Reviewing my own practice

I want to be more active when consuming media so I decided to blog about all of the films that I see at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) this year. The purpose of this exercise is to refresh the skills learnt in the Introduction to Cinema Studies course and applying those concepts to analyse and critique feature films and documentaries. I wanted to also experiment with using my opinion and justifying these opinions with evidence or at least providing an explanation for this viewpoint.

I tried to focus on the explicit and sometimes implicit meanings of certain elements and to question the function of certain elements in these films. An example of this is when I reviewed the film The Volcano,  about Maria, a young girl from a peasant family in Guatemala. She faces an arranged marriage and the use of animals demonstrate her place in this society and provide an emotional motivation for her desire to leave the coffee plantation she lives on.

I referred back to the text for the Introduction to Cinema Studies course, Bordwell and Thompson (2005), Film Art: An Introduction when approaching these critiques. In the chapter on Film Form, Bordwell and Thompson refer to evaluative judgement. I attempted to use the criteria mentioned such as coherance which refers to the films form in relation to how engaging the artwork is, complexity which refers to the relationships between formal elements and how they interact to create formal patterns and originality which refers to how the film uses the formal elements to either work towards or against familiar conventions.

In some reviews I found it hard to write the film because I do not have access to re-watch and analyse the films or fact check certain details. I didn’t want to make statements that I couldn’t corroborate. I tried to keep a description of the plot to a minimum so that I could analyse the elements that worked and didn’t work efficiently. This exercise forced me to concentrate when watching films and pick up the important details also which I will bring into my creative practice in the future.

It has been a worthwhile experience, and I would like to write about the films that I watch more often so that I can keep reflecting on them and refine my analytical skills. I have not yet decided what section of the media I would like to work in when I complete the degree, however this experience has been very enjoyable and understanding the intrinsic elements and their connections and patterns within feature films is a valuable for me to have. I enjoy creating stories and learning more about the construction and use of certain elements used in feature film.

I have reviewed eleven films so far and I am going to see another one tonight. If you are interested you can click on the links below:

Reference

Bordwell, D & Thompson K 2005, Film Art: An Introduction International Edition, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY