Is There a “Right” Way to Read a Movie?

The art of film analysis and critique is something that people enjoy to varying degrees. You can love movies without necessarily feeling the urge to pick them apart, scene-by-scene, frame-by-frame, but at the same time, some people might feel as though this is a move that helps to strengthen their love of the film and the medium in general. It’s subjective, and there’s no right way to enjoy a film when it comes to reading it.

However, if you do decide to dig deep into its meaning and themes, is there a right and wrong way to read it? Is there only one conclusion that you should come to or maybe even a single way that you could come to that conclusion?

No Immediate Answers

Even those who do enjoy discussing and analyzing a piece of art in depth might prefer to do so differently. For some people, immediately launching into such a discussion as soon as the credits start rolling might be the right way to go about it – with the knowledge and connotations fresh in their memory. However, that’s just not how some people operate, for other people, the experience needs to stew with them and find connections throughout their own life to form meaning. Days later, you might find yourself watching something else entirely, or even engaging in something barely related, like taking a walk or playing casino games, and realize a point of resonance between what stuck with you and what you now find yourself thinking. 

The Visual Language

If you find yourself in a discussion about what a film was trying to say with someone, and you notice your conversational partner insisting on points that were all conveyed through dialogue and even non-verbal communication, there might be a component of the discourse missing. That in itself is a perfectly valid way to read a film, but it’s important to remember that movies are works of visual art, with attention and care put into the framing of any given shot, and how the sound design works concerning the composition. 

These aspects of the movie might be slightly less easy to immediately come to terms with regarding their meaning, but they could also provide more room for interpretation. 

Death of the Author

This is a concept that you might have heard about concerning books. It refers to the question of legitimacy that statements made by the author hold when they’re made outside of the original text itself. The actual answer is, as you might expect, subjective, and how you want to interpret a piece of fiction is really within your power, but the same is true of movies. Sometimes, directors, writers or actors might give their perspective of events that quickly becomes known as the definitive explanation, and yet this doesn’t have to be true. While it might feel strange to believe something different to the ‘official’ version, movies are works of art, and your interpretation is formed by the unique ways in which you interact with it.