Jenny Strand

How to analyse a film.

There are many ways to analyse a film. Genre analysis and auteur theory being the most common. An auteur is a director who has come up with the entire story by themselves therefore is the principal creator of the film and more than likely they will be breaking traditional conventions. For example an auteur director could put two film genres together. Why? Well most directors do this more to create an artistic statement rather than for the money side of things. Quentin Tarantino did this with Pulp Fiction (1993) and has gone on to do it in his other films. At first he didn’t make much of an income but now of course he’s extremely well known for the way he works and is successful with it. Unlike auteur theory, conventional genre films are usually very similar and could even have the same plot but just with little tweaks and different actors and actresses. Genre analysis is very ideologically traditional in that it consists of seven main key areas. These being: Codes and conventions, setting, character, themes, narrative, iconography and ideological message.

Codes and conventions mean what the director has done in the film in way of setting, characteristics, audio and script to put it in a category. For example, a romance would traditionally have a man and woman as the main characters, it would be quite cheery and would have light hearted music in the background whereas say in a horror we would expect the mise en scene to contain dark scenes with quite gloomy music and the setting would be in quite a deserted location. Ideological message means something that represents something that people are well aware of. For example, in Skyfall, (Sam Mendes, 2012) the ideological message there is of UK military dominance. The themes of films are of traditional ones: Horror, romance, thriller, action, comedy and fantasy. They tend to stick within the box and make it very conventional and sometimes quite expected, not in a good or bad way.

In order to analyse a film’s genre, you need to take note on a select few things: the mise en scene, the sound used and the editing side of the film. For example if you were watching a film that had a lot of fast pace edits then this would indicate that the film was of an action film as action films are quite fast paced. It’s the opposite with horror movies, because of the genre; the shots will be slow and drag on a bit to build up suspense and the music would be of quite a taunting nature trying to make the audience feel scared. In a comedy there would be a mixture of slow and fast shots to add humour to things and the mise en scene would be quite regular and/or exaggerated.

For example, with Quantum of Solace, you know it’s going to be an action film as James Bond films are well known for being action and crime. In the opening titles and scenes, for anyone who’s yet to know what the genre is, it soon becomes clear to them as straight away we see women being shown in a provocative and desirable way as they always are in Bond films, and then it goes straight on to a car chase in an exotic place (Quantum of Solace was filmed in six countries) they’re represented in a very specific way. This is shown through fast low and high angle shots. To me this made the film more exciting. These are two factors

Jenny Strand

that will catch the audience’s attention straight away. The first thing you think of when you hear James Bond is cars, women and guns. You’ll find in most films women are represented in a very particular way, they’ll be objectified as being quite weak and having to be saved. For an example in a horror, you’ll most likely see a woman struggling and in the end it’ll be a character of the male gender that helps/saves her. They’re portrayed as victims quite often.

A film of a quite similar genre to Quantum of Solace is Leon: The Professional. Leon is a 1994 English language written and directed by Luc Besson. Based in Italy, Leon is the main character who works for a man called Tony. Tony instructs Leon who to kill and then Tony pays him. Leon is very much on his own in Italy when one day he comes across a young girl called Mathilda Lando(Natalie Portman), smoking with a black eye. The story then starts with her dysfunctional family. Her dad is involved in illegal things such as stashing drugs in their home for corrupt DEA agents. After they find out some of the drugs are missing, they kill all of them however at this time Mathilda is out shopping. She comes back as the men are still there and Leon takes her into his apartment pretending she is his daughter. From this point on Mathilda stays with Leon. They go into a hotel and end up working together. Mathilda is taught how to fight and together they kill people and get the money. In the end Mathilda goes to kill the man who killed her family and Leon goes to stop her which results in an explosive ending.

At the start of Leon, it’s very much the same as Quantum of solace in the way the film starts out with action straight away yet the main characters couldn’t be more different. It’s surprising that as the main character, Leon doesn’t have the usual look. He’s quite strange looking and not the stereotypical hero type of good looking and a sense of power.

Quantum of Solace and Leon are both similar storylines; the two main characters (Bond and Leon) are both basically paid killers. However their lifestyles couldn’t be more different, Leon is quite scruffy in that he dresses extremely casual and looking at him you’d never think he has the skills he does, however Bond dresses in expensive suits and drives an Aston Marten. He’s surrounded by women whereas Leon isn’t really surrounded by anybody. In Quantum of Solace the representation of women is sometimes questionable. Women are objectified and you usually find this is a lot of action films like that; the way women are characterized is often as victims who are helpless and they’re always very glamorous and often shown partly clothed, with close up shots of their bodies. It’s just what the audience expects; it also adds an appeal to the majority of the audience, which are males.

Luc Besson can be classed as an auteur director as in Leon he cast Natalie Portman as Mat Hilda and by making her a sort of love interest with Leon, it caused controversy and it hasn’t really been done before. Therefore he created something really new and caused a bit of a wave in the film industry. Personally I found it quite peculiar but it is interesting. As many of the audience found. He does it in a clever way in that it’s obvious but he doesn’t actually indicate that there’s a love interest there, the audience just picks that up. I’m not aware of

Jenny Strand

any other films that are set out the way Leon is and I like that, throughout the film you never actually knew what was going to happen between them. The opinion on this film was split down the middle by critics but Luc Besson did something write as the film won two awards and was nominated for two; won an award for best foreign language by Czech Lion and best sound editing by Golden Reel award.

One of my favourite films that broke tradition is Apocalypse Now (1979). A war film directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it doesn’t follow tradition with war and make out like soldiers are heroes and that’s that. It shows that innocent people do get harmed in war and shows the truth of it. For me, this is the first film I’m aware of that has really done that and I think because of the year that it was released, people never really went outside of the guidelines when portraying war so I think it was a really clever and eye opening thing to do.

There’s a scene where we see soldiers dropping bombs where extremely young children are and I think that would have made a huge impact on people as it’s not something that’s nice to see and it is quite upsetting and makes you question things. Usually that type of thing is well hidden from the public. It has a really strong political message.