Logo A Sharper Focus Essays on Film by Norman Holland
Essays on Film by Norman Holland

A site devoted to increasing your intellectual enjoyment of movies.

I think of films as works of art, and I believe that we best enjoy works of art by appreciating how all the different elements come together to form an artistic whole. The notes of a symphony, the riffs of jazz, brush strokes, the metaphors of a poem, the key moments in a novel, or the shots and plots and scenes and camera angles of a movie—we can understand them as fitting together around a focus. After we’ve seen a movie, if we ask, What was the point?, that was the point, the focus around which we can understand all the different elements of a film forming a work of art that makes sense to us as humans.