HUMN 246 Film Appreciation

You will need to locate a film for your Film Analysis assignment.  Below are suggestions to find films.

• If you are in Columbus, you can borrow a DVD from the Franklin University Library collection of movies on DVD. 
• If you are in Ohio, you can borrow a DVD through the SearchOhio catalog. The DVD would be delivered to the library for you to pick up.
• Borrow a DVD from your local public library.
• Rent or purchase a movie from a streaming video service (Vudu, Amazon Prime, Google Play)

How to Read a Movie

"I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. 'You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?' he asked me. 'You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class.'  

I did. The results were beyond my imagination."

"Of course you don't simply creep along and talk about what you're looking at. It helps to have a grounding in basic visual strategy...I bought some books that were enormously helpful. The most useful was Understanding Movies, by Louis D. Giannetti, then in its first edition, now in its 11th. He introduced me to the concept that visual compositions have 'intrinsic weighting.'"

[Photo Above: Hitchcock's "Notorious" (1946)].

Read more of "How to read a movie" here and click on the links below to read more from Roger Ebert's Journal.