Intro to Film 2025 • Professor Gregory Zinman • Emory University

Category: Reader

  • Reframing Mulholland Drive as Art Cinema

    SLIGHT SPOILER WARNING

    Reading Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” framed Mulholland Drive for me as something less like a mystery that “should” resolve and more like a work that uses narration itself as its central problem. Bordwell’s description of art cinema highlights how it departs from classical Hollywood storytelling by loosening clear cause and effect, foregrounding style and authorial choice, and inviting the viewer to participate in interpretation rather than simply follow a chain of motivated events. 

    Bordwell’s framework is especially helpful because he describes art cinema as organized around two broad principles: a pull toward realism (psychological complexity, everyday detail, the sense of lived experience) and authorial expressivity (a visible shaping intelligence that can be felt through patterning, symbolism, and deliberate narrative uncertainty). Mulholland Drive constantly oscillates between those principles. On one hand, the film offers “realist” textures, like the awkward industry networking, auditions, and the humiliating vulnerability of wanting to be seen as talented and desirable. On the other hand, Lynch repeatedly interrupts anything that looks like stable plot momentum with sequences that feel like authorial punctuation marks, moments that insist on mood, dread, or formal play more than explanation.

    A good example is how the early portion of the film initially resembles a classical setup: Betty arrives in Los Angeles with an optimistic goal, Rita has amnesia and needs help, and the structure suggests that investigation will restore identity and produce narrative clarity. But Lynch keeps inserting events that do not sit comfortably as steps in a single causal chain. The hitman’s botched assassination plays like dark slapstick, the Cowboy appears as a kind of cryptic herald, and the diner sequence at Winkie’s feels like a self-contained nightmare. If we try to force classical psychological causation onto these moments, they resist it: they carry emotional and thematic weight, but they do not function like clean “clues” in a detective story. Bordwell notes that art cinema often replaces tight causal logic with gaps, digressions, and a more episodic chain of incidents, where motivation can be partial or retrospective. 

    This is where Bordwell’s vocabulary of motivation becomes useful. In classical narration, we tend to assume that everything is motivated in a legible way, usually by character goals and causal logic. Art cinema, as Bordwell describes it, is willing to shift motivation onto other grounds: realism (life is messy), authorial patterning (recurring images, symmetrical scenes), or even uncertainty itself as a guiding principle. Mulholland Drive makes us feel that shift most strongly through repetition and doubling. Names, roles, and relationships fold over each other. Scenes echo earlier scenes with altered emotional meaning, as if the film is less interested in “what happened” than in how desire, guilt, and fantasy can reorganize the same material. Instead of a straight line, the movie feels like a set of refrains.

    Club Silencio is the scene that most explicitly announces this art-cinema contract. The performance insists on emotional truth while simultaneously telling us that the band is not real, that sound and spectacle are produced, that what moves us can be fabrication. Bordwell argues that art cinema often makes authorship palpable, allowing style and narration to comment on themselves and on our habits of spectatorship. Club Silencio does that in a way that feels almost like a thesis statement: the film is warning us not to treat representation as transparent, and it is preparing us for the major narrative rupture that follows.

    That rupture, the shift into Diane’s reality, is where Bordwell’s emphasis on ambiguity becomes the key term. Bordwell describes ambiguity as a dominant principle in art cinema, where the viewer is encouraged to weigh competing explanations rather than receive definitive closure. After the blue box sequence, the film does not neatly label what came before as dream, fantasy, alternate reality, or subjective distortion. Instead, it forces the viewer to move backward and reinterpret. Betty becomes Diane, vitality curdles into resentment, romance becomes exploitation and pain, and earlier images begin to read like displaced wish-fulfillment. This is not simply “confusing for the sake of confusing.” It is a structured reorientation that makes interpretation part of the experience of the film, which is exactly what Bordwell identifies as central to art cinema’s mode of practice. 

  • Understanding Continuity Editing

    The Film Art’s content on continuity editing emphasized my viewing of All that Heaven Allows as more than a melodrama but also as a film built through seamless and meticulous editing – almost invisible. The book’s chapter 6 specially emphasizes Hollywood concentrates their traditional editing means in maintaining spatial clarity across axis of action, using eyeline matches, and shot-reverse-shot patterns to anchor the viewer within that fictional world. To that end, Sirk’s movie is a great example of a film grounded in visual logic. 

