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Writing about Film
A Checklist: Getting Ideas for Writing about Film
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These questions may help bring impressions out into the open and may with some
reworking provide topics for essays.
Preliminaries
- Is the title significant? Are the newspaper or television advertisements
appropriate?
Literary Adaptations
- If the film is adapted from fiction or drama, does it slavishly follow
its original and neglect the potentialities of the camera? Or does it so revel
in cinematic devices that it distorts the original work? (Of course, an adaptation
need not go to either extreme. Robert Enrico’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge (1962) is a close adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s story, and yet
it is visually interesting.)
- If the film is adapted from fiction or drama, does it do violence to the
theme of the original? Is the film better than its source? Are the additions
or omissions due to the medium or to a crude or faulty interpretation of the
original? Is the film The Color Purple by Steven Spielberg more sensational
or less than the book? In what ways can it be said that the film is different
from the book?
Plot and Character
- Can film deal as effectively with inner action—mental processes—as
with external, physical action? In a given film, how is the inner action conveyed?
- Are shots and sequences adequately developed, or do they seem jerky? (A
shot may be jerky by being extremely brief or at an odd angle; a sequence
may be jerky by using discontinuous images or fast cuts. Sometimes, of course,
jerkiness may be desirable.) If such cinematic techniques as wipes, dissolves,
and slow motion are used, are they meaningful and effective?
- Are the characters believable?
- Are the actors appropriately cast? (Wasn’t it a mistake to cast Robert
Redford as Gatsby in Jack Clayton’s version of The Great Gatsby [1974]?
Tom Hanks as the lead in Brian DePalma’s Bonfire of the Vanities [1990]?)
Sound Track
- Does the sound track offer more than realistic dialogue? Is the music appropriate
and functional? (Music may, among other things, imitate natural sounds, give
a sense of locale or of ethnic group, suggest states of mind, provide ironic
commentary, or—by repeated melodies—help establish connections.)
Are volume, tempo, and pitch—whether of music or of such sounds as the
wind blowing or cars moving—used to stimulate emotions?
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