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Analysis of film and art

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Understanding Art (Case Studies) | The Nerdwriter

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8 Things to Keep in Mind When Analyzing Film

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8 Things to Keep in Mind When Analyzing Film

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Courtesy Dr. Sue Scheibler, LMU

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screenwriting screenplay script filmmaking filmmakers tips techniques "screenwriting tips" film movies analyze structure study learn "how to write a screenpl...

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I believe that a more informed audience raises the bar for storytelling. That examining the techniques used to tell great stories makes your own writing better and your appreciation for the stories deeper. With Lessons from the Screenplay, I make videos that analyze movie scripts to examine exactly how and why they are so good at telling their stories.

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Short documentaries with discussion questions

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4. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the "Reply" button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.

My grandmother Lea once told me a story about the woman who lived next door to her in Tel Aviv, and of her capture by the Nazis in Belgium and of an unfathomable decision she had to take to save herself. I never forgot it, and am pleased to share it with you in this Op-Doc film.

Even as a teenager, I was familiar with stories from the Holocaust. My grandfather had survived the horrors of the camps himself, and his stories formed a large part of our family's shared narrative.

But this woman's story felt different. Her pain and horror were woven with love, loss, guilt and redemption - and the epilogue was truly extraordinary. Many years later, once I'd become a documentary filmmaker, I decided to find out whether the woman was still alive.

She was. Klara was 92 years old and still living in the same Tel Aviv apartment. I flew out to see her the following week and asked her to tell me the story I'd heard from my grandmother in her own words.

We sat in her living room, the camera started rolling, and she began. She was sharp, funny and generous, and when looking into the darkness and recalling that difficult time, she did not spare herself one bit. When finished she seemed emptied, for the first time looking as old as her age.

I was moved, even transformed, but told her how sorry I was for having stirred up her feelings and memories like that. I'm not sure she fully absolved me, but she did say she was happy I had come to see her.

Throughout my lifetime the Holocaust has felt like one of the defining narratives of the West. Almost three generations later, the mind still struggles to make sense of what happened in that time. But one commandment, one kernel of a logical response, seems to be expressed by all who have lived through the horror: Never forget.

_________ More?
* Read our list of practical teaching ideas, along with responses from students and teachers, for how you can use these documentaries in the classroom.

* Our next Film Club will take place on Friday, Dec. 8.

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Teaching With: 'I Have a Message for You'

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4. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the "Reply" button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.

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Every Frame a Painting was a series of video essays about film form, made from April 2014 to September 2016, by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou. We officially announced the end of the channel in December 2017. Nothing sinister, we just felt it was time. This post explains it all:
https://medium.com/@ton…

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Now You See It explores film themes and tropes. It's like a college film analysis class minus the lecture halls, essay assignments, and student loan debts.

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Professor Huhtamo's Cabinet of Media Archaeology. Part 1: The Magic Lantern

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"Professor Huhtamo's Cabinet of Media Archaeology" is a series about little known but influential media machines. It is meant for media education at any level and for anyone interested in media archaeology and the early history of the moving image.

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A comedic Kurt Vonnegut lecture about story structure

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How to analyze film visuals. Courtesy Dr. Sue Scheibler, LMU

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Courtesy Dr. Sue Scheibler, LMU

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Resources from Ronald Chase

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How to use YouTube Video Essays in the Classroom

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How to use YouTube Video Essays in the Classroom

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YouTube/Vox

Like many of you, I've been thinking a lot lately about how we can better prepare students to be thoughtful, responsible, and critical consumers and creators. While I don't have all the answers, I've come to one conclusion: Media-literacy education must deal with YouTube. Ninety-one percent of teens use YouTube. That's 30 percent more than use Snapchat (61 percent), the next closest social media competitor, and even more than use tech we think of as ubiquitous, like Gmail (79 percent).

What's more, YouTube is a unique beast and can't just be tacked on. It has its own celebrities, culture, norms, and memes and has even given rise to the dreaded " YouTube voice." But what I find particularly fascinating is that YouTube has its own genres and types of videos. One of these - the video essay - is something I think can be a great tool for media-literacy education. Here's why.

