Scene Analysis Paper

The scene analysis paper should be 1000 to 1200 words long (roughly four pages). Aside from the goals of clarity, coherent organization and so forth that apply to every paper, this paper asks you to describe a scene from a film in a way that a) demonstrates a facility with analyzing film as film, including descriptions of film-specific techniques, and b) uses details from the chosen scene as a way to say something about the film as a whole. I encourage you to draw on the assigned readings for this paper, and you are welcome to supplement those readings with additional research.

If you have trouble choosing a scene, I suggest looking for one that you find productively weird. If there’s no weirdness, there may not be much to write about, as in, this movie is a love story, and in this scene, the characters declare their love for each other, and therefore, the scene reinforces the themes of love in the movie. The argument is correct, presumably, but boring! It needs some productive weirdness.

The productive weirdness of a scene can be obvious (it’s a romantic comedy set in the 1970s, but this one scene has living dinosaurs, with no explanation!) or subtle (why does this scene of a detective story have tennis equipment in the background?). Either way, the weirdness can help you show your reader that there’s something worth working to explain.

The following three "circles" describe the levels at which the paper can work; the best scene analyses will combine all three kinds of analysis. (I mean the circles to be a helpful way of organizing your thinking for the paper. They should not appear explicitly in the paper itself.)

Center circle: the specific elements of one scene.

Example: "The lighting of the boarding house scene starts with the page of Thatcher's manuscript fading into the white of the snow."

This circle will supply most of the evidence your paper cites. Details from your chosen scene will populate the body paragraphs, certainly, but they can also work to add specificity to your introduction or conclusion.

What is a scene? It may be helpful to think of an analogy to live theater, where scene breaks are often clearer than in films: basically, when all the actors leave the stage, the scene ends. (Sometimes, the lights also go down for a minute so that the scenery can change. The scenery constitutes a scene, right?) In films, similarly, a change of characters and/or location marks a change of scene. If you have any doubts about your working definition of “scene” for the paper, it’s fine to check with me.

Second circle: the context of your chosen elements in the work.

Example: "The boarding house scene is lighted environmentally, creating a 'natural' effect unlike the obviously artificial directional lighting of the rest of the film."

This circle may not require its own section, but dropping in details that situate your scene in the film as a whole can help your reader bridge the gap between your smallest details and your largest claims about the whole film.

Outer circle: the consequences of your point for the work as a whole.

Example: "Even though the presence of an abusive father seems to complicate Kane's nostalgia for an innocent childhood, the lighting of the boarding house scene reinforces the 'naturalness' of childhood that feeds our sympathy for his nostalgia."

Your introduction and conclusion can do a lot of the work of moving your paper into this circle, where the paper explains to its reader why paying attention to details of a scene will result in some kind of new understanding of the film. This circle allows you to move beyond the most straightforward explanations-a scene uses dark colors to represent evil, and so does the film, for example-to showing something a little unusual that your analysis brings out in the film.

The paper should use Chicago style for its footnotes and bibliography. It will be graded on a conventional letter grade scale, and you will have the opportunity to revise it for a higher grade in the final portfolio.

For formatting the papers, the following elements are helpful to me as a reader:

• Basic heading information: your name, my name, and the course (English 120)
• A title
• Double-spaced text

Other decisions--the font, whether to use a title page, and so forth--are up to you. If you have any questions about formatting, feel free to ask in class or pop me an email.