Once you begin to look closely at editing, you will notice a great deal as to how film and television stitch together narratives and grab our attention. Many contemporary popular films continue the continuity approach to editing but also incorporate moments of discontinuity. Consider the degree to which particular film’s you’ve seen follow the Hollywood formula (establishing shot, eyeline matches, etc.) or break from it. Note a few cuts or transitions that come to mind in recent movies you’ve seen. How or why were these significant (or invisible)? How do such sequences help shape the experience of time, emotion, character, action?

You will likely note a few points in common between the Shohat & Stam and Stam and Spence essays, as both call for other modes of analysis and critique that are not simply concerned with representations, but consider a range of mediations, discourses, and voices. To begin, address how some particular ethnic or cultural “others” are typically presented in classical films (from 1900 to 1965) or beyond, and, more significantly, what messages are conveyed with such stereotypes—good or bad. What are the problems with “positive images” of minorities? With a few of these bullet points above images in mind, note how The Battle of Algiers and/or other films we’ve seen so far, frame certain discourses about race, ethnicity, gender, etc., and how the viewer may be “positioned” in relation to the characters on screen.