Film Review vs. Analysis
While movies are a form of entertainment and artistic self-expression, serious film criticism moves beyond simple description.
- Film Review: Typically shorter (400–1200 words), a review offers personal impressions and evaluations of a movie’s content.
- Film Analysis: A longer format (1200–12,000 words) that requires reflective thought and outside research. It attempts to explain how cinematic techniques and narrative elements force a viewer to react in a specific way.
Four Levels of Meaning
To understand what a film is “really about,” critics can analyze content on four distinct levels:
1. Referential Content (The Plot)
- This is a synopsis of the plot, simply recounting what happens in the story.
- It refers directly to events and implies aspects of the story without deep interpretation.
2. Explicit Content (The Moral)
- This includes the “moral of the story” or socio-political attitudes that the filmmaker expresses directly.
- Meaning is communicated explicitly through dialogue, character actions, and obvious plot developments.
3. Implicit Content (Inferred Meaning)
- This level relies on “internal evidence” within the film to infer meaning from how characters grow, change, or develop.
- It looks at general human relations or conflicting values that are not explicitly stated, allowing for different interpretations based on the viewer’s experience.
4. Symptomatic Interpretation (External Context)
- This approach treats the film as a symptom of a broader influence, such as the culture, time, or place in which it was created.
- It relies on “external evidence” and often identifies symbolic or allegorical content.
- Example: District 9 is a sci-fi thriller, but symptomatically, it reflects 21st-century attitudes toward immigration and minorities.
Approaches to Analysis
Critics use various theoretical frameworks to uncover a film’s ideological meaning or intent.
The Formalist Approach
- Focuses primarily on “internal evidence,” looking at the film’s structure and form.
- Analyzes narrative elements and specific cinematic techniques (e.g., lighting, editing, sound, camera movement) to see how they convey meaning.
The Realist Approach
- Examines how a film represents reality.
- Some films try to make techniques “invisible” to focus on the story, while others use techniques to replicate specific experiences like insanity or memory.
The Contextualist Approach This broad category analyzes a film as part of a larger context. Specific subsets include:
- Culturalist: Examines the specific time, place, and culture that created the movie.
- Auteurist: Views the director as the “author,” analyzing the film in the context of their previous body of work and personal life.
- Psychological: Applies theories from Freud or Jung to find symbolism regarding the subconscious, id, ego, or sexual repression.
- Dualist: Looks for pairs of opposites (e.g., good vs. evil, urban vs. rural) to identify contrasting societal tendencies.
- Feminist: Concentrates on the portrayal of women, determining if they are stereotypes, protagonists, or empowered figures.
- Marxist: Associates characters and events with class struggle, labor issues, and oppressive government structures.
- Generic: Analyzes the film as a representative of a specific genre, looking for shared motifs or subversions of expected formulas.
- Genetic: Traces the film’s evolution through all stages of production, from script drafts to the final director’s cut.