The (Un)Conventional Conventional

In the introduction of J. Dudley Andrew's The Major Film Theories, he intimates that "Film scholars lose the unreflective innocence of passive film viewing." Throughout this paper we will be exploring the meaning of that statement and how it relates to my personal film viewing experience after two media analysis classes (although primarily in relation to Film Analysis). And so, let us begin.

I have long been a student of film in a less than formal way. I've always been fascinated by the various aspects of moviemaking; everything from the actors to the costuming to the lighting intrigued me. And while it is true that film is by its very nature a visual medium, it has always been the screenplay that most fascinated me. How can 80 to 120 pages of paper typed in courier font be the catalyst for the spectacular images seen in a Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, or Alfred Hitchcock film?

I didn't know. And so I turned to watching all the extra features on DVD's looking for behind the scenes footage to give me clues as to how a movie takes on a life beyond the page. But even those mini-documentaries did little to help my conundrum. In frustration I turned to my performance background; I read biographies of great directors. I studied lighting techniques and the basics of cinematography, etc... I

And then I found my way into a formalized media analysis class. And it all clicked for me at the speed of 24 frames per second, paralleling real life.

It is only by adopting a Gestaltist approach to film that we will ever truly be able to understand and analyze cinema.

By using critical analysis methods such as Auteur, Cultural, Discursive, Aesthetic, etc... we begin to use different critical lenses that allow us to illuminate portions of the whole. And when doing this, we begin to see just how much these methods overlap and complement each other. No critique can ever be wholly Aesthetic or Auteur; each critique will encompass several methods which work together to give us a more complete analysis than any one method could do alone.