Compositional Interpretation

The Open University's Open Arts Archive hosts a broad range of material on the fine arts; it has an especially good collection of podcasts from Open University Study Days on various topics related to fine art.  Several of these use compositional interpretation.

You might like to take a look at clips from the various films that the chapter mentions; you can find them here:

Ocean's Eleven

Heat

The Player

The Incredible Hulk

The film historian and theorist David Bordwell has a blog with Kristin Thompson here.

Summary of Monaco's descriptive vocabulary

James Monaco's schema for analysing the composition of film images is narrated in his book How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (Monaco 2009).  Here is a summary of his terms.

The mise-en-scène can be understood in terms of its:

• frame:
  • screen ratio.
  • screen frame: open or closed.
  • screen planes: frame plane, geographical plane and depth plane.
  • multiple images.
  • superimpositions.
• shots:
  • shot distance: extreme long shot, long shot, full, three-quarters, medium, head and shoulders, close-up shot.
  • shot focus: deep or shallow, sharp or soft.
  • shot angle: angle of approach, angle of elevation, angle of roll.
  • point of view: character, third person, establishing, reverse angle.
  • pans, tilts, zooms and rolls, when the camera remains in one position.
  • tracking and crane shots, when the camera itself moves.

The montage of a moving image can be described with reference to its:

• cuts:
• type of cut: unmarked, fade, dissolve, iris, jump. The Open University's iTunesU podcasts 'The Final Cut' have an editor discussing how cuts work. You can access iTunesU via the iTunes Store – it's on the main menu list.
• rhythm. 

The sounds of moving images can be described by considering their:

• type: music, environmental sound, speech.
• relation to the image: source, parallel, contrapuntal.