In the habitual setting of non-specialist students of English, there is no way a teacher can build competencies related to reading a novel, for example, with its various themes, echoes, instances of structural irony and all the devices that a writer will use to create meaning. Because you cannot maintain attention over several months on a basis of a couple of hours a week, focusing on one subject.

But film-writing —when the work is rich enough, complex enough, does provide opportunity for studying literary-type techniques in a much shorter time.

The plot, first and foremost, sequence by sequence, in its linearity (or non-linearity) can be examined in detail, giving students a chance to describe scenes, with character interaction, camera movements, from details to general organisation, and finally meaning.

Then we have the themes (e.g., Christ in Blade Runner), which the teacher can identify and offer as food for the intelligence of the students, for them to track the major threads throughout the movie and bring out their respective contribution to meaning.

Another, little exploited target for investigation is cultural depth. All films are more or less the product of a certain civilisation, a given moment in a given society, so that details are never accidental, but refer to specific knowledge, shared by all in the culture that produced this work of art, and thereby create additional meaning.

So that just by studying one film you actually research with your learners three major fields of the target culture: narrative language, literary creation and cultural significance. Plus, you create opportunity for students to produce complex commentaries in the target language. Of course the principle is not to spend two hours watching a film, but to select at the beginning of a study one key sequence which the whole class will work on. This collectively implements strategies that the students will then transfer to pair work, each group designing its own contribution based on one chosen sequence or theme.