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.
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