Different types of film analysis

Different types of film analysis

 This section deals some of the different types of film analyses you may have been assigned to write.

Semiotic analysis

A Semiotic Analysis is the study of signs codes and conventions on films. It describes a way of explaining what meaning the audience can take from codes. It is typically involving metaphors and analogies to both non-living objects and characters within a film. Because symbols have several meanings, writers often need to determine what a particular symbol means in the film and in a broader cultural or historical context.

 There is four types of signs and codes that exist in the semiotic analysis of film.

 

Indexical Signs

• This is one of the most straightforward ways to create meaning. Indexical signs act as cues to existing knowledge. This type of sign is very common and is used constantly in the media. 

 

One reason this title is said to be "La La Land" is right on the surface. Los Angeles has the initials "L" and "A", hence the "La" in the title. However, this title was also chosen as a satire and jab at Hollywood culture.

Hollywood is a dream for many and is definitely portrayed as such. While this movie is super dreamy, hence "La La Land", not all dreams come true for these two characters. This allusion to a dream-like state is both beautiful and realistically devastating.

Symbolic Code

• Symbolic codes only work when a society uses them widely. By themselves they might fail to convey meaning but because they have been used in popular culture many times, they turn into something meaningful. An example for this would be a red heart for love or the colour yellow for happiness.

 

·         A horse—and its young rider—feature in a heroic scene towards the end of the film. Perhaps the most relevant of them all to this film, the donkey that meek animal of labour—gets freed by Karnan. Haunting this film are visuals of those girls bearing the symbolic head of a guardian deity.

Enigma

• This type of code used in films creates a question in which the film makes potential viewers wonder what will happen. Often used in its trailers it draws viewers in to seeing the movie. This is very apparent in the final trailer, released by Warner Brothers.
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Convention

·         One more thing conventions used in this movie. The conventions of a genre are the elements that commonly occur in such films. They may include things like characters, situations, settings, props, themes and events. For example, a convention of the science-fiction genre is that the story often includes robots, aliens, time-travel or genetic manipulation.

o   The chief antagonist is a casteist IPS officer called Kannabiran (Natarajan Subramaniam) who cannot stomach the fact that the people of the village are not obsequious to his authority. Kannabiran is another name of Krishna, who in the epic justifies the actions of the Pandavas and the Kurukshetra war as one for righteousness.

• In the village of Podiyankulam, a little donkey hops on the road, its front legs tied with a rope. Nobody takes notice of it. They understand that the donkey's legs have been tied to prevent it from running, going where its heart takes it. It's normal to treat it that way, the people believe. But not Karnan (Dhanush). Every time he sees the donkey, he is bothered by its bondage. The fact that it is not free.

 

 

Narrative analysis

Narrative analysis is an examination of the story elements, including narrative structure, character, and plot. This type of analysis considers the entirety of the film and the story it seeks to tell.

To create this type of analysis, you could consider questions like:

·         How does the film correspond to the Three-Act Structure: Act One: Setup; Act Two: Confrontation; and Act Three: Resolution?

·         What is the plot of the film? How does this plot differ from the narrative, that is, how the story is told? For example, are events presented out of order and to what effect?

·         Does the plot revolve around one character? Does the plot revolve around multiple characters? How do these characters develop across the film?

Cultural/historical analysis

One of the most common types of analysis is the examination of a film’s relationship to its broader cultural, historical, or theoretical contexts. Whether films intentionally comment on their context or not, they are always a product of the culture or period in which they were created. By placing the film in a particular context, this type of analysis asks how the film models, challenges, or subverts different types of relations, whether historical, social, or even theoretical.

A few of the many questions you could ask in this vein include:

·         How does the film comment on, reinforce, or even critique social and political issues at the time it was released, including questions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality?

·         How might a biographical understanding of the film’s creators and their historical moment affect the way you view the film?

·         How might a specific film theory, such as Queer Theory, Structuralist Theory, or Marxist Film Theory, provide a language or set of terms for articulating the attributes of the film?

Take advantage of class resources to explore possible approaches to cultural/historical film analyses, and find out whether you will be expected to do additional research into the film’s context.

Mise-en-scène analysis

A mise-en-scène analysis attends to how the filmmakers have arranged compositional elements in a film and specifically within a scene or even a single shot. This type of analysis organizes the individual elements of a scene to explore how they come together to produce meaning. You may focus on anything that adds meaning to the formal effect produced by a given scene, including: blocking, lighting, design, color, costume, as well as how these attributes work in conjunction with decisions related to sound, cinematography, and editing.

To conduct this type of analysis, you could ask:

·         What effects are created in a scene, and what is their purpose?

·         How does this scene represent the theme of the movie?

·         How does a scene work to express a broader point to the film’s plot?

This detailed approach to analyzing the formal elements of film can help you come up with concrete evidence for more general film analysis assignments.