When looking at movies, it's hard to analyse them without considering all of the different aspects and preparation that has gone into making them. For example research into a specific time, books that may have been written, live performances of that particular book and how to create a perfect cinematic experience; drawing on that research with the advantage of capturing image on film and being able to create a mood through sound, special effects and editing.
Watching the podcasts 'How to read a Movie..Part 1 and 2' gave me a better understanding of how to look at a movie through Literature, Live drama or musical theatre, and then finally the cinematic aspects to really break down films and get a better picture of what's going on and how the producers and directors came to certain decisions.
The first stage is looking at the Literary aspects of the film. So is there a plot, what about characters and what are they like? What is the set like? etc. As film does follow a similar pathway to a book we must analyse what we know about the plot. the characters, the time period and how it effects the emotion of the film, and finally what is the overall theme - what is the author or director trying to say (lesson or moral of text). When watching films I always try and see if there is a hidden message in there somewhere, it makes me feel good or sad at the end of the film but I always search for it in some way!
Dramatic Aspects is the next stage when looking at film so it will be making written literature visual to an audience so characters need to be thought out carefully.What will the character wear? What does the set look like? Is this how the characters will speak? As in a book your imagination takes over what you think the set would look like and how the characters would speak so alot of it comes down to how you invision all of these things to be.
In the Podcast Romeo and Juliet is spoken about and I went back over the most recent Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet. I thought of how that version although different to previous traditional versions was thought about carefully. They thought about how they could bring romeo and Juliet into real modern life with literary aspects, changing the dramatic traditional aspects by having the set in Malibu California wearing Hawaiian shirts instead of renaissance clothing and carrying guns. But both Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Luhrmann's version do follow the plot of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.
Finally the cinematic aspects of film - sound, editing, special effects that all make film exclusively film. Different to live theatre; film can be manipulated to create a certain mood with all of these aspects that you can't do with literature and live theatre. So these are things that are totally unique to that particular film as the director has thought about how he wants a particular scene to come across and what sound effects to use, what angles will the scene be shot from etc.
I found this really helpful as before I would just look at film and say what I liked and didn't like about it, whereas now I can break down my reasons properly and look in depth into what really makes film, film.
