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Film Analysis : ' Movie ' Of A Film '

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For anyone who has ever watched a film is a critic in some form. They judge various aspects based on personal feelings or attitudes, then state them for anybody to hear. I, the writer, am guilty of this type of film analysis. I based my ‘review’ of a film solely on how I felt the narrative evolved or how well the acting was done. I never considered why the rhetor of film choose certain details or what might have influenced the rhetor in the first place. However, through this course I was exposed to two academic ways of analyzing films, contextually and descriptively. Contextual analysis of a film uses the events surrounding the film’s production or release and the audiences’ response to the film to develop an understanding of the film. Descriptive analysis of a film uses details from the film or the rhetor’s specific choices to decipher what the underlying massage the film was attempting to portray. In this paper, I will describe the two ways of academically analyzing film, contextually and descriptively, and how using both styles for the same film is the only way to fully comprehend the film. The first way to analyze a film in an academic fashion is through contextual analysis. This method of analysis is reliant on the concept of time. “The key point is that all rhetoric is presented at a specific time and place and cannot be understood apart from that time and place.” (Rowland, 2002, p.35). For each time and place, there is differing contexts that will shape the way the

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