The document provides sample analyses of different films that demonstrate various strategies for film criticism, including analyzing narrative structure, style, form, and social ideology. The analyses discuss films such as 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. The purpose of the analyses is to provide examples of approaches that can be applied in writing film criticism.

1. Chapter 11
Film Criticism: Sample Analyses
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2. Sample Analyses
• Narrative films, alternatives to narrative form,
documentary, and analyses that emphasize
social ideology will be examined.
• All of the films discussed can be analyzed in
other ways as well.
• These analyses are examples of strategies that
you can apply in your writing.
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3. The Classical Narrative Cinema:
His Girl Friday
• Segmentation shows the pace of character
interactions contribute to the overall pace.
• Deadlines within the plot and the clash of
character traits and goals propel the cause
and effect.
• Time and space are subordinate to cause and
effect.
• Telephones play an important role in cause
and effect.
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4. North by Northwest
• Using classical narrative patterns, a strict time
scheme and motifs keep the narrative unified.
• Point-of-view shots offer a degree of
subjectivity.
• Continually emphasizes surprise and suspense
through careful manipulation of the hierarchy
of knowledge.
• Hitchcock also uses climactic sequences.
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5. Do The Right Thing
• Stretches traditional Hollywood conventions
while still upholding conventional techniques.
• Setting and a limited time frame unify the plot.
• The main causal action falls into two lines: Sal’s
relations with the community and Mookie’s
personal life.
• Cinematic technique loosely uses the continuity
system and emphasizes the community as a
whole.
• Style also stresses the underlying problems in the
community.
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6. Moonrise Kingdom
• Common story with unusual narrative structure.
• Setting is highly stylized.
• Unusual plot structure creates mystery and
suspense.
• Narrator provides omniscience.
• Anderson’s fantastical style is achieved through
staging, framing, music, and on-screen text.
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7. Narrative Alternative:
Breathless (À Bout de souffle)
• A classic story line presented nonclassically.
• Rejects classical Hollywood causality.
• Classic film technique is also rejected, instead
using location shooting, and natural light and
sound.
• Often breaks away from traditional editing
techniques.
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8. Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari)
• Spatial and temporal structures are
emphasized over narrative events.
• Camera and editing patterns involve using a
full circle.
• Taken together, film technique suggests a
different relationship among setting, duration,
and story action than exists in a classical
Hollywood film.
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9. Chunking Express
(Chung Hing sam lam)
• Involves six characters in two distinct stories
presented side-by-side.
• The lines of action in the two parts aren’t
linked causally, which forces you to seek other
connections.
• Motifs link the two stories, as does the theme
that change is a part of love.
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10. Documentary Form and Style:
Man with a Movie Camera
• Takes the “kino eye” idea as the basis for the
film’s associational form.
• Exploits the power to control our perception
of reality by means of editing and special
effects.
• Draws a connection between the camera and
human actions.
• Explicit and implicit meanings may be missed
by viewers who aren’t familiar with Russian.
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11. The Thin Blue Line
• Uses narrative form, but not in a wholly linear
way.
• Form and style shape our sympathies subtly
and ask us to reflect on the obstacles to
arriving at the truth about any crime.
• It is both an account of what really happened
while sending the message that persistent
inquirers can eventually arrive at truth.
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12. Form, Style, and Ideology:
Meet Me in St. Louis
• Reinforces certain aspects of a social ideology:
American values of family unity and home
life.
• Dialogue, stylistic devices, and mise-en-scene
contribute to the feeling of a happy family life.
• Referential, explicit, implicit, and symptomatic
meanings all emphasize the social ideology.
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13. Raging Bull
• There is both sympathy and revulsion towards
Jake.
• Narrative and stylistic strategies make Jake a case
study in the role of violence in American life.
• The narrative organization of incidents and
motifs suggest that male aggression pervades
American life.
• Stylistic techniques depict the violence as
disturbing but also mesmerizing.
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