What Are YouTube Video Essays?

YouTube video essays are long-form (relative to many other internet videos) critical videos that make arguments about media and culture. They're usually meticulously narrated and edited, juxtaposing video footage, images, audio, and text to make an argument much like a writer would do in a traditional essay. As former YouTube talent scout Jeremy Kaye puts it, video essays "take a structured, in-depth, analytical, and sometimes persuasive approach, as opposed to the quick 'explainer' video style."

Why Are They Great for Learning?

It's easy to dismiss a lot of what circulates on YouTube as frivolous, silly, or even obnoxious, but video essays are the opposite. They demand students' attention but not through cartoonish gesturing, ultra-fast editing, and shock value (which even some of the more popular educational YouTubers fall prey to) - there's room to breathe in these essays. To capture attention, video essays use a time-tested trick: being flat-out interesting. They present compelling questions or topics and then dig into them using media as evidence and explication. This makes them a great match for lessons on persuasive and argumentative writing.

But what I really love most about video essays is that they have something at stake; they ground their arguments in important cultural or political topics, exposing the ways media represents gender or race, for instance, or how media evolves over time and interacts with the world at large. Most importantly, video essays model for students how YouTube can be a platform for critical communication.

How Can They Be Used in Classrooms?

First, a caveat: Most of the channels below offer content that'll work best in an upper-middle or high school classroom. Some videos can also be explicit, so you'll want to do some browsing.

Conversation starter or lesson hook: Many of these videos serve as great two- to 10-minute introductions to topics relevant to classrooms across the curriculum.

Active viewing opportunity: Since video essays present often complex arguments, invite students to watch and rewatch videos and outline their theses, key points, and conclusions.

Research project: Have students find more examples that support, or argue against, a video's argument. Students could also write a response to a video essay.

Copyright lesson: Video essays are a great example of fair use. Show students that by adding their own commentary, they can use copyrighted material responsibly.

Assessment: Have students create their own video essays to demonstrate learning or media-creation skills like editing.
Channels and Videos to Check Out
This is an eclectic channel that's hard to pin down; basically, the video topics focus on whatever intrigues the channel's creator, Evan Puschak. There's everything from analysis of , to MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech to the history of the fidget spinner .

Vox runs the gamut of issues in politics, culture, and pop culture. Their explainer-style videos can serve as conversation starters, and since they published multiple videos a week there's no shortage of choices. Also, make sure to check out their playlists offering essays on everything from to climate change .

This channel does a masterful job of uncovering the layered meaning - social, political, and cultural - in music and hip-hop. While most of these videos are mature, and only suitable in very particular high school contexts, there's brilliant work on everything from the poetic rhythms of the hip-hop group Migos to Kanye West's stagecraft to music video minimalism . Any one of these videos could inspire a great lesson or unit.

Video essays are just one thing Lindsay does on her channel, and she's really good at them. Her videos often deal with heady topics like "the other" but boils them down in accessible ways. She also isn't afraid of throwing in a few jokes to keep things interesting.

There's tons here focused on music with a specific emphasis on hip hop lyrics. One of my favorite series is called Deconstructed . While Deconstructed videos aren't typical video essays, they present color-coded breakdowns of the rhyme schemes in hip-hop tracks. Students could apply this technique to their favorite songs or poems.

This now defunct channel has 30 videos with some of the best film analysis on YouTube. If you're looking to help students analyze the language of film, this is the channel to check out. One of my personal favorites focuses on the work of a film editor .

Kristian focuses a lot on cartoons and comics which is a nice entry point for younger kids. His videos each touch on big ideas in storytelling. For instance, his examination of Pixar movies delves into their rich themes that break the often rote themes of other animated movies. This video would pair well with creative writing or literary analysis lessons.

One of the more long-running essayists on YouTube, CGP Grey has a fast-talking style with a lot of animation, but does a good job of answering head-scratching questions like, "What if the electoral college is tied?" or explaining complex issues like copyright in a digestible way.
Lessons from the Screenplay
While this channel focuses on how screenwriting underpins film, the lessons offered in each of this channel's video essays are broadly applicable to the craft of writing in general.

