ENG 111 OER Repository

This resource has been designed as a guide for teachers to use in the classroom when teaching students how to analyse a film as a text.

Academic writing about film requires that you see beyond your enjoyment of the film experience and consider the “invisible things,” such as camera angles, composition and editing, lighting, sound and mise-en-scene (sets, costumes, makeup). These are the “film elements” that are distinctive to this art form. When we are caught up in the excitement or emotion of the film’s story, we often become passive viewers, swept along in the entertainment. Of course, these responses are important, but they are just a beginning point when it comes to writing thoughtfully about film.

Movies are entertainment. Movies are documents of their time and place. Movies are artistic forms of self-expression. Movies we see at theatres, on television, or home video are typically narrative films. They tell stories about characters going through experiences. But what are they really about? What is the content of a film?

Although the criticism of every art will be based in the particularities that arise from its specific media, I am interested here in highlighting aspects of criticism applicable across the arts (and which are therefore relevant to film criticism). Equally, although the characteristics of evaluative criticism have developed through and in relation to written criticism, most of the aspects listed below would be equally germane to work currently taking place within audio-visual formats.

Left-hand drop-down menu includes extensive coverage of the elements of the rhetorical situation and triangle.

Students are digital natives who spend their days saturated in rhetorical messages that they have learned to decode quite well – for example, they can easily size up an instructor within moments of walking into the classroom. As students look at various messages from fashion advertising to political campaigning, they often decode and make sound rhetorical conclusions about these messages. This chapter helps students understand the rhetorical skills they already possess, transfer these skills to classroom projects, and become familiar with basic terms of rhetorical analysis used in the academy.

These resources will help teachers and students better understand visual rhetoric strategies for rhetorical purposes.

These resources will help teachers and students better understand visual rhetoric strategies for rhetorical purposes.

From the Writing Studio at Duke University

An except from John Berger's Ways of Seeing, put out by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1972. It is considered an early and very accessible work of postmodernism.

A BAFTA award-winning BBC series with John Berger, which rapidly became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made. In the first programme, Berger examines the impact of photography on our appreciation of art from the past.

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato's cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images.

No Caption Needed is a book and a blog, each dedicated to discussion of the role that photojournalism and other visual practices play in a vital democratic society. No caption needed, but many are provided.

Students learn strategies of argument via political cartoons.

Writing from photographs seems as though it should sharpen the way we convert experiences and events into prose. I suspect that it also changes not only what we write but how we write it. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the selfie coincides with the age of autobiography.

This site from the National Gallery of Art provides several documents to help you analyze Mary Cassat's painting "Little Girl in a Blue Armchair."

This documentary explores the work of one of America's most famous photographers, Ansel Adams, as he goes beneath the surface to record nature and the quality of humanity. Known for his signature style of landscape photography, Adams captures our natural environment with images full of space and light.

"Though often overlooked, Graphic Design surrounds us: it is the signs we read, the products we buy, and the rooms we inhabit. Graphic designers find beauty within limitations, working towards the ultimate goal of visually communicating a message. Utilizing a language of type and imagery, graphic designers try to make every aspect of our lives defined and beautiful."

"COLLAGE WAS A major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century. Who invented collage--Braque or Picasso--and when is still not settled. Both artists left most of the work they did between I907 and 1914 undated as well as unsigned; and each claims, or implies the claim, that his was the first collage of all. That Picasso dates his, in retrospect, almost a year earlier than Braque's com-pounds the difficulty. Nor does the internal or stylistic evidence help enough, given that the interpretation of Cubism is still on a rudimentary level."

"To enhance your appreciation of photography it is necessary to develop the skills to make careful visual analysis. While everyone can easily discuss the contents of photographs ("what you see"), most need more training to learn about formal analysis used in the visual arts."

An animated and interactive experience of color communication and color symbolism.