speak and write critically about a few of the most important American documentaries; critically evaluate documentary films

Scene Analysis essay instruction

The purpose of this assignment is to help you achieve the following course learning goals:

  • speak and write critically about a few of the most important American documentaries;
  • critically evaluate documentary films;
  • articulate the historical and social forces out of which filmmakers have created documentaries and upon which the films comment.

Understanding a documentary film requires not only a comprehension of its overall themes, techniques, and ideology, but how each element contributes to the whole. As a way of practicing your analytic skills on a smaller (but no less important) scale, you will choose and critically Analyze one scene from Academy Award winner Michael Moore’s film, Where to Invade Next (2015).

You can find this film in YouTube. Or if you can find other place to watch will be fine, just make sure you will need to watch the entire film at least once (it is about 120 minutes long) and your chosen scene several times to notice different aspects of the scene and to take good notes.

In your analysis of about 900 words (no fewer than 800, no more than 1000, according to the word count tool in Microsoft Word), respond, in the form of a thesis-driven essay (not individual answers and not necessarily in this order), to the following questions:

  1. Each scene of a documentary film is like a paragraph in a written paper: it presents one main idea that helps support the main idea or argument of the entire film. What is the main idea or purpose of your chosen scene? How do you know?
  2. What sights and sounds does Moore present in the scene? How do they convey the main idea of the scene?
  3. What filmmaking techniques (camera movement, focus, narration, music and other sound, mise-en-scène, etc.?) do you notice, and how do they contribute (or fail to contribute) to the overall film?

I will be looking for analysis of specific elements of your chosen scene, connected to how those elements contribute to the scene’s purpose.  Consider things like camera angles, lighting, editing of shots, and sound.

What is a scene?  In A Short Guide to Writing about Film*, Timothy J. Corrigan defines a scene this way: “A space within which a narrative action takes place; it is composed of one or more shots.”  Wikipedia defines a scene as “a part of the action in a single location.”  A scene is sometimes harder to identify in a documentary than in a feature (fictional) film because the structure is typically not a “story” in the way we are used to in feature films, but the idea is essentially the same.  Sometimes it is clear when a film shifts from one scene to another, such as when a cut takes us to a totally different time and place in the film.  At other times, however, what constitutes a scene is less clear and becomes a matter of judgment.  In a documentary film, which is built around ideas, a shift from one idea or point to another might constitute a scene change.

*If you want support for writing about film, I recommend this text: Corrigan, Timothy. A Short Guide to Writing about Film, 8th ed. Pearson, 2012.

Consider your reader (your audience) to be a smart person who has seen the film but is not an expert on it.  You do not need to describe everything in the scene. Instead, say just enough about the scene so your reader knows which scene you are discussing. 

The rest of your paper should be analysis, not description. 

You should mention the title of the film in your opening paragraph so your reader knows which film you are discussing.

You can read two good examples of scene analyseshere


 . Notice how the authors tie specific, formal elements of the scene to the meaning that they help convey.

Your paper must be a Microsoft Word document and must follow MLA style.

You do not need a Works Cited page because you need not cite external sources.  This is an analytical essay, not a research paper.