MARKING MOVIES

Movies are about communication. What matters is how they "speak" to the audience.

All the rules we teach beginners are just guidelines about what has been proven to work. Occasionally someone comes along, ignores some of the rules but still blows us away with their movie. To me that means we are dealing with an art, not a science. I firmly believe judging is a personal response to the films you see. A good judge will suppress his or her prejudices and try to be open to all the styles and themes they are shown, but in the long run it is how the film impacted them that matters.

Every so often someone comes up with a "scientific" approach to marking films.

Their intention is to make the process more ordered and consistent, and to smooth out individual prejudices. It is also often intended to make the task of judges, and competition officers, easier.

Such schemes usually involve a form of score-sheet. The elements of a movie, technical and artistic, are listed and judges asked to give a score for each item. At the end a total score for the movie is found by adding these up.

For me this goes against the grain of my belief that the end result is what counts, not the component parts.

I do think there is a place for such systems when you are in a learning situation. Applied to a club exercise, for example, it is a way of indicating the areas of film craft which need more attention. But for top-level competitions I think they miss the point. Very often they come up with the same results as any other approach but they can go wrong. For example there are lots of technically excellent but tedious movies which would be marked too high and a few superb movies that have lots of technical faults which would be marked too low.

Numbers

Such schemes appear to fall under the spell of NUMBER. The thinking goes: mathematics is an exact science and it uses numbers. We use numbers, therefore our approach is an exact science.

Duh! If I list all the restaurants in town, add up their phone numbers and divide by the number of restaurants, will I get the average restaurant phone number? Would that work? No, because sometimes numbers are just labels, not counts of items.

In score sheets the numbers are labels. When you say "editing 90%" that does not mean there are 100 units of "editing value" and this has 90 of them. It is saying "excellent".

The risk is that it is ever-so-tempting to add up or to average numbers. You would not try that with labels. "Excellent" + "average" + fair" = ??? what.

What happens if there are three judges. How do we know that his "average" is the same as mine or hers? It does not matter so long as we all rank the films in the same order, but if we take different views … how do we compare? Using verbal labels reminds us to be careful. Using numbers appears to be exact and tempts us to stray into foolishness.

- Dave Watterson (expressing a purely personal viewpoint)