Go Shove Your Analysis Where The Sun Don't Shine

As a film student I often have to watch a movie from a critical standpoint and analyze many aspects of it. I have to analyze the lighting, the mood, the sound, the costuming, the writing, etc., etc. A great deal of the time I have to take these observations and try to infer what the director was thinking when he made various decisions throughout the movie.

I am beginning to think that this is a load of bull.

Like, I love movies and I love literature, and I realize that an important part of the analysis is looking for themes and emotions within the words and pictures. But did anyone ever think (even for a minute) that maybe the director/author didn't intend for there to be any themes or anything like that when they were creating the final product? When I write, I just write from the heart and every once in awhile a "theme" breaks through that I didn't intend to create. Did anyone ever think that maybe the author meant something else and enough people believed the opposite to sway the rest of humanity?

I know if I wrote a book, I wouldn't be aware of any of these things...which is why I would make a lousy author. Someone would come up to me with a question like "I loved the use of the eye to represent an immortality of the spirit. Was this written because of something blissful you experienced or because of an underlying pain in your right leg?" and I would have to look at them (like a dummy) and be like "No, I was just writing about the time I had pink eye and missed the school dance."

I guess I'm frustrated because of an incident in cinematography class today. We are learning about what creates the 'visual style' of the movie, and watched like 5 movie clips and tried to infer what the director was thinking when he/she made decisions related to set design, costumes, lighting, etc. Some of the stuff people were coming out with, in my mind, was nothing more than verbal diarrhea. Is it not possible to create something without someone else taking an ax to it and telling you that "the use of beige in this scene ties in the with the theme of isolation related to the longing of the soul."

It probably doesn't help that this semester I got stuck in the same section as a know-it-all who doesn't know when to keep his bloody mouth shut. As one of my friends said, it's like he's taken a few film coures here and there and now thinks he can teach it. Hey buddy...we're in film school (note the strong emphasis on the world school.) We're all here to learn, and if you think you know it all to a point where you don't shut the heck up, please get lost, you're wasting valuable space.

Oh to be a movie virgin again...I just wish I could go back to the days when I watched a movie and left happy, without thinking about the decisions that went into each frame of production, because, I now see, it's just way too complex, and a great deal of the time, way too stupid.