Watching On Purpose
An opening note
I started The Long Take as a way to stay intellectually tethered to my undergraduate training in film theory without pretending that a five-star rating or a 140-character reaction can carry the weight of sustained analysis. Letterboxd is great for logging, ranking, and venting. This space exists for slowing down: for thinking through how films actually work, and for writing at a length that allows ideas to develop rather than collapse into a quip.
What follows is a brief introduction to film analysis and one framework I find especially useful for approaching movies with intention.
What Film Analysis Is (and Isn’t)
Film analysis is not criticism in the evaluative sense. Declaring a film “good” or “bad” offers a verdict, but it rarely explains how a film produces meaning or emotion. Nor is analysis simply a reflectionist exercise – reading films only as mirrors of social attitudes or historical moments.
Instead, film analysis asks how cinema functions as an art form. It breaks a film into its constituent elements and examines how those elements interact to shape narrative comprehension, emotional response, and interpretation. The goal is not to decode culture at large, but to understand how moving images and sounds are organized to create experience.
Film Style as a System
At the center of analysis is film style: the patterned and salient use of cinematic techniques such as cinematography, sound, editing, performance, and mise-en-scène. These techniques are not isolated. They operate as part of a system (what film theorists often describe as “film form”) in which each element gains meaning through its relationship to others.
Style, in this sense, is purposeful. Films are engineered to produce reactions. The question is not whether style is doing work, but what kind of work it is doing.
The Five Functions of Film Style
One productive way to approach style is by asking what function a given stylistic choice serves. While these functions often overlap, distinguishing them helps clarify how films guide viewers.
1. Narrative Function
Stylistic choices frequently exist to convey story information. Camera placement, color, sound, and editing orient us in space and time, establish character relationships, and clarify causal connections. When style performs a narrative function effectively, it tends to disappear into comprehension. Simply put, we understand without being explicitly told.
2. Affective Function
Style also operates at the level of emotion. Visual and auditory cues shape how we are meant to feel in a given moment, often before we consciously register why. Lighting, rhythm, silence, and performance work together to cue tension, intimacy, grief, or relief. This is not emotional manipulation so much as emotional guidance.
3. Thematic Function
In some cases, stylistic patterns point beyond immediate story or feeling toward abstract ideas. Repeated images, sounds, or visual contrasts can articulate themes without relying on dialogue or exposition. Meaning emerges cumulatively, through recognition and comparison across the film.
4. Aesthetic Function
Not all style exists to serve narrative, emotion, or theme. Some patterns draw attention to themselves for the pleasure of form alone. Symmetry, repetition, bold color palettes, or highly controlled compositions may function primarily as aesthetic experiences, inviting viewers to notice design and craft.
5. Realist Function
Finally, style can work to approximate everyday perception. Long takes, deep focus, and unobtrusive camera movement can create a sense of continuous time and shared space, encouraging immersion rather than stylization. Even realism, however, is constructed and is worth analyzing as such.
Why This Framework Matters
Thinking in terms of function shifts analysis away from judgment and toward explanation. Instead of asking whether a stylistic choice is excessive, subtle, or “necessary,” we ask what it does and whether it does that work effectively within the film as a whole.
Movies are not accidents. They are composed of choices, repeated and varied across time, stitched together into coherent systems. Film analysis is simply the practice of watching closely enough to see those systems at work.