Summary Points

• Style refers to the distinct ways that film artists make use of available methods and techniques to create patterns of meaning.
• Style is also about there being a fittingness in the way form and content together reveal the film’s slant on the subject—the filmmaker’s way of imaginatively owning it.
• Pattern refers to the film’s framework—the underlying structure that organizes different aspects of the film so that they can work together.
• There are three related layers of meaning in a film: (1) Explicit meaning is what the film communicates directly to viewers. (2) Implicit meaning refers to the underlying theme, referential meaning, and intertextuality. (3) Interpretive meaning explores the deeper significance of the film, attributing meaning and uncovering perspective disclosed through formal elements.
• Scholars recognize three broad interpretive strategies: (1) a dominant reading, (2) a resistant reading, and (3) a negotiated reading.
• As much as it is entertaining, a well-made film can also be enlightening or persuasive in its view of life.
• Criticism is about appreciating a film’s merits and trying to understand what a film is about.
• There are four widely accepted criteria for assessing art that film scholars apply in making judgements: (1) coherence, (2) intensity of effect, (3) complexity, and (4) originality.

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Movie Clips

The King’s Speech (2010) First Speech

The King’s Speech (2010) Last Speech

Eye in the Sky (2016) Official Trailer

Rear Window (1954) Opening Sequence

Rear Window (1954) Opening and Closing Sequences (with analysis)

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On Directorial Styles

The Spielberg Face

091. The Spielberg Face from Kevin B. Lee on Vimeo.

The Spielberg Oner (Steven Spielberg’s Use of the Long Shot)

Martin Scorsese—The Art of Silence

Michael Bay—What is Bayhem?

David Fincher—And the Other Way is Wrong

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Fun Stuff

For a complete list, see the American Film Institute’s “100 Quotes, 100 Movies.”

Beth Hill, “What Is Theme,” The Editor’s Blog, October 24, 2010.

Noelle Buffam, “Top 10 Central Themes in Film,” The Script Lab, April 1, 2011.

Adam Popescu, “Steven Spielberg on Storytelling’s Power to Fight Hate,” New York Times, online edition, December 18, 2018.

For “a definitive recap of [Inception’s] spiraling plot, as well as a list of answers to questions the movie doesn’t quite answer directly,” see Sam Adams, “Everything You Wanted to Know About ‘Inception,’” Salon, July 19, 2010.

For an analysis of the ending of Inception see Mike Reyes, “Inception Ending: Is It All Just A Dream?” Cinemablend.com.

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Sidebar: Narrative and Perspective in Vantage Point (2008) and Rashomon (1950)

Critical reaction to Vantage Point (2008), a pedestrian Hollywood thriller, was lukewarm. One reviewer describes the film as “a nice, straightforward, good old-fashioned geopolitical conspiracy thriller with no pretentions.”¹ It was Vantage Point’s puzzle-like narrative design however that engaged critics, who variously found it clever, flawed, or gimmicky. The story generates intrigue by retelling a single event—the chaos during an attempt to assassinate a US president—from the multiple vantage points of different characters, each time revealing new details about the conspiracy. The narrative is plainly modeled after Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). This classic Japanese crime drama centers on four witnesses who give biased and contradictory accounts of the rape of a woman and the death of her samurai husband. Kurosawa’s use of multiple interpretations as a plot device has become a narrative convention known as the “Rashomon effect.” Both films use human perspective as a framing device and subtext. In doing so, they also demonstrate how different styles of narration—their structure and point of view—can shape a movie’s meaning.

The narration of the two movies (the process of telling the story) is similar; both center on the diverse viewpoints of characters within the world of the film. The intended effect, however, is noticeably different. The eight differing viewpoints in Vantage Point work to sustain and build suspense by deliberately withholding, and then gradually revealing, pieces of story information, thereby eliciting a question: Will someone figure it all out and thwart the conspirators before it’s too late? Each character’s “vantage point” is really a matter of spatial location (we see exactly what they see). Because it is not a subjective rendering based on assorted motivations, the effect is to shape the narration as being objective and reliable. In Rashomon however, the four differing testimonies—told in flashbacks—are influenced by self-interest and are factual only to the extent that they represent what each witness takes to have happened. The story’s aim then, is not to expose the truth, but to raise questions about human subjectivity, perception, and memory in order to question the possibility of truth.

An equally important difference between the two movies has to do with the narrator—the “voice” telling the story, whether a character in the story, an agent outside the story, or from the story itself. The narrator has a range and depth of knowledge and invests the story with a certain attitude or point of view that shapes the way the story is told—what is or is not disclosed about characters, actions, and events.

In both movies, the narration is controlled by a voice outside the world of the film—namely, the filmmaker. The difference lies in the mode of narration. Vantage Point employs an omniscient narrator, who ultimately knows more than any or all of the characters. The way the story elements are arranged makes it clear that the storyteller is privy to every significant detail. This becomes most evident at the movie’s climax when the filmmakers actually “abandon the vantage-point experiment, shift to an impersonal view, and finish the story in a conventional way,” film critic David Denby notes. “Like so many other thrillers, this one ends in a series of car crashes and shootouts.”² Vantage Point takes the audience on a suspenseful ride, strategically disclosing information along the way so that in the end viewers find satisfaction in knowing the whole truth about the conspiracy.

Rashomon makes use of an unreliable narrator—an untrustworthy storyteller—that in effect calls into question the truth of the story being told. The conflicting testimonies are all plausible; instead of solving the crime, the ambiguous ending leaves viewers to wonder which, if any, of the accounts is the “real” one. In this way, Rashomon actually delivers “five versions of the same anecdote because the most important belongs to the filmmaker,” as New York Times critic Manohla Dargis points out.³ Moreover, the filmmaker’s choice to leave the mystery unsettled points to a meaning that transcends and comments on the voices of characters within the world of the film.

Neither movie arguably denies that the truth of the pivotal event is verifiable. Vantage Point finally unmasks the conspiracy and “one simple truth emerges: murderous Arab extremists won’t escape US intelligence forces, not even in a high-speed car-chase down narrow side-streets lined with café tables,” a Time Out London critic notes with some derision.⁴ By withholding definite knowledge about the crime, the narrator of Rashomon shifts the focus of the film’s meaning from whodunit to a kind of philosophical inquiry into the perplexity of the human understanding in the quest for truth itself. Viewers are left wondering how to interpret the story and have to think about their own point of view. For that reason, Dargis faulted Vantage Point as “a vague attempt to explore questions of narrative and subjectivity (like Rashomon) through the box-office-friendly form of a thriller (like the Bourne flicks).”⁵

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1. Amy Biancolli, “Vantage Point,” Houston Chronicle, February 22, 2008.

2. David Denby, “Taking Action,” New Yorker, March 3, 2008.

3. Manohla Dargis, “One Assassination Attempt, a Multitude of Perspectives,” New York Times, February 22, 2008.

4. Trevor Johnston, “Vantage Point,” Time Out London, March 3, 2008.

5. Dargis, “One Assassination Attempt.”

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