    My overall impression of the movie and its editing was that Sirk uses continuity editing to preserve spatial and logical continuity but he uses the mise en scene and camera distance to create a contrast between freedom and confinement. This can be evidenced when comparing the framing of scenes inside Cary’s house ( full of mirrors, glass, rigid lines, feels claustrophobic) and Ron’s mill (openness and natural flow). 

    Chapter 6 also talks about graphic matches and rhythmic editing which Sirk uses for both clarity and emotional pacing (as tension builds up). The cutting rhythm in Ron’s scenes are slow and patient while they are noticeably tighter, more abrupt and faster paced when it comes to Cary’s scenes with her children specially. Match-on-action cuts ensure that Cary’s emotional journey remains smooth. 

    Richard Brody’s point that melodrama “risks laughter at the moments of greatest passion” finally made sense: continuity editing is what keeps those potentially “too much” moments sincere. It stabilizes melodrama so that emotional intensity reads as real rather than ridiculous. Laura Mulvey’s “dialectic between high art and trash” is literally visible: continuity gives the film its classical control, while the heightened emotions push it toward excess. 


    This week’s movie + reading reminded me of Challengers. Guadagnino’s film about a love triangle between three professional tennis players also relies on continuity editing principles. The axis of action is incredibly important in the match scenes. But what’s interesting is that Challengers often deliberately test the boundaries of continuity—using whip-pans, extreme close-ups, and rhythmic cutting to accelerate tension—whereas All That Heaven Allows uses continuity to smooth emotion.

  • Do The Right Thing

    Ive only ever had one exposure to Spike Lee, and it was from my dad who worked on set with him and said he was horrible to him- so of course ive never watched any of his stuff and have to mention that whenever someone bring him up now. I have thought about watching Do the Right Thing for the same reason as everyone else, it has 4.4 stars on letterboxed. However, based on the reading this week I feel like I already have seen the whole film. They broke down the scenes and talked about the unique style of the film that helps make it so popular today. Specifically the notion that, “Lee weaves his many stories into a whole.” This seems to be a key definer of this movie, whether on letterboxed or the reading – people are praising how Lee was able to put so many ideas together into one and make it work. Along with this the reading goes on to praise the community within the film, and says that despite there being so many characters to focus on – Lee did a great job of using a formal narrative structure on each one. This reading is a praise of how Spike Lee was able to balance multiple characters and their stories and weave them all into one to create a fluid story about community and life within their neighborhood while also battling conflicts. It goes on to compliment Spikes ability to stay on the 180 degree line and utilize continuity editing despite the switch in focuses. The film is seemingly revered very highly as the reading talks about the flow in and out of traditional narrative structure by mentioning how Spike, despite having 8 main characters, was able to give each a conflict and goal as if it was just 1 character. Then talks about how Spike fades out of narrative structure by not giving all 8 of the main characters “clear cut” goals that bring them to a conflict. I believe based off this reading that the because Spike deviates from the norm, the film is what it is and is so well received, he has created something that people were not used to seeing, it was unique. By doing that, this movie has remained something that people all these years later still are shocked if you have not seen it because of its lasting relevance. Spike Lee, despite being rude to my dad, seemed to have a vision and it is one I can appreciate as he utilizes these aspects of film making to produce a movie that navigates complex themes while using complex film and narrative structures, which is (unfortunately, always got to side with my dad) very very impressive.

  • How Style Shapes Tension

    This week’s reading on Do the Right Thing made me think a lot about how filmmakers use form to create meaning, especially when the story contains dozens of characters and a constantly shifting flow of small moments. Spike Lee builds a film that looks loose on the surface, but the chapter shows how carefully he organizes it through restricted narration, recurring visual and sonic motifs, and a flexible continuity system that still keeps us oriented. Those ideas helped me see the film less as chaotic and more as deliberately unified.

    I found the discussion of restricted narration especially interesting. Even though the movie jumps between characters, Lee often limits what we know in a given moment, which builds tension inside the neighborhood. We may understand the community, but we don’t always know where the next spark will come from. That gap mirrors the instability inside the block itself—one heated moment away from exploding.

    The reading also highlights how motifs pull everything together. Mister Señor Love Daddy’s radio presence becomes the neighborhood’s heartbeat, stitching scenes together through sound. Even Mookie repeatedly stepping over the girl’s chalk drawing becomes a small but sharp reminder of how disconnected he feels from the community he lives in.

