English 356
The Art of Film 1, with Dr. Magee, was an interesting experience for me. One of my roommates actually took the class the previous semester, and my other roommates and I watched all the movies on the syllabus with him. Fortunately, this made it a little easier to analyze the movies when I watched them a second time because the syllabus didn’t change a lot, which is understandable, for the semester when I took the course. Unfortunately, this made it a little unexciting but apparently most of my classmates had also already seen all of the movies, just from being interested in film. Some of my favorite movies were on the syllabus though, and for the honors portion of the course we got to watch a film of our choosing. Like most other movies we watched, we had to choose a scene in the film to analyze, by picking a film technique and it’s effect in the film. We presented this to the rest of the class and we also wrote a final paper about a film topic of our choosing. Some of my favorite movies are thrillers, so I talked about angles in crime thrillers. I rewatched Zodiac, Fight Club, and Nightcrawler for this paper, all really intriguing films. I discuss the key elements of crime thrillers, what makes them so captivating, and how different camera angles in these films create tension between different characters and suspense in the audience.
This class was pretty difficult for me, because the techniques were a little tough to recognize in the films and I had a hard time analyzing things like camera angles and lighting. I did get better at it though, and now when I watch movies I’ll get a little excited when I recognize an interesting technique or shot.
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