Analyzing Moving Images: A “Salon-Style” Approach

By Jonathan Mackris, Film and Media

Teaching Effectiveness Award Essay, 2026  

Students entering my film courses usually have some familiarity with analyzing written texts. Analyzing moving images is a different story. All of them are able to follow films and understand their plots. Yet many of them struggle to articulate how they know—their experience of moving images is so intuitive that they haven’t had to think about how they work. My task as an instructor is to create assignments that train two related skills: (1) their judgement as critical analysts of film style, identifying where choices are made and how they affect the meaning of the work; and (2) their ability to express these judgements in detailed writing.

Over my years at Berkeley, I have developed what I call a “salon-style” approach to teaching film. Each class is structured around a series of clips that we view and discuss together, evaluating and comparing their formal techniques. As I worked to perfect this style, I started to notice a problem: while students would typically take notes on my lectures, they were not taking notes on the clips. As I thought about it, it made sense why. Many of us are used to viewing films as passive experiences—for some, it might feel unnatural to take notes while watching. I wanted to come up with a way to incentivize students to become active viewers. Moreover, I wanted to push them to practice applying the vocabulary from lecture to what we watched in class, in order to build these analytical skills more proactively.

To do this, I developed a handout ahead of my summer 2025 course. The organization was simple: the handout listed each clip I planned to screen that day in class, with space underneath each title to take notes. I distributed these sheets at the start of each class and collected them at the end. I told the students that the handouts would be graded for completion—as long as they took some notes during class, they would receive credit. When reviewing their notes, I would leave small comments in the margins, making small corrections to misapplied key terms or encouraging them to try to add more detail. While I felt I couldn’t “grade” the notes, I wanted to offer some pointers to make them as effective as possible. I knew some students might have mixed feelings about this requirement at first, but I hoped they would see the benefits when it came time to write.

The first major assignment in this course was an exam designed to test their analytical skills. I screened a clip that shared certain formal techniques with ones we watched in lecture in order to see whether students could recognize and describe these techniques on their own. While grading, I was glad to see the volume of detail they brought to their writing. There was a noticeable increase in the quality of their observation relative to what I was accustomed to seeing in my previous classes. Students who regularly attended lecture succeeded at describing how these techniques worked in a new context. The following week, I ran an anonymous poll inquiring as to what my students found effective about the course when preparing for the exam. In that poll, I asked whether they found the notes helpful for their learning. I was relieved to see that the vast majority of them—81% of the 23 respondents—found it helpful. In the comments, several students further expressed that while they originally felt some trepidation about taking notes on films, they came to realize its utility for their writing. As the class progressed, I continued to see my students’ writing progress, growing more sophisticated and specific. Since then, I’ve continued to use this handout in my classes, and students have continued to respond positively.