    To connect this to something I’ve watched recently, I kept thinking about La La Land. It is totally different tonally, but it uses motifs in a similar way—like the recurring musical theme that reappears each time Mia and Sebastian confront a new stage in their relationship. It also blends classical continuity with more stylized moments, just as Lee does. In both films, those choices subtly control how we experience character conflict.

    Overall, this week’s reading pushed me to look past plot and pay more attention to the craft that shapes how stories hit us emotionally.

  • Do the Right Analysis

    This week’s reading from Film Art focused on film criticism and walked us through a sample analysis of a film directed by Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing. What stood out to me during the readings was the mention of the film’s plot disconnecting from traditional storytelling and classical usage. Instead of having clear, cause-and-effect action or movement that pushes the plot forward in a traditional way, the film steps outside of that structure. At the same time, it still taps into certain elements of American cinema, just in its own style and on its own terms. This approach allows the film to feel both familiar and completely original, creating space for the social and emotional weight of the story to take priority over a strict narrative.

    Do the Right Thing' Review: Movie (1989)

    Throughout the film, Lee makes an effort to incorporate and seamlessly show the connections among several sequences that hold their own stories and lead back to the central theme of respecting the community. In the beginning of the film, there is a brief introduction of the man on the radio, which establishes the setting of the town and ultimately binds together the relationships presented. Lee’s ability to utilize setting helps hold the characters and their actions together. With the radio man speaking about the heat wave currently affecting the residents of the neighborhood, there is space for the feeling of irritability and tension that leads to the climax later in the film. Lee is also able to detach slightly from traditional filmmaking and touch on elements of experimental film in the way he stitches these scenes together. This creates a rhythm that mirrors real life, where smaller moments slowly build toward larger conflicts, making the film feel grounded, intentional, and socially aware.

    In addition, the reading also discusses Lee’s choice to incorporate various camera positions to evoke emotion throughout different scenes. For example, it highlights his use of high angles and the shot of a man walking over a child’s drawing, which helps convey a sense of self-absorption within the narrative. This further underscores his reliance on classical usage.

  • “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” and “The Hangover”

    David Bordwell’s “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” defines art cinema as a distinct mode that rejects classical Hollywood conventions of linear storytelling, defined cause and effect, and psychological clarity. Rather, it emphasizes realism, authorial expressivity, and ambiguity. Bordwell writes about how art films often feature psychologically complex characters, loosely structured narratives, and situations that don’t come to complete resolution. He argues that art cinema films, while more complex, actually present a more realistic version of reality by incorporating the deep complexities and problems left unsolved that frequently occur in real life.

    A film I watched recently is The Hangover (2009), and while the movie is definitely a mainstream Hollywood comedy, it’s interesting to think about how the film adapts specific techniques from the art cinema style. Bordwell writes, “Just as the Hollywood silent cinema borrowed avant-garde devices but as-
    similated them to narrative ends, so recent American filmmaking has appropriated art-film devices”, talking about how mainstream Hollywood films incorporate elements of art cinema. He goes on to list specific examples such as the open ending of Five Easy Pieces (1970) or the “psychological ambiguity” of The Conversation (1974).

    The structure of The Hangover disrupts the typical cause-effect style of classical narrative cinema. All the events of the story are told out of order to keep the mystery of what happened that night alive, and the viewer is subject to extreme restricted narration. The film opens on the day of the wedding, near the end of the actual story, when the groomsmen call the bride to admit they lost the Doug (the groom). From there, the story cuts to two days previous to that as the boys are shown embarking on Doug’s bachelor party. Finally, the film cuts from the beginning of the night right to the chaotic morning after the party, where Doug is missing and no one can remember a thing from the night before.

    This non-linear structure immediately places the audience in a state of confusion and curiosity, mirroring the characters’ own disorientation. Similar to the art cinema Bordwell describes, the film asks viewers to piece together what happened through fragments of memory, visual clues, and subjective perspectives.

  • Reality, Performance, and Ambiguity in Holy Motors and Parasite

    This week’s readings both explore what defines art cinema. Bordwell describes art cinema through realism, authorial expressivity, and ambiguity. Unlike classical Hollywood films, which follow clear cause-and-effect logic, art films leave uncertainty and interpretation to the audience. Frodon’s interview with Carax shows how these ideas of art film are embodied in Holy Motors, where everyday life itself becomes a performance.