I saved this one for last because it's the least traditional. Kogonada is a former academic turned filmmaker who gained popularity through his Vimeo video essays that, for the most part, elegantly edit together film clips without any narration. These videos are great if you're teaching video and film editing class or film appreciation/criticism. Creating a narration-less video would be an excellent final project for students.
Tanner Higgin is Director of Education Editorial Strategy at Common Sense Education, which helps educators find the best ed-tech tools, learn best practices for teaching with tech, and equip students with the skills they need to use technology safely and responsibly. Go to Common Sense Education for free resources, including full reviews of digital tools.
How to Use YouTube Video Essays in the Classroom

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How to Use YouTube Video Essays in the Classroom

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Like many of you, I've been thinking a lot lately about how we can better prepare students to be thoughtful, responsible, and critical consumers and creators. While I don't have all the answers, I've come to one conclusion: Media-literacy education must deal with YouTube. Ninety-one percent of teens use YouTube.

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Editing and the Kuleshov Effect

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Hitchcock's Pure Cinema-  "The Kuleshov Effect"

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Uploaded by Stephen DaVega on 2009-10-19.

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Insights into important films

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Suggestions for films to watch in the classroom

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Instead of a summer reading list, I thought I'd provide a list of great films we can show our students to inspire conversations about politics, history, culture and art. For me, the most important part of this is to understand that films are their own form of literature, as profound and poetic as any book, and to inspire conversations with a cultural artifact relevant to our students' lives.

Don't be turned off by the fact that this is a sci-fi film about aliens coming to earth. The story is really about the power of language and how the way we speak can change how we think. Based Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life," the film's message is important in our world of fragmented populations, balkanized political parties and misunderstanding. The film is as applicable to language classes as it is to social studies topics related to international relations.

This film will make you rethink your notion of race in America. Based on author and playwright James Baldwin's letters and unfinished book about Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcome X, it challenges what we think we know about people of color, racism, and the resurgence of white supremacists in the U.S. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson, this documentary is a perfect compainion to social studies curriculum about current events and the Civil Rights Movement, and literature like I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

Akira Kurosawa's (Seven Samurai, Ran) post-WWII film explores the rape of a woman and her husband's murder in ancient Japan through four different points of view. This philosphical exploration of perception, bias and human nature helped the auteur explore the ramifcations of war, but which continue to resonate in today's world of alternative facts and anti-intellectualism.

Ask yourself and your students: What do you believe in?

Kate Blanchett plays as many as 13 characters in this adaptaion of an art installation by Julian Rosenfeldt. The film explores the many political ideologies & manifestos, including the Communist Manifesto, Dada, Dogma 95 and more. This is more of an art work than a narrative film, but provides a visual way to explore political and artistic ideals, and enjoy the contrasts of the film's settings to the written word. Consider this conversation starter when developing student voice, mission statements, and goals for your class. Ask yourself and your students: What do you believe in?

We take for granted our abilty to talk and understand each other, if even clumisly and with the wrong words. Imagine, then, a profoundly autistic child, Owen Suskind, unable to talk at all, whose only gateway to the world is through Disney animated films. This documentary walks us through such a real life experience, and humanizes those around us with autism.

The real lesson, though, is how we as the audience also use Disney films to connect to this character. Often hidden and mis-understood, Owen and those with autism are disconnected from our experience, and it is only through our shared experience with Disney that we can truly understand him and the challenges we all face communicating with one another.

Assembling a group of "artistic warriors," that inclued Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Salvador Dali, experimental Chilean filmmaker, Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), set out to turn the Frank Herbert sci-fi classic into a Hollywood film in the mid-1970's. Long before Star Wars, Alien, Bladerunner and the "awful" David Lynch verison of the 1980s, Jodorowsky developed a plan for a mind-blowing cinematic experience.

