Just a quick post to report on a modification I adopted based on Nicholas Rombes' excellent ongoing 10/40/70 series. Here's Rombes on the rules:
This column is an experiment in writing about film: what if, instead of freely choosing which parts of the film to address, I select three different, arbitrary time codes (in this case and for future columns, the 10-minute, 40-minute, and 70-minute mark), freeze the frames, and use that as a guide to writing about the film, keeping the commentary as close to possible to the frames themselves? No compromise: the film must be stopped at these time codes. Constraint as a form of freedom.
Now, since time immemorial, I've had film students do shot descriptions and analyses as their first writing assignment. Ordinarily, I select a two- to three-minute section of Casablanca and ask them to account for individual shots' lengths, cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène [mit out sound]. Then I ask them to write a few paragraphs about one of those aspects, how it works in the sequence, why the filmmakers might have chosen to do whatever they did, and its relationship to the film as a whole.
I usually change up the sequence each semester so as to thwart Greek organizations' banked papers/my own short attention span. This time I showed them instead [essentially] minutes 10, 40, 70. It made for much more cogent analyses. So, yay.
