How to Watch Movies

In this fascinating article, Roger Ebert describes the "shot at a time" sessions that he conducts with film students and film festival audiences. Instead of lecturing about the movie, he invites the audience to interrupt it at any time and discuss what's on screen.

One thing I quickly discovered was that even much smaller audiences can contain someone who can answer any question. In "The Third Man," if a character spoke
German, there would be a German speaker. If a scene required medical knowledge, there would be a doctor. A Japanese film at Boulder turned up Japanese speakers,
experts on the society, students of the director. There would be somebody who could tell you what a Ford truck could and couldn't do. Or a rabbi, a physicist, an artist, a musician.

Of course, Ebert says, it helps to have some understanding of visual composition and strategy. He then goes on to give a brilliant crash course in visual composition and strategy.

In simplistic terms: Right is more positive, left more negative. Movement to the right seems more favorable; to the left, less so. The future seems to live on the right, the past on the left. The top is dominant over the bottom. The foreground is stronger than the background. Symmetrical compositions seem at rest. Diagonals in a composition seem to "move" in the direction of the sharpest angle they form, even though of course they may not move at all. Therefore, a composition could lead us into a background that becomes dominant over a foreground. Tilt shots of course put everything on a diagonal, implying the world is out of balance.

He follows by using these principles to analyze a scene from Hitchcock's Notorious (which, happily for me, I've seen about ten times). There's also a link to the surprising results of a session on Citizen Kane.

Great stuff if you love movies. Thanks to Kottke.

p.s. And shame on you, Lou Lumenick.