Of course, the film was never made, but the profound effect it had throughout Hollywood is a testament to the enduring influence visionaries can have, even if they don't personally succeed. For me, this is like teaching: we assemble a team of humans to take on the world, and we prepare their hearts and minds for that mission. Only years later do we see the results, always in ways we could't have predicted.

For me, this is like teaching: we assemble a team of humans to take on the world, and we prepare their hearts and minds for that mission.

Musicals are always about love and the love for music. This film is about love stories themselves: The love for another person, a love for one's art, a love for the Musical as art form, the love for Los Angeles (La La Land), the love of dreams. We know what happens in life with all of these things, and the film explores this condition with tenderness, and even an optimism that we would do well to discuss as our students embark on journeys of passion that may not take them where they plan to go.

The Academy Award-wining story of a gay African American boy growing up in Miami, this film questions all kinds of stereotypes about race, economics, the scourge of crack, sexuality, and of course, love. Even the film's music score defies expectation, and, along with the steady directing of Barry Jenkins, elevates the story of black urban life to that of classic literature and tragedy.

This raw documentary explores the citizen volunteers who rescue victims of the Syrian civil war. The raw, shocking video footage of rescues contrasts with the calm resolve of members of the White Helmets as shown through candid interviews. If there's one thing we need desperately in history and social studies classes, its a connection to and empathy with people in conflict in the world right now. This doc puts a human face on a tragedy Americans are happy to ignore.

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Summer Screening List 2017 - Michael Hernandez - Medium

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Instead of a summer reading list, I thought I'd provide a list of great films we can show our students to inspire conversations about politics, history, culture and art. For me, the most important part of this is to understand that films are their own form of literature, as profound and poetic as any book, and to inspire conversations with a cultural artifact relevant to our students' lives.

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The films they restore and sell on DVD also include booklets with film analyses

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Since 1984, we've dedicated ourselves to gathering the greatest films from around the world and publishing them in editions of the highest technical quality.

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A sample policy for allowing students to watch films with mature subject matter.

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This week, the well-to-do wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former actress Louise Linton, shared a heated exchange on Instagram over photographs of her wearing (and flaunting) expensive clothing brands, where she appeared to insult another woman for having lesser means. Linton, who once gave an interview about the dozens of diamonds and other jewels she would be wearing to wed Mnuchin, asked the commenter if she had "given more to the economy than me and my husband? Either as an individual earner in taxes OR in self sacrifice to your country?" and concluded with a final barb: "Your life looks cute."

Linton may not think very much of people who don't "give" as much to "the economy" as she and her husband. It wouldn't be any big surprise: After all, Linton and Mnuchin are both creatures of Hollywood, a territory none too friendly to poor people.

It's unusual to see people struggling to get by on the big screen. By my count, in the entirety of American cinema, there are fewer than 300 movies that significantly concern themselves with poverty or homelessness. When they do, the result is predictable, insulting in ways that not only reflect but propagate unfair stereotypes and misleading prejudices about people who live in poverty.

[Louise Linton just spelled out her values system for you common folk]

Oftentimes, movies that seem to be about poor people are actually about rich people. If you know "My Man Godfrey," "Oliver Twist" or "My Own Private Idaho," you may remember them as being about, respectively, a Depression-era hobo, a hungry orphan boy, or two homeless hustlers. But in each instance, the central character is actually a rich man in poor drag: Godfrey is a well-to-do Bostonian hiding away in a Hooverville while recovering from a broken heart; Oliver's true parentage, and inheritance, is eventually revealed; and Keanu Reeves's hustler, who comes into his own fortune, is the mayor's son. I think of these kind of characters (and they abound) as Impostor Tramps.

And there's another way in which movies may care less about poverty than they would have you believe. You may remember "The Soloist" as being about a homeless Juilliard-trained musician played by Jamie Foxx. But the narrative actually centers on the reporter (Robert Downey Jr.) and how he finds new meaning in his work, saves his marriage and repairs his relationship with his son - all thanks to the Important Lessons he learns by helping Foxx. In such films, (think of "The Fisher King" and "Resurrecting the Champ") poor people are objects, not subjects: They are the means toward someone else's end. It's one way in which old doctrines show themselves, counseling us to aid The Poor because it's a way to achieve our own salvation.

