Critical approaches - Film analysis

Here we have two of the ‘3 Cs’ in its sights: watching and talking about film (part of the ‘Cultural’ spehere of film education), and ‘analysing film’ (part of the ‘Critical’ dimension). The section on FIlm Analysis was written by our colleagues in the Danish FIlm Institute, and features a brilliant one-minute film from South Korea. So we have a film from beyond the viewing experience of many young people (part of the ‘Cultural’ sphere), as well as using it to model approaches to film analysis.

We emphasise as always the importance of combining the Cs together: so that watching a wide range of film is always done critically; and that film analysis should always range across different types of film forms and genres, periods, and locations.

Throughout this course, we typically propose approaches to watching, making, and analysing short films, rather than feature films. This is for a number of reasons:

• Short films are complete narratives in their own right, but can be watched many times in a lesson or session;
• Young people are much less likely to have seen the short films we propose - and much more likely to have seen feature films;
• shorts are more easily cleared for copyright;
• and while taking clips from feature films is sometimes useful for illustration, if you want to teach about whole narratives, then short films are most efficient.

In later steps, you will be looking at ways in which to plan student presentations and feedback from student to student, and finally, you will see an example of film analytical teaching materials, made by the Danish Film Institute. The latter is included to inspire educators to plan their own film analytical tasks after the course.

Each step asks you to read a text and/or watch the short film 'Edge of Seventeen' as part of the step task. We encourage you to share your thoughts and notes with the other participants.