Interpreting films

[Crass]

I really enjoy movies, not the Hollywood kind but the weird independent or small studio and horror kind. I have no problems watching a movie and just taking it for what it is, taking a trip so to speak, but a lot of the time I feel I am missing out on entire layers because I don't understand the symbolism even when I know the director is trying to tell me something.

Watching a movie like Dellamorte Dellamore or Possession I really enjoy the visuals, the audio, the characters, the dialogue, the story and the performances but I know there is more depth and a bunch of stuff I am missing, both subtle and obvious.

I really want to get better at analyzing and interpreting the meaning of symbols and events so I can get an even more rewarding experience, what's the key? Are there books on this subject? Is it about having a broad cultural knowledge from which to pick pieces to the puzzle? Is it watching a lot of movies?

I usually go online to read about movies I have recently watched, sometimes other peoples interpretations make a lot of sense and I feel stupid for not picking up whatever it was they pointed out, other times I have no idea where they are coming from and I wonder if it is I or them that is a moron.

[mundanity]

Film analysis is now a subdivision of semiotics, which grew out of the academic work people did trying to teach adults literature studies in Britain around the 60s. It covers a wide range of topics and views, and there's a wealth of journals devoted to it. Yes, having a broad understanding of society and culture at large helps, because it means you'd understand the metaphors being either consciously or unconsciously displayed in the films.

The basics are encapsulated in the general structure of the film, using some basic artistic technique - how the frame is composited with lines of action, contrast and lighting just like a painting, how the music keys the viewer for certain emotions or adds to the mood of the scene, even down to how the characters are dressed or made-up and come into the frames. The more complicated stuff draws on wider social metaphors, such as fears about terrorism, racism, misogyny, etc etc.

For example, when I watched the first 28 Days Later I saw it as a metaphor for the general social terror experienced by people after 9/11, whether real or not. The second half is obviously a metaphor for the terror of citizens of the state itself. But then 28 Weeks Later is much different - I saw it as a metaphor for the interpersonal family terror people experience when they're in relationships that are domestically violent. It's a far more personal kind of terror, thus the haunting focused stalking of Robert Carlisle's character. But this is one thing you must always remember when doing film analysis: Even if you're the most respected analyst/reviewer in the field, you're still going to have plenty of people - often the majority - disagreeing with you. The letters section of any decent peer-reviewed film journal is a testament to this. So from an amateur standpoint, there's no reason for you to not analyse films, but unless you can back up your claims 100% in every way shape or fashion, you need to frame your analysis in terms like, "I think" or "I saw" or "What I took away from the film was..." if you're writing about it. Unless you actually move into academia, in which case it's okay to make statements like, "The director clearly blah blah blah" as long as you have evidence to back it up from the film/s.

I highly recommend Graeme Turner's film studies books as a basic grounder in the field. Film As Social Practice (http://www.amazon.com/Film-as-Social-Practice/dp/B000P0JN8A/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254083815&sr=8-2) is an analysis 101 book which is excellent for beginners. I'm sure there are websites out there that teach the same thing but I'm not sure where they are. Also anything by David Bordwell. We basically lived off his works in my first year of film studies. There's also An Introduction To Film Studies (http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Film-Studies-Jill-Nelmes/dp/0415409292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254084101&sr=1-1) by Jill Nelmes and How To Read A Film (http://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Film-Movies-Beyond/dp/0195321057/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254084190&sr=1-1) by James Monaco. There would also be more books to mine in the reference sections of these introductions, and that's generally how academic analysis goes - you read something in one piece that is a quote of someone else and then you hunt that down then find something interesting or controversial they've put in their writing which again is backed up by a previous researcher and you look them up and so on it goes. Very rarely is there a source which brings the majority of it as new and fresh. Most academics take baby steps, though there are a few that dare to leap (eg - Nobdoy went near Spaghetti Westerns until Christopher Frayling came along because the general consensus was that they were cheap and "not real film/Westerns").

As I said, these will ground you in the basics. More complicated stuff comes from just a wide reading of all kinds of literature and an understanding of contextual resources. For example, if you're going to analyse how Sergio Leone and other European Western directors changed the face of Westerns forever, you need to have some understanding of the history of the countries, since they influenced the directors (eg - Italian Neorealist film that came after the war as a response to the depravities and destruction, Sergio worked on many Neorealist films as his training as well as growing up under Mussolini, then the influence this bleakened view of humanity had on his take/homage to Westerns and the construction of his non/anti-heroes). Or a look into the director themselves, though they often lie too.

And yeah, a big part of it is watching a lot of movies, and I'd also recommend keeping a movie diary, if you're serious.

[Crass]

Exhaustive and informative, thank you very much mundanity, I will look into the sources you provided. Too bad that I don't really have enough time to dive in too deep in this stuff right now, because it's all very interesting.

[Viridis]

Or you could just spend hours reading TVtropes.org!

I don't want to make light of the topic, because film analysis is definitely its own thing, but reading that site when I'm bored has sharpened my familiarity with the sort of "tools" of story-telling in a surprising way. ;)

[Antebellum]

Its good to have some general cultural grounding. Western films - as in films produced in the Western Hemisphere, will commonly have Biblical or Mythological themes.

Just off the top of my head: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The Good is God, the Bad is Satan, and the Ugly is man. In the final confrontation, the three eye each other and feel their guns and finally, they shoot! The Good kills the bad and reveals that he had unloaded the Ugly's gun the night before. In a battle between God and Satan, man is powerless.

Of course, there's other instances in the movie too where this is reflected, but this is just an example of how a knowledge of some of the common refereces made to by literature can help in interpreting movies - or books as well (Lord of the Flies anyone?).