Introduction: Initial Intake
After reading Roger Ebert’s “How to Read a Movie,” I absorbed the different techniques Ebert explained and tried to understand how to apply them to my own viewing experience. There are three techniques I was able to grasp while reading.
Different Techniques
First technique is practicing attentive vs entertained viewing which means entertained viewing is watching a movie for the purpose of enjoyment and to pass time. Attentive viewing is when the audience or viewer is watching the movie for the purpose of discovering different meanings within the movie and to create a personal interpretation on what the movie is. The second technique is understanding cinematic language and using that to compose what emotions that are being invoked. This entails the purpose of the elements within a film such as sound, lighting, framing, and edited shots. The last technique is the stop-action method. This technique is applying skills used in game tape review which involves a lot of pausing and stepping out of the flow of the movie to absorb and analyze the content from the frames previously seen.
What would work?
I don’t believe the stop-action method would work because the constant pausing may distract from the total value of the movie. I also believe that focusing on singular frames over main segments of the movie can cause you to get lost in what you are trying to understand. I believe using the first two techniques would work as being more attentive whilst emotionally being vulnerable to what the movie can convey. What this does is make you analyze everything in a film while immersing yourself within the film which overall makes it a more personal experience.
Video Summary
In this video, I learned how symmetry creates a sense of unease or environment control. By centering the action, the director the viewer’s ability to look away becomes harder which forces the audience to engage directly with the character’s environment and how they potentially feel.
This technique from Tarantino was a perfect example of what Ebert means by the importance of cinematic language. By using a low-angle shot, the director instantly changes the power dynamic of the viewer, making the subject within the movie appear dominant. It is a simple but smooth way to dictate how the audience feels about a character’s authority.
The match cut is an effective technique for showing how editing controls time and meaning within. By connecting two different scenes to make a single visual action, the director creates a thematic link, proving that simple cuts are a deliberate choice intended to create our understanding of the story.
Final Thoughts
This experience has helped me understand the balance of the viewing experience necessary to read a movie. While I still try to stay emotionally vulnerable to the film’s story for my entertainment value, I now have a better understanding of cinema vocabulary to verbalize a directors purpose and goal the director is trying to achieve different emotional effects. Ebert’s focus on cinematic language in the reading applies to specific techniques rather than frame pausing. What I learned is becoming a powerful tool for any viewer or audience who wants to understand movies beyond passive consumption and into a deeper, more interactive engagement with cinema.