When the main characters are genuinely destitute, they are often objects of fear. "C.H.U.D." is one notorious case, in which homeless men literally rise up from the sewers to slaughter the upper classes. While many horror flicks with "vagrants" as the villain were made in the 1980s, as widespread homelessness emerged for the first time since the 1930s, the bigotry that inspired them endures: Kevin Drum recently insisted that it is "perfectly understandable" to be disgusted by homeless people.

When they are not monsters, poor people on film are often irredeemable and irresponsible. Take "Precious," which purports to care about its characters but nonetheless traffics in the ugliest racist stereotypes about welfare recipients and poor African Americans.

[Check out Louise Linton's wild white-savior-in-Africa story]

Alternately, poor people onscreen are broken and need to be fixed ("The Saint of Fort Washington," "Being Flynn"), or lost and in need of rescue, as with movies ("Dangerous Minds," "Freedom Writers") that feature a Nice White Lady coming to inspire and save black and brown children, who merely need to be motivated - to find some reservoir of pluck or grit - so that they can improve their lot. These stories are especially insidious because they teach viewers that poverty, as HUD Secretary Ben Carson said recently, is a " state of mind " rather than a condition we create through our politics and public policy. In the movies, poverty is rooted in individual failure (or one dramatic, tragic event), and the larger political and economic forces that constrain people's opportunities are absent.

Indeed, the way to escape poverty in cinema is never public aid or even private charity. Accepting help (or, heaven forbid, demanding it) marks characters as undeserving; refusing aid, by contrast, even if it means your children go hungry, is a sign of moral fiber (see Jeff Bridges in "Hidden in America" or "Cinderella Man," in which the final heroic act is ostentatiously repaying the public relief that saved the family from ruin).

Finally, despite the fact that poverty is higher outside metropolitan areas than within them, and highest in the South, in the movies it is concentrated in big cities, and especially among African Americans in New York. That gives us a wildly distorted sense of where most poverty is and who experiences it.

[The loneliness and isolation of poverty in the Deep South]

"The Grapes of Wrath," still among the best movies about poverty, is an exception, showing audiences rural families in need. So does "The Glass Castle," along with better films like "Winter's Bone," "Frozen River" and "Wendy and Lucy. " But these conform to their own pattern: When movie poverty is rural, it is white (with exceptions, like "Ballast" and "George Washington"). And this white, rural poverty is much more likely to be portrayed sympathetically. As recent events remind us - from the extravagant efforts mainstream media have made to humanize racist, homophobic, and xenophobic white Trump voters, to violent public rallies by neo-Nazis - we still inhabit a white supremacist culture, so this should probably not be surprising, even it we find it troubling.

The newly released " The Glass Castle,"based on author Jeanette Walls's memoirs of growing up poor, offers a fresh opportunity to watch whiteness work, given how much it deviates from the book to make the alcoholic father blameless and the neglectful mother merely eccentric. It softens this family's poverty in a common way, too. In Walls's memoir, the children spend much of their time hungry, cold, and dirty. But in Hollywood's version, they are never too cold, too hungry or too dirty. American movies often pull their punches in this way, avoiding giving filmgoers a realistic sense of what deep poverty is like, thereby making it easier for people like Linton and her husbandto dismiss and easier to deny the need for policies to reduce it. "The Glass Castle" takes a brutally unsentimental, clear-eyed accounting of growing up poor and turns it into a maudlin movie about a woman's troubled relationship with her father and their reconciliation. And another opportunity to show movie audiences something about the reality of poverty in America is squandered.

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Perspective | Where do we learn that poverty is shameful and dangerous? At the movies.

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This week, the well-to-do wife of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former actress Louise Linton, shared a heated exchange on Instagram over photographs of her wearing (and flaunting) expensive clothing brands, where she appeared to insult another woman for having lesser means.

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A sample form to allow students to watch R-rated or other "mature subject matter"