Course Summary
Overall, my entire experience in film analysis has been a great one. I’ve been exposed to many different monumental films from all over the entire spectrum of film genres. My knowledge, understanding, culturalization and analyzation of film have grown in both width and depth. Like all things though, this course did have its high points and it’s low points.
Looking back through the entire course, it’s hard to pick a favorite movie. If I had to choose, it would probably be Run Lola Run. I really enjoyed viewing and then dissecting Memento because of how intricate it was. With Memento, the more one watched it and the more one studied it, the deeper it became. For instance, after reexamining the film, one often realizes that the film was not made just to simply entertain, teach, or tell a story; it was also made to give the audience the same experience as Leonard Shelby. It was made to have the audience question reality and his or her memory. I though this was a really interesting concept that was well woth exploring.
In contrast with Memento, my least favorite movie was man with a movie camera. I can understand how this film was significant in the way that it acted as an encyclopedia for cinematographers and editors at the time, however I felt that, as a movie, it was very boring and didn’t create any piece of artistic work worth valuing. Personally, if I really wanted to find out about all the early film editing tricks, I would rather read a how to book. This film wasn’t a work of art, rather simply a catalogue of artistic techniques. This film would be the equivalent of a painting made to demonstrate all the different styles of brushstrokes and ways to apply paint to a canvas. Man with a movie camera was simply not interesting in any artistic way. Out of the films, those were the two that marked the high and low points of this class, however the readings were also an important aspect of this class.
Out of all the readings, I enjoyed Auteur Theory the most. This is because it introduced a very interesting theory on how to divide film makers into three different categories. I found this theory to be very logical, well explained, and therefore ultimately true. I liked it a lot because I could agree with it, however I think it was universally a good read because of how understandable it was.
On the other end of the spectrum, my least favorite reading was The Voice in Cinema. I found this reading to be extremely confusing. Half of the time she was speaking, I simply couldn’t understand what she was saying because her vocabulary and diction was unnecessarily sophisticated. Once I later found out what her theory was that she was trying explain, I couldn’t help but ask myself, “Are you serious?” Ultimately, she was trying to explain that our imaginations create the rest of the scene that is unseeable beyond the screen because of sounds and framing. If I could sum up here theory in one sentence, there is no reason for her to write an entire paper about it and, on top of it, use an overly sophisticated writing style. Honestly, it’s kind of pretentious when considering how simple her idea was, yet how complex she had to make it sound. I just didn’t enjoy her paper in the least bit of ways.
