Dr. Abigail Cheever:
Most students come to UR with a pretty good English background, even if they didn't take a class here at UR. They probably did some English in high school, so they have a good idea of what it means to sit down with a novel or sit with a poem and try to work out what's going on.
You can't do the same thing with film, or rather you can do some of the same things, but you can't do only that kind of a reading. You have to spend your time talking about precisely those kinds of visual elements of the story that come across visually through the images that are unfolding in front of you. So anything that ignores the fact that the story is primarily told visually rather than narratively is going to be a problem.
I think [that] frequently in the Introduction to Film Studies I get a lot of papers early on in the semester in which students don't really know what they're doing, and they shouldn't, because they've never taken a film-studies class before. And so they just write it as if [the film] were a novel talking about the dialogue, talking about the characters, talking about the plot, but never thinking about how the visual elements of the frame also work to tell that story. That's why I always have the opportunity for them to do a rewrite (laughs) in that first paper because I think this is a skill you need to learn over time
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