Writing an interpretive analysis of a documentary
Expanding upon the work you did for Reading Response 8:Crafting an Interpretive Lens, please write an interpretive analysis of the documentary you’ve chosen, incorporating ideas from the lens text you’ve chosen (i.e., from Davila, Ahmed, Bastien, or Smith). Your analysis should be at least 300 words, and ideally not longer than 600 words.
The documentary: In designing your analysis, I think you’ll find that it’s easier to focus on analyzing one aspect of the documentary you’ve chosen, rather than the whole entire thing — a scene, a character, a stylistic choice, a representational choice, etc. For example, you might focus on a socio-cultural issue raised by the documentary and a particular scene or character that exemplifies the documentary’s argument about this issue. Or, you might think about an aspect of the documentary’s style that seems particularly interesting to you, and look at one or two scenes/moments where this stylistic choice becomes important.
Your readers: Imagine that you’re writing for readers who are familiar with the documentary you’ve watched, and familiar with the concept of interpretive analysis. Describing the whole documentary is not necessary, but describing the scene(s), moment(s), or image(s) central to your analysis will help jog your readers’ memory, and help your readers follow your train of thought. You also don’t need to tell/signal to your readers that you’re doing an interpretive analysis — just do it.
Your interpretive lens: In defining/designing your interpretive lens, think about how you can describe the project of your lens text in a way that’s fair to its original context and that helps your readers to understand its applicability to your own analysis. Pick at least 2-3 quotes from your lens text — these might be individual key words, or sentences/phrases that explain key ideas. Try to borrow and/or extendconcepts from your lens text to help you analyze your documentary.
An outline for your analysis might look something like this:
1) A brief (1-3 sentence) descriptive introduction to the thing you think is interesting/worth analyzing in the documentary
2) A brief (2-3 sentence) introduction to your interpretive lens — describing the project of your lens text in a way that emphasizes the concept that will help you do your interpretive analysis
3) Your analysis of the documentary