Film has properties that set it apart from painting, sculpture, novels, and plays. It is also, in its most popular and powerful form, a storytelling medium that shares many elements with the short story and the novel. And since film

presents its stories in dramatic form, it has even more in common with the stage play: Both plays and movies act out or dramatize, show rather than tell, what happens.

Unlike the novel, short story, or play, however, film is not handy to study; it cannot be effectively frozen on the printed page. The novel and short story are relatively easy to study because they are written to be read. The stage play is slightly more difficult to study because it is written to be performed. But plays are printed, and because they rely heavily on the spoken word, imaginative readers can conjure up at least a pale imitation of the experience they might have been watching a performance on stage.

However, this cannot be said of the screenplay, for a film depends greatly on visual and other no visual elements that are not easily expressed in writing. The screenplay requires so much” filling in” by our imagination that we cannot really approximate the experience of a film by reading a screenplay, and reading a screenplay is worthwhile only if we have already seen the film. Thus, most screenplays are published not to read but rather to be remembered.

Still, film should not be ignored because studying it requires extra effort. And the fact that we do not generally “read” films does not mean we should ignore the principles of literary or dramatic analysis when we see a film. Literature and films do share many elements and communicate many things in similar ways. Perceptive film analysis rests on the principles used in literary analysis, and if we apply what we have learned in the study of literature to our analysis of films, we will be far ahead of those who do not. Therefore, before we turn to the unique elements of film, we need to look into the elements that film shares with any good story.

Dividing film into its various elements for analysis is a somewhat artificial process, for the elements of any art form never exist in isolation, It is impossible, for example, to isolate plot from character: Events influence people, and people influence events; the two are always closely interwoven in any fictional, dramatic, or cinematic work. Nevertheless, the analytical method uses such a fragmenting technique for ease and convenience. But it does so with the assumption that we can study these elements in isolation without losing sight of their interdependence or their relationship to the whole.