Sometimes I wonder if there is a place for film analysis in a high school setting.  What is the difference between analyzing a film and analyzing a book?  Surely, they are building up the same critical thinking and observation skills?  Surely, they both have the ability to help expand and improve vocabulary?  There are a good deal of films that can be seen as mindless fluff but there are also a lot of books that fall in that category as well.  Can students get the same or similar things out of analyzing film as they do out of reading books?

 

When I was a kid, I was an incredibly voracious reader.  I could get through something like a book a week and I spent a lot of my free time reading.  As I got older, it became harder and harder to justify spending the time sitting down with a book for fun.  Then, when I got to University, my recreational reading was almost entirely replaced by academic reading.  That or watching a movie.  It felt nice to be able to sit back and allow a story to be told in front of my eyes.  It felt similar to having a book read to me when I was little.  My dad used to read me and my sister the Series of Unfortunate Events books by Lemony Snickett.

 

Sitting back and watching these films was not a passive experience, and neither is being read to.  I think ultimately, the two different mediums build similar skills in different ways.  I don’t think that one is inherently better or worse than the other and I think that, in the future, I’d like to use film as more than just a time filler in my classroom.  Perhaps it would be interesting to have students critically compare books to their film counterparts, thinking about how the medium of film requires that changes be made, even if that can be upsetting to many book fans and if sometimes it’s not done in the deftest way.

 

I believe that analyzing film can help develop critical analysis skills in the same way that literary analysis can and could perhaps engage students who aren’t as interested in reading as some others might be.  I do really hope to be able to involve film analysis in my classroom in the future and allow students to consider the possibilities of critical film analysis.