What do you consider the "content" of a fim? Its issue or its narration? Do you want to make a narrative analysis or a textual one, the text of a film consists of all signs within it, not just of the plot. I suggest to have a look at an textbook such as "Film Art" by Bordwell/Thompson

@ Clause Tieber· Thank U

You could apply content analysis for the script but when it comes to the visualized narrative or the visual in general you should use different tools. You might try Caldwell (2005): Film Analysis Handbook: Essential Guide to Understanding, Analysing and writing on Film.Sydney.

Another approach is offered by Gillian Rose (2001): Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Interpreting Visual Materials, second edition, Sage. A book that really helps to understandvisual media.

The book from Rose is really good but it's more an introduction than a guidline for analyzing film. Hower, I think it would be a perfect starting point for getting into touch with different methodologies.

and by the way: there is a 3rd Edition out (2012)

We're doing research on this at Centre for Moving Image Research at UWE in the UK. We have a project to automate and extend Barry Salt's seminal Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis. We are looking at types of shot, shot length etc. Of course, interpretation of results will be the issue. We are re-examining the relationship between assertive interpretation as evinced in the majority of film theory (which has very little 'evidence' to back it up, relying on 'theoretic era' interpretations of the world) and obective/subjective physiological analysis. Of course 'Scientific Method' is as suspect as original methods developed in a pre-digital age. But our stance is to develop 'Domain Theory' of subject areas so that we have a more gestalt examination and investigation of subject areas. It's time to move a step ahead in this study.

ASL (average shot length) methodologies such as Salt's (whose work I admire and use, incidentally) are useful for seeing overall patternation, but they're a kind of 'scientific' instrument that stands very much alone in terms of quantitative data generating tools for the task at hand. Such seemingly evidential methods really produce just a sketch of the film rather than provide a means of analysing content if content analysis is anything more than description and observation of broad patterns. Salt's grasp of history and context is much deeper than the ASL model taken in isolation suggests, and that is the real value of what he does. I wouldn't get hung up on the ideal that content analysis can be driven by that kind of data generating observational instrumentation, though. We had a student here at UCD some years ago that proposed a very different model that tried to reconcile the blunt end of ASL with the parsing of time as spatial and narrative 'content' in shots relative to the overall running time of the film as a time-experience. It produced very different graphs from Salt's, although the conclusions ultimately really reinforced basic concepts of narrative and screen narration. Unfortunately the student, who was a professional cinematographer, and also explored lenses, optics, and time as part of his research, hasn't taken it any further yet. I wish he would. Anyway, as such more broadly 'theoretical' or cognitive analytical models are still the most effective ways to substantiate any kind of close reading of the film text, certainly the most rich and revealing in terms of building a meaningful argument. You can find a good set of critical writing tools in Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide to Writing About Films and good examples of good writing in the Norton Anthology of Film Criticism. 

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Dear Jodie,

you can employ the techniques of Critical Discourse Analysis ,  take a look at my articles on this topic please.

good luck with our research

a.

I do have the same question.

Essential Guide to Understanding, Analysing and writing on Film