What’s In a Film Analysis Essay?

THE GRADUATE, for Example.

In film and media studies, we often ask our students to write an essay about one or more films. Sometimes it’s a specific type of analysis: a scene analysis or “shot breakdown,” a narrative analysis, etc. But our students don’t always know exactly what goes in such an essay, and recently my online film students have been doing good work of this kind, and so it’s made me more aware of what goes in one particular kind of film analysis essay: one that combines historical and stylistic analysis.

So I’m sharing here one idea of what goes into such essays — with the hopes that this is useful not only to my current students but also to other teachers and students.

Connecting Levels: Industry, Films, Story & Style

You can think of film history as working on a number of levels, and a good film history essay connects these levels. The three broadest levels are:

• the general principles or logic of the domain;
• one or more movies;
• the movie’s story, scenes, and shots (visuals, sounds, and special effects).

The logic of commercial filmmaking as an industry is to make back the money you spend on the film, plus a profit. This purely economic need can employ more than one strategies, but this economic level almost always runs into social and aesthetic concerns, and questions of technology are never far away.

At this industrial level you find strategies like:

• spend more money to make more money,
• spend less money assuming a smaller audience,
• avoid offending anyone to court a larger audience,
• court controversy in order to generate publicity;
• do something familiar: use popular genres, stars, sources (games, novels, etc.);
• do something different and interesting — but not TOO (unless you are okay with a tiny audience),
• etc.

At a lower level you have: the film or films you’re analyzing.

And delving even deeper, the film is made up of:

• the story and style,
• specific scenes,
• specific shots and their visuals, sounds, and special effects.

At the level of story and style, you might be concerned with the social issues the movie engages with or avoids (as mentioned above), or with how conventional or unconventional the film is, since a more unconventional film may intrigue a smaller audience or frustrate and irritate a wider one. The aesthetic issues might be boiled down to two opposing question.

• Does the film have a clear, understandable story with an active
  protagonist whose problems are resolved happily
  at the film’s end due to the protagonist’s effort and character?
• Or is the story obscure, the protagonist passive, and the resolution
  unhappy, accidental/random, or unclear?

An historical film essay would then connect the film’s story and style in the logic of the film industry. So going from the film level up to the industry level, the broad main argument of this type of essay might sound like this:

This film neuters hot-button social issues because the budget was high and the producers wanted to avoid offending a wider audience so they could make back their budget.

Or instead of “neuters hot-button social issues” it might be:

• “relies on very conventional gender roles,”
• or “includes only minimal social commentary.”

Or an argument might run like this.

This sometimes-violent crime film featuring admired actors did not make back its budget because of its unconventional style and downbeat story. (The Limey.)

The way this scene is filmed gives some hint that the director is willing to subject the viewer to violence and yet will also go to some lengths to prevent the viewer from seeing what is arguably the most important part of the scene.

Or another film might be analyzed this way:

This confusing and violent movie didn’t make up
its production costs ($37M box office over a $63M budget)
despite being based on a critically successful book
and featuring two major stars — suggesting that unconventional style and storytelling prevent audiences from connecting with familiar content such as story and stars.

It’s hard to see how confusing FIGHT CLUB is in a clip, but a clip can show the unsettling if still humorous kind of social critique the film still manages to make.

These statements connect a film to principles, but they use the film as a unique case to shed light on how the general principle work out in reality. (A background assumption is that world is not just a transcription or realization of abstract rules: there’s some element of complexity or chance that prevents the actual world from being perfectly predictable from a set of equations.)

Trends, Genres, and Personnel

Between the film and the principles are trends. These may be:

• ‘internal’ artistic developments in which new styles emerge in film as an art form: such as the way zooms were popular in the 70s or Steadicam shots in the 80s or digitally green- or yellow-toned shots in the 2010s.

A rather humorous compilation of zoom shots ripped completely out of context nevertheless shows some very recognizable 1970s stars and hairstyles.

Or they may be ‘external’ influences that go beyond film as an art form and movies as an industry:

• globalization: styles and personnel coming from around the world in different ‘waves’;
• ‘external shocks’ like changes in technology (16mm; VHS, cable, and DVD’s; digital filmmaking, distribution, and viewing),
• or like sweeping economic changes: downturns, industry consolidations and restructurings, etc.

Between trends and films are different ways that films cluster and connect: genres, which unite different films in a set of durable yet changing conventions; and of course personnel like directors, actors, costume designers, etc.

So a strong historical analysis extends from one or more films in a few directions:

• ‘up’ towards trends, and principles;
• ‘down’ to the film’s story, scenes, shots, images, sounds, and effects; and
• ‘sideways’ to other similar and different films, by way of shared features like genre, star, director, writer, etc.

A strong essay connects these levels, and usually it also connects one film to others, and the parts of one film to other parts: one scene to another, one shot to another. The strongest analysis can almost make it seem as if in looking at a particular shot or hearing a particular sound, we are understanding the whole context which caused the movie to be.

Benjamin in THE GRADUATE is a bit of an outsider.

An Example: THE GRADUATE.

If we want to write about 1967’s The Graduate, we are addressing a film that is 50 years old this year. But we know the general ideas about what’s going on in this period.

• We know as an historical generalization that 60s Hollywood films borrowed elements from the European New Waves. This was an artistic trend, a sort of global fashion epidemic. Roger Ebert even wrote about the fact in his review of The Graduate upon its initial release — an historical document which can support our approach.
• But we also know that French New Wave directors were socially critical: in 400 BLOWS we see that family and school do not support the growth and happiness of a young boy who gets into trouble because of it: he ‘acts out,’ as we would say now.
• And we know that French New Wave directors played with visual continuity by using techniques like jump cuts.

This video summarizes some key elements of the American ‘new wave’ cinema of the late 60s.

This analysis/discussion of 1959’s THE 400 BLOWS underscores the failures of the main character’s world to support him in his path towards maturity.

The most famous jump cuts in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 BREATHLESS: the illusion of a continuous scene is frankly and overtly ruptured.

Story, Scenes, and Audiovisual Details

So if we are analyzing The Graduate historically, we can drill down into the level of story first. What’s it about?

• Benjamin Braddock graduates college.
• His education has not prepared him for life.
• His parents and the adults around him do not seem to understand his unhappiness.
• He’s isolated, and he ‘acts out’ by having a very inappropriate affair with one of his parents married friends.

That’s the level of story. And historical documents can confirm our interpretations, whether of or other things: a period poster, for example, uses the tag-line “This is Benjamin. He’s a little worried about his future.” This would seem to confirm that growing up is indeed an issue the film intended to treat and use to draw an audience.

Period poster promoting THE GRADUATE.

A small excerpt from THE GRADUATE shows Benjamin’s visual and auditory POV in the scuba birthday scene.

At the level of scenes, we might fasten on Benjamin’s birthday gift of a scuba suit.

• At the level of film technique, the director Mike Nichols uses visual and auditory point-of-view, so we see and hear as Benjamin.
• He can’t hear his parents, and he jumps into the swimming pool and sits isolated at the bottom rather than interact with his parents (which he can’t do anyway: generally and because of the diving gear).

This scene also connects ‘sideways’ to another scene.

• Mrs. Robinson throws Benjamin her car keys to drive him home (so she can seduce him) and the keys land in a fish tank next to a tiny figurine of a diver which is oxygenating the tank water. (Jason Fraley discusses these connections.)

Before Benjamin scuba dives in the pool, he’s seen next to a scuba diver figurine and then fishes out Mrs. Robinson’s keys from next to the same diver.

So we can ‘drill down’ from the movie to some scenes and specific auditory and visual details, and we can explain how the choices of what we see and hear and how work to tell the story, express the characters’ thoughts and feelings, etc.

Since we know New Wave visual techniques were popular in the 60s in Hollywood, we can look for them in The Graduate.The Graduate uses false continuity to cut between Benjamin lounging in and around his parents’ pool and sleeping with Mrs. Robinson.

• We see a striking cut when Benjamin dives into his parents’ pool and swims up onto a floating life raft — at which point, by means of a cut, the life raft becomes Mrs. Robinson in the hotel bed.
• He’s no longer isolated and underwater, because Mrs. Robinson
  is figuratively a life raft.

Many of the edits in this famous montage use ‘false continuity’: making two places seem like one. It’s only near the montage’s very end that

This may seem more like a psychological interpretation. And we could go further in this direction.

For instance, a psychological interpretation of The Graduate might take the following single frame from the film and point out that Benjamin’s mother dyes and wears her hair very similarly to Mrs. Robinson. This might suggest an Freudian or Oedipal interpretation in which Benjamin is sleeping with Mrs. Robinson because of an unconscious fixation on his mother. This would align with the ‘childish’ aspect of Benjamin not being able to grow up.

Analyzing how the shots or scenes fit together to express the story is not psychological: analyzing the characters’ motives based on a psychological theory is. By contrast, an historical interpretation takes the film as an expression of the economic, social, and cultural logic of how and why it was made and looks and sounds exactly as it does.

We may use some psychological interpretation in our historical interpretation — as long as we bring it back to the historical context: for example, if reviewers at the time saw the film as Freudian. But the New York Times, at least did not: they saw The Graduate as a “satire.”

Assumptions and Inferences

So one film (The Graduate) embodies important trends, and we can demonstrate how particular elements of story and style make the connection between the film and the trend more than random. The Graduate doesn’t just use a tricky editing or show a troubled young man: the film and its visual devices are tightly woven together because it’s a complex work. The assumption here is that cultural works and their contexts are a whole such that the work can serve as an emblem of the circumstances of its making.

So now we’ve connected specific shots and scenes and story elements of a film with an important trend. But we still haven’t ‘drilled up’ to general principles. What does The Graduate tell us about the logic of making films for a profit? Here a few facts help us out, together with our general notion that making money, social commentary and art do not just fit together hand-in-glove.

The Graduate was made for $3M ($22M in 2017 dollars) with an untested director and lead actor. Yet since its making, it’s made over $100M ($754M adjusted for inflation): it’s the 22nd highest grossing film in North America when adjusted for inflation — beating out FANTASIA and THE GODFATHER

So what does this tell us in the context of what we know about making money by making movies?

1967’s The Graduate is a socially critical coming-of-age story with a disturbing story and then-unconventional style. The film not only connected with the social unrest of the 1960s to defy expectations at the box office: its stylish portrait of post-college angst continues to resonate for rental and streaming audiences — perhaps suggesting that the 60s did not simply end but rather continue as a permanent and even profitable ‘generation gap.’

This is an inference or interpretation. And it needs to be backed up by evidence. The last part is very speculative, and it would probably take comparisons to another film, as well as other historical and social facts to support such a claim. The film is the subject of a recent book, so that confirms its on-going interest. And at least one writer today supports the ‘generation gap’ argument.

But this argument, even if flawed, still does what an historical film analysis ought to do:

• situate a unique artifact (a film) and
• its general features (story) and specific audiovisual details
• in the logic of the field (here: filmmaking),
• trends of the period, and
• larger conflicts amongst the economic, social, and cultural/aesthetic dimensions of our lives.

— Edward R. O’Neill

The enigmatic last shot of THE GRADUATE.