    In Holy Motors, Monsieur Oscar travels through Paris, performing multiple identities, such as a beggar, a father, and a killer. Although there are no visible cameras or audiences watching him, he continues to perform and act. This reflects authorial expressivity, as Carax blurs the line between art and life. The stretch limousine that Oscar rides represents the realism of modern alienation as it looks luxurious on the outside but feels empty inside. It reflects how technology connects people, yet simultaneously isolates them. The ending, where machines speak, creates ambiguity. Audiences are confused about whether they are watching life or just another performance as Carax blurs the line between human and machine. Human Oscar performs like a machine the entire day, and now the machine has started to talk like a human being. 

    Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite also embodied the art cinema mode. Its realism is grounded in the vivid contrast between the wealthy home and the semibasement house. Bong’s authorial expressivity is evident through symbolic motifs such as stairs and rain. The vertical movement of the stairs represents the class hierarchy in the film. The rain reveals the stark reality of how the experience of rain can change significantly depending on one’s social status. Finally, the ambiguous ending, whether the son ever rescues his father, reveals life’s uncertainty rather than a happy ending or resolution.

    These are questions we can think about:

    1. If life itself becomes a performance, can we ever distinguish between authenticity and acting?
    2. Does the director’s control over ambiguity make the film more honest or more artificial?

  • Art Cinema Today: Enemy

    When figuring out what I wanted to write about for this week’s blog post, I noticed many were interpreting the reading from this week in a modern context. To add on to that trend, in a perfect way to talk about a very underrated movie, I would like to emphasize the artistic efforts from Enemy (2013, Denis Villeneuve).

    According to David Bordwell, the author behind the Art Cinema Essay, some of the aspects that make up art cinema, contrary to a standard Hollywood movie, are key stylistic inputs that don’t exist in the overdone Hollywood blockbuster. Even though Bordwell’s argument was released in 1979, this notion still holds up to this day. With sequels and big name brand movies dominating Hollywood, it is a treat for audiences to find a movie nowadays that tries something unique or different. Enemy is one of those movies that does exactly that, and unfortunately did not translate to the box office.

    First off, Bordwell notes in his essay that artistic films often include morally ambiguous, confused characters that progress throughout the film. The protagonist of Enemy, Adam/Anthony Bell, is a man who is discovering his morality throughout the entirety of the film. The basis for the plot of this movie is that Adam is fighting against an “enemy” version of himself. He interprets his life as he is fighting against a clone, however in reality, it is just himself in a different conscious. The longer the movie goes on and the more that Adam finds about his other self, the more that his morals develop from the blank slate that he is in the beginning of the film.

    Secondly, an art film must explore philosophical or social themes that tell the audience something about the human condition. At its simplest form, this movie is about a man who finds an enemy version of himself. However, this movie covers interesting themes of marriage and responsibility in a very interesting way: a massive spider. All throughout this movie, Villeneuve continues to cut to scenes of a massive spider towering over the city that Adam lives in. In no casual Hollywood movie would this occur as it confuses the audience. On my first watch of Enemy, I had absolutely zero idea what the spider the size of a skyscraper meant towards the plot of the movie, or even why the characters weren’t discussing this plot point. In reality, the spider represents the main character’s fear of commitment to his marriage and is an encapsulation of the feeling of being trapped by his wife. Adam simply can’t stop himself from giving into lust and the spider getting larger and larger over the city is representation of that.

    One last aspect of Enemy that I appreciate very much is the open-endedness of the ending. Bordwell highlights the importance of a film with unanswered questions at the end. Now, if Enemy is known for one thing, it might be its confusing ending. After Adam has successfully defeated his other self and everything seems to fit for a perfect, happy ending, the movie simply ends with Adam staring at a massive tarantula spider in his bed room that jumps away from him. For viewers expecting a simple ending that a typical Hollywood picture would deliver, this ending makes absolutely no sense and calls for open discussion and speculation as to the meaning of what the comically large spider in the bedroom represents. A clear indication of the artistic value that Denis Villeneuve put into this movie.

    Overall, Enemy is a very underrated movie that didn’t do too well at the box office, most likely because of the very artistic and metaphorical decisions that Villeneuve added to the movie. To me, this movie perfectly fits the art film that Bordwell talks about in his essay. However, an artistic movie doesn’t always have to fail at the box office and in popularity. Are there any ways to imbue artistic filmmaking according to Bordwell into a movie while still making it digestible to the average watcher? or is that impossible because it is meant to be viewed by someone with an appreciate of the art of filmmaking?

  • Ambiguity and Realism in Art Cinema

    Leos Carax is a French filmmaker who is known for Holy Motors. Carax’s film can be considered an “art cinema.” According to Bordwell, “art cinema” is a distinct type of film that is based on realism and authorial expressivity (which is defined as “recurrent violations of the classical norm”). Holy Motors is an art cinema due to its blend of realism and strangeness. The character of Mr. Oscar is realistic because he is psychologically complex, which is Bordwell’s definition of character realism. In the interview, Leos Carax commented on his movie and apologized for being vague in his response to a question from the interviewer. Carax explained that he created a science-fiction world where Mr. Oscar’s job is to show the “experience of living in the now.” He aimed to depict real life, which is already strange and complex, and, in his opinion, no “flashbacks or playing with the narrative” were needed. He preferred real-life ambiguity. Carax described the film as his “most unconscious” film, born as an image rather than a plot or a logical cause-and-effect reasoning. The events and motivations of the characters remained open-ended and not fully explained; they were intentionally left ambiguous (vague). The realism of the film does not rely on a well-defined plot, but rather on the movement of physical objects – human bodies, machines, and animals. Carax was also unconventional in his approach to shooting the movie: the film was made without reviewing daily footage, and Carax placed himself in front of the camera.

    I recently watched the film Ready or Not (2019), a horror-comedy film. In the film, the characters are constantly using violence in a game-like way for unclear reasons. The main character, Grace, just got married to Alex and is suddenly asked by her new family to draw a card to play a game on her wedding night. Grace, then, is being hunted down (to be killed) by her in-laws after pulling the card to play hide and seek. As viewers, we are stuck throughout the film, wondering why all of this had to happen.

    Later, we find out that this is a ritual that the family does every time someone marries into the family. The family believes that they have to kill Grace, or they will die because of a curse that runs in the family. Up until the end of the film, we do not know why the curse exists, and if it is even real or made up. This makes viewers question the sanity of the family as they do not seem to care enough if they shoot each other, and they are trying to kill Grace (a new member of the family who has done them no wrong) without remorse. Even at the end of the film, there is still not much clarity; it is very ambiguous as to why the family was cursed, how the curse works, and why Grace pulling the card to play hide and seek meant she had to die. There is no closure given to the viewers or to Grace.

    Question to consider:

    How does ambiguity change the way we interpret a film?

  • “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” and Wicked

    In this week’s reading, David Bordwell’s essay “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” analyzes the art cinema as a mode of film practice rather than a genre, meaning it’s defined by a set of formal and narrative techniques rather than thematic content. This greatly differs from traditional Hollywood films, in which characters have a clear-cut goal with a straightforward plot, while Art Cinema has looser plots with complex and ambiguous protagonists in a “realer” way.

    A recent movie I watched was “Wicked”, which although in fact is a Hollywood blockbuster, there are certain aspects that can resonate with Borwell’s Art Cinema. In Bordwell’s essay, he says that art cinema prioritizes psychological depth over straightforward plot, exploring the inner thoughts of its characters. InWicked, the story delves deep into Elphaba’s motivations and moral struggles, rather than just a linear good-versus-evil plot. Bordwell also highlights narrative ambiguity in art cinema, where events are open to interpretation and outcomes are not fully resolved. Although the actual movie is pretty straightforward, when combined with the context of the original story, many interpretations and nuances begin to show. We see the familiar world from Elphaba’s perspective and begin questioning what was actually real. Finally, Bordwell says that the protagonist in art cinema is often complex and morally ambivalent. Elphaba fits this model perfectly, as she subverts traditional heroic and villainous roles, making the audience question what it means to be “good” or “evil.”

    Although some connections can be drawn between the essay and “Wicked,” there are many points where the movie is different from Art Cinema and is instead a traditional Hollywood blockbuster. For example, although Elphaba is complex and morally ambiguous, she still has a strong goal and drives the plot forward. Additionally, although the movie has very human characters with human thoughts, the movie is still very fantastical and nothing like the “naturalistic setting” and realistic points in the essay. The plot is very structured and has a pretty distinct beginning, middle, and end, even if the context of the original story gives the movie a complex story structure. In conclusion, Wicked is more like a mainstream musical movie with some art cinema elements, rather than an actual example of art cinema.