Why doesn't film come up more?

[tpmorrison]

For as long as I’ve been playing quiz bowl (and especially these days), I have never understood why film comes up as infrequently as it does. A standard collegiate tournament will usually have around 3/3 or 4/4 film in it; ACF Nationals had about this many in the 20 or so packets I heard. Both of these strike me as far too low.

Broadly speaking (and in no particular order), it seems to me that there are three main criteria that should inform how often a subject comes up in the quiz bowl distribution:

1. Is the subject popular in academia? For instance, is it a common undergraduate major or a popular area for electives, and does it have graduate departments?
2. Outside of school, is this a subject that “intellectually curious” people often choose to engage with seriously? This is vaguely defined, of course, but is hopefully clear from the standard litmus tests used in quiz bowl for such things.
3. Does the subject lend itself well to quiz bowl questions? For instance, is there a large space of possible answers and answer types? Is there a high clue density per answer? Is it relatively easy for writers to research and find clues about the subject, and for interested players to learn more about it?

I think film checks all these boxes. I have no real data for the first point (nor do I find it the most compelling), so I’ll just say that most universities have film majors, and anecdotal evidence suggests to me that film electives are fairly popular for non-majors.

I am more interested in the last two points. With the rise of streaming and platforms like the Criterion Channel, it is quite common for a humanities-inclined person to also be interested in film; I would wager that film is by far the most popular of the other fine arts categories both within and outside of the quiz bowl community. Indeed, despite a near-zero bang for buck in terms of scoring points, quiz bowl has a fairly large contingent of film enthusiasts already.

I also think film is among the best categories with regard to the practical considerations of question writing. Even at current canon standards, I would guess