Film Reviewing Lessons by Ebert

Roger Ebert reviews Triumph of the Will, the Nazi propagandist film considered by many to be a masterpiece, and in the process gives us some advice on how to study movies.

That's the approach I long used in the "shot-by-shot" film analysis sessions that I conducted annually for more than 30 years at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado, and also for many assorted years at the Hawaii, Virginia, and other festivals, and in classes at the University of Chicago. I recommend the approach to any film enthusiast. The film teaches itself to you.

I began in about 1970, on the advice of John West, a Chicago film exhibitor, teacher and historian. "You know how coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to go through game films?" he asked. "Do the same thing with a feature movie. You don't stop after every frame, of course, but you stop at anything interesting, and discuss it, and you can back up and look at it a frame at a time."

This I did, to begin with, during U of C classes. The rules were simple: Anyone in the audience shouted out "Stop!" and we did, and discussed why they wanted us to stop. Beginning with Hitchcock, who remains the most fruitful director for such analysis, I worked my way over the years through the work of Welles, Bunuel, Bergman, Herzog, Truffaut and many others. I found that with a large group, there would always be one member with the expertise to settle the question at hand: A Hungarian speaker, for example, or a psychiatrist, or a specialist on Japanese medieval history. The Colorado groups often numbered 1,000 students and locals, and over the years we formed a community.

Of course the introduction of the laserdisc, and later the DVD, made this process infinitely easier.