Understanding a film requires not only a comprehension of its overall themes, techniques, and ideology, but how each element contributes to the whole. As a way of practicing your analytic skills on a smaller (but no less important) scale, you will choose and critically analyze one scene from Dee Rees’s 2012 film, Pariah
. It streams for free. (Click on the green “Log in for all services” button, and then click on the link to stream the film.)
Content note: Domestic violence; homophobia.
You probably will need to watch the entire film at least once (it is about ninety minutes long) and your chosen scene several times to notice different aspects of the scene and to take good notes.
In your analysis of about 900 words (no fewer than 800, no more than 1000, according to the word count tool in Microsoft Word), respond, in the form of a thesis-driven essay (not individual answers and not necessarily in this order), to the following questions:
- Each scene of a film is like a paragraph in a written paper: it presents one main idea that helps support the main idea or argument of the entire film. What is the main idea or purpose of your chosen scene? How do you know?
- What sights and sounds does Rees present in the scene? How do they convey the main idea of the scene?
- What filmmaking techniques (camera movement, focus, narration, music and other sound, mise-en-scène, etc.?) do you notice, and how do they contribute (or fail to contribute) to the overall film?
I will be looking for analysis of specific, formal elements of your chosen scene, connected to how those elements contribute to the scene’s purpose.
What is a scene? In A Short Guide to Writing about Film, Timothy J. Corrigan defines a scene this way: “A space within which a narrative action takes place; it is composed of one or more shots.” Wikipedia defines a scene as “a part of the action in a single location.” Sometimes it is clear when a film shifts from one scene to another, such as when a cut takes us to a totally different time and place in the film. At other times, however, what constitutes a scene is less clear and becomes a matter of judgment.
Consider your reader (your audience) to be a smart person who has seen the film but is not an expert on it. You do not need to describe everything in the scene. Instead, say just enough about the scene so your reader knows which scene you are discussing.The rest of your paper should be analysis, not description. You should mention the title of the film in your opening paragraph so your reader knows which film you are discussing.
Notice how the authors tie specific, formal elements of the scene to the meaning that they help convey. Your thesis should state, briefly but specifically, how your scene’s formal elements help convey meaning, and each paragraph after that should provide further evidence to support that thesis.
Your paper must be a Microsoft Word document. (You can get the Microsoft Office suite
, including Word, for free.) You do not need a Works Cited page because you need not cite external sources. (If, for some reason, you do use external sources, you do need to cite them in the text and in a Works Cited page, but I prefer that you use only the film, not other sources.) This is an analytical essay, not a research paper. You do not need to cite the film since it’s obvious that you are writing about Pariah. Just mentioning the film early in the paper is sufficient.
Example essay : attached