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Writing About Film: Some Guidelines

• The plot summary problem

Film writing of necessity involves a certain amount of description: one cannot quote verbatim from a film image in written language. Beginning film students have a tendency toward plot synopsis: their instinct is to say “what happened” rather than to describe how actions, characters, places, and things are represented. This tendency can be even more marked than in literary studies courses, since many students have not yet been acclimated to consider films as authored works, much less approach them as texts susceptible to critical analysis.

evaluation: an estimating of value

Submitted by rachelr on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 11:02am

So far I am really enjoying the direction of the course, and I think the variety of material that we will be covering over the course of the upcoming quarter will bring in a lot of different angles and perspectives on nonfiction. Looking back on the past quarter, however, I feel like we have had a lot of arguments and point-proving sessions that have drifted away from our main points. I live that in the class we can stray from the main point and explore new ideas surrounding it, but this is only constructive when the class is having a discussion, not always an argument.