1. Introduction to Film
Analysis

2. Course Goal = Film Analysis

3. Course Goal = Film Analysis
• Identify major elements of film art
• Recognize how those elements work
together
• Examine a film’s organization and visual
style
• Recognize historical, cultural, and
aesthetic contexts
• Understand how films are made

4. Course Goal = Film Analysis
• Write about film
• Make and argue for interpretive claims
about films

5. ideas for film analysis
1. Expectations influence filmmakers’
choices and viewers’ experiences of
films
2. Filmmakers present information, elicit
emotions, and suggest ideas by
orchestrating details in a systematic
way.

6. 1. Expectations

7. 2. The Orchestration of Detail
• Motifs
• Parallels
• Details and Structure

8. Motif
Any detail that takes on significance through
repetition.

9. Parallel
A similarity established between two characters
or situations that invites the viewer to compare
the two.

10. Motifs and Parallels in
Chinatown

11. Motif: Photographs

16. Motif: Eyes, Sight, Spying

22. Motif: Water

23. Motif: Chinatown

24. Parallels
• Jake gets shot at in his car; Evelyn gets shot at
in her car
• Jake has broken sunglasses; Noah Cross has
broken bifocals
• Jake loses shoe; Mulrawy’s body found
missing one shoe
• Curly’s wife has black eye; Evelyn gets eye shot
out

25. Are these the only ways that films can create
meaning?

26. The World Beyond the Film

27. The World Beyond the Film

28. Intertextual References: Genre