Please familiarize yourself with the terms used to describe film form (Speidel’s essay is a good core reference, especially the section on “cinematic codes,” though there are many others). As much as possible, I’d like us to describe the films we watch in class rather than trying to look through them to find some sort of underlying meaning.
Poetics, not hermeneutics. Description, not interpretation.
Images as objects that do something in themselves, not as symbols that mean something else other than themselves.
One way of accounting for what difficulties we may encounter when we watch films in class is George Steiner’s essay “On Difficulty.” While Steiner talks about poems, we can apply his ideas to other works of art, including films.
In particular, what helps is the way he distinguishes between four types of difficulty, arranging them according to increasing degrees of abstraction.
- contingent difficulty
- modal difficulty
- tactical difficulty
- ontological difficulty
Steiner’s essay itself is worth reading, and I feel it can be helpful even for your other classes. After all, if you have Steiner’s terms, you have a critical vocabulary to use in describing what kind of difficulty you’re encountering when you go through, for example, your assigned readings for your philosophy courses.
For a quick summary of Steiner though, you may click here.
Elements of Screen Arts (2019) 