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Chapter-1-Looking-at-Movies

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8/24/09

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Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you should be able to
✔ appreciate the difference between passively watching movies and actively looking at movies. ✔ understand the defining characteristics that distinguish movies from other forms of art.
✔ understand how and why most of the formal mechanisms of a movie remain invisible to casual viewers.
✔ understand the relationship between viewers’ expectations and filmmakers’ decisions about the form and style of their movies.
✔ explain how shared belief systems contribute to hidden movie meaning.
✔ explain the difference between implicit and explicit meaning, and understand how the different levels of movie meaning contribute to interpretive analysis.

medium. With so much experience, no one could blame you for wondering why you need a course or this book to tell you how to look at movies.
After all, you might say, “It’s just a movie.” For most of us most of the time, movies are a break from our daily obligations—a form of escape, entertainment, and pleasure. Motion pictures had been popular for fifty years before even most filmmakers, much less scholars, considered movies worthy of serious study. But motion pictures are much more than entertainment. The movies we see shape the way we view the world around us and our place in that world. What’s more, a close analysis of any particular movie can tell us a great deal about the artist, society, or industry that created it.
Surely any art form with that kind of influence and insight is worth understanding on the deepest possible level.

✔ understand the differences between formal analysis and the types of analysis that explore the relationship between culture and the movies.
✔ begin looking at movies more analytically and perceptively.

Looking at Movies
In just

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