1. Jenny Strand
How to analyse a film.
There are many ways to analyse a film. Genre analysis and auteur theory being the most
common. An auteur is a director who has come up with the entire story by themselves
therefore is the principal creator of the film and more than likely they will be breaking
traditional conventions. For example an auteur director could put two film genres
together.Why? Well most directors do this more to create an artistic statement rather than
for the money side of things. Quentin Tarantino did this with Pulp Fiction (1993) and has
gone on to do it in his other films. At first he didn’t make much of an income but now of
course he’s extremely well known for the way he works and is successful with it.Unlike
auteur theory, conventional genre films are usually very similar and could even have the
same plot but just with little tweaks and different actors and actresses. Genre analysis is very
ideologically traditional in that it consists of seven main key areas. These being: Codes and
conventions, setting, character, themes, narrative, iconography and ideological message.
Codes and conventions mean what the director has done in the film in way of setting,
characteristics, audio and script to put it in a category. For example, a romance would
traditionally have a man and woman as the main characters, it would be quite cheery and
would have light hearted music in the background whereas say in a horror we would expect
the mise en scene to contain dark scenes with quite gloomy music and the setting would be
in quite a deserted location.Ideological message means something that represents something
that people are well aware of. For example, in Skyfall, (Sam Mendes, 2012) the ideological
message there is of UK military dominance. The themes of films are of traditional ones:
Horror, romance, thriller, action, comedy and fantasy. They tend to stick within the box and
make it very conventional and sometimes quite expected, not in a good or bad way.
In order to analyse a film’s genre, you need to take note on a select few things: the mise en
scene, the sound used and the editing side of the film. For example if you were watching a
film that had a lot of fast pace edits then this would indicate that the film was of an action
film as action films are quite fast paced. It’s the opposite with horror movies, because of the
genre; the shots will be slow and drag on a bit to build up suspense and the music would be
of quite a taunting nature trying to make the audience feel scared. In a comedy there would
be a mixture of slow and fast shots to add humour to things and the mise en scene would be
quite regular and/or exaggerated.
For example, with Quantum of Solace, you know it’s going to be an action film as James
Bond films are well known for being action and crime. In the opening titles and scenes, for
anyone who’s yet to know what the genre is, it soon becomes clear to them as straight away
we see women being shown in a provocative and desirable way as they always are in Bond
films, and then it goes straight on to a car chase in an exotic place (Quantum of Solace was
filmed in six countries)they’re represented in a very specific way. This is shown through fast
low and high angle shots. To me this made the film more exciting. These are two factors that
will catch the audience’s attention straight away. The first thing you think of when you hear
James Bond is cars, women and guns. You’ll find in most films women are represented in a
very particular way, they’ll be objectified as being quite weak and having to be saved. For an

2. Jenny Strand
example in a horror, you’ll most likely see a woman struggling and in the end it’ll be a
character of the male gender that helps/saves her. They’re portrayed as victims quite often.
A film of a quite similar genre to Quantum of Solace is Leon: The Professional. Leon is a
1994 English language written and directed by Luc Besson. Based in Italy, Leon is the main
character who works for a man called Tony. Tony instructs Leon who to kill and then Tony
pays him. Leon is very much on his own in Italy when one day he comes across a young girl
called Mathilda Lando(Natalie Portman), smoking with a black eye. The story then starts
with her dysfunctional family. Her dad is involved in illegal things such as stashing drugs in
their home for corrupt DEA agents. After they find out some of the drugs are missing, they
kill all of them however at this time Mathilda is out shopping. She comes back as the men
are still there and Leon takes her into his apartment pretending she is his daughter. From
this point on Mathilda stays with Leon. They go into a hotel and end up working together.
Mathilda is taught how to fight and together they kill people and get the money. In the end
Mathilda goes to kill the man who killed her family and Leon goes to stop her which results
in an explosive ending.
At the start of Leon, it’s very much the same as Quantum of solace in the way the film starts
out with action straight away yet the main characters couldn’t be more different. It’s
surprising that as the main character, Leon doesn’t have the usual look. He’s quite strange
looking and not the stereotypical hero type of good looking and a sense of power.
Quantum of Solace and Leon are both similar storylines; the two main characters (Bond and
Leon) are both basically paid killers. However their lifestyles couldn’t be more different,
Leon is quite scruffy in that he dresses extremely casual and looking at him you’d never
think he has the skills he does, however Bond dresses in expensive suits and drives an Aston
Marten. He’s surrounded by women whereas Leon isn’t really surrounded by anybody. In
Quantum of Solace the representation of women is sometimes questionable. Women are
objectified and you usually find this is a lot of action films like that; the way women are
characterized is often as victims who are helpless and they’re always very glamorous and
often shown partly clothed, with close up shots of their bodies. It’s just what the audience
expects; it also adds an appeal to the majority of the audience, which are males.
Luc Besson can be classed as an auteur director as in Leon he cast Natalie Portman as Mat
Hilda and by making her a sort of love interest with Leon, it caused controversy and it
hasn’t really been done before. Therefore he created something really new and caused a bit
of a wave in the film industry. Personally I found it quite peculiar but it is interesting. As
many of the audience found. He does it in a clever way in that it’s obvious but he doesn’t
actually indicate that there’s a love interest there, the audience just picks that up. I’m not
aware of any other films that are set out the way Leon is and I like that, throughout the film
you never actually knew what was going to happen between them. The opinion on this film
was split down the middle by critics but Luc Besson did something write as the film won
two awards and was nominated for two; won an award for best foreign language by Czech
Lion and best sound editing by Golden Reel award.

3. Jenny Strand
One of my favourite films that broke tradition is Apocalypse Now (1979). A war film
directed by Francis Ford Coppola, it doesn’t follow tradition with war and make out like
soldiers are heroes and that’s that. It shows that innocent people do get harmed in war and
shows the truth of it. For me, this is the first film I’m aware of that has really done that and I
think because of the year that it was released, people never really went outside of the
guidelines when portraying war so I think it was a really clever and eye opening thing to do.
There’s a scene where we see soldiers dropping bombs where extremely young children are
and I think that would have made a huge impact on people as it’s not something that’s nice
to see and it is quite upsetting and makes you question things. Usually that type of thing is
well hidden from the public. It has a really strong political message.