This chapter examines various ways to analyze films and provides example analyses of classical, alternative, documentary, and ideological films. The films discussed are His Girl Friday, North by Northwest, Do the Right Thing, Breathless, Tokyo Story, Man with a Movie Camera, The Thin Blue Line, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Raging Bull. This chapter models ways to prepare, organize, and write a critical analysis of a film.

After reading this chapter, you should be able to understand:

1. Classical construction is the most common structure of film.

2. Documentary films can go beyond direct recording and suggest a wide range of meaning.

3. His Girl Friday focuses on speed. It is built on the common unit of classical narrative cinema: the scene. The film has two cause-effect chains: The Romance, and Crime and Politics. Space and time are both effected by the cause and effect nature of the narrative, which keeps the dramatic tension high.

4. Like most spy films, North by Northwest has a complex plot, involving two major lines of action. It contains patterns that are familiar to the viewer, such as the search pattern, the journey pattern, and the romance pattern. The numerous point of view shots heighten the film's emotional appeal.

5. Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing is a classically structured film, though it may not seem so on the surface because of its brief, disconnected scenes, a restless, wandering camera, and its numerous characters without motivation. It does, however, contain classical elements, such as clear action and a strong forward impetus to the plot. One important means of unifying the film is its setting. Its more relaxed utilization of classical conventions became common in post 1960s cinema.

6. Breathless, while at first appearing to have a classical structure, is not in that it contains character motivations that are ambiguous and lingers over incidental dialogue. Its editing jumps frenetically. It also utilizes location shooting with available lighting. The editing style of Breathless is discontinuous. The film is consciously an alternative to the Hollywood narrative.

7. Tokyo Story develops a set of alternative guidelines to the classical style. The film dissenters narrative which allows for spatial and temporal structures to come forward and create their own interest. Ozu's style is created by distinct framing and editing techniques.

8. Some films weave together a large number of plotlines, often involving many characters, such as Chungking Express. The plotlines may at first seem completely isolated from one another, but usually they converge, revealing unexpected causal connections.

9. Man with a Movie Camera takes the idea that the filmmaker's eye is equal to the lens of the camera and uses it as the basis for the entire film's associational form. The film becomes a celebration of the documentary filmmaker's power to control audience perception of reality by means of editing and special effects.

10. The Thin Blue Line illustrates how documentary can use narrative form. The film uses reenactments in order to get the viewer to sympathize with a particular point of view. Similarly to other narrative films, it plays with our knowledge and the knowledge of the characters.

11. Meet Me in St. Louis upholds dominant conceptions of American family life and proposes an ideal of family unity for the post-World War II future. The ideology of Meet Me in St. Louis is reinforced by numerous formal (narrative) and stylistic elements, such as color, mise-en-scene, and light.

12. Raging Bull takes violence as its central theme but discusses it in a very ambivalent way. Raging Bull's depiction of violence also is representative of conditions in America as well as the protagonist's internal struggles.