At the start of the Film Studies course, students have a bit of a problem understanding that textual analysis and film language are a lot more complicated than their understanding of the plot of the film. Students tend to believe they ‘understand’ films, just because they understand narrative. Of course, students do have a lot of experience in decoding media images, and in this sense they do in fact know a lot. But unfortunately, while they can understand narrative and even more complex codes like symbolism and metaphor, they have a tougher time analyzing images.
A good place to start is with still images, analyzing pictures instead of scenes. If you’ve viewed a film recently, you might want to do this exercise with screen-grabs (we recently used THE 400 BLOWS), but any group of still pictures will probably do for a beginning. Here’s a series of questions you can ask about an image – illustrated with some choices from THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI (1919) that could be used to focus the discussion.
