LECTURE ONE
All forms of communication involve a sender, a message and a receiver. The film makers is the sender and the viewers or audience are the receivers. The message (as in most forms of communication) is coded in some fashion. When people talk, the message is encoded in some specific language, but film makers use film as the code. Certainly language is important but it is the film techniques which set film apart from the other arts.
Most films have a text (or story) and a subtext (or theme). The subtext is not normally expressed as a single sentence (e.g. “life is beautiful”) but rather tends to look at a complex set of relationships often thought to occur in five different areas:
(a) Socio-political (themes of power, who has it who does not, how it is used.
(b) religious
(c) science/technology (themes about the moral and ethnical practices of scientists or the roles of these in life).
(d) Psycho-sexual. Despite the apparent demise of Freud, much of the psychoanalytical approach lives on in films. Films in this area often deal with questions of sexuality, repression and so on.
(e) Reflexivity: Films which look at the creative process and the relationship between art and life in general or the process of creativity.
Many films may operate in more than one of these areas at the same time. Science and religion as opposing forces can be found in many films.
The text is analyzed through a process called hermeneutics, which basically means breaking literary codes rather than ciphers and codes as are used to hide the meanings of words. The term hermeneutics is often applied to religious texts, but need not be restricted to them alone.
Hermeneutics may work through metaphor, exemplars and so on and the challenge is to identify the subtext and indicate what in the work allows for such an interpretation.. There is rarely a “right or wrong” interpretation, but rather a question of substantiating the interpretation. In language there are often ambiguous sentences (those having multiple meanings):
Starving children can be dangerous.
(Children who are starving a dangerous children vs. the process of starving children is a dangerous process).
There is no reason to conclude that one reading is more reasonable than another (especially in isolation). However, a reasonable grammarian should be able to parse the sentence in such a way as to show where the ambiguity lies. So it goes with films as well.
The sender in any form of communication must code the message in the variables that are available. In the case of films there are many. Among these are position of camera, kind of lighting, composition in the frame, apparent distance of camera to subject, length of cuts, kinds of transitions between scenes and so on. Breaking the code involves analysis using these aspects of film making as potentially having meaning. If the director shows individuals all in separate frames, is that different than if some are shown together and others are not. Who is grouped with whom?
Generally, you need to ask yourself about any shot, “What do I know (or suspect) from this shot” and “How do I know it?” We might conclude that we suspect the people in the sequence do not know each other because they are shown initially in one shots. (We might be wrong, but in terms of the entire film, we might be able to argue this point later).
In one shot a medical bag falls to the floor. The fact that it is a medical bag would imply that one of the people is a physician.
The very way the film is constructed can also give information. Look at the pages dealing with the “Film analysis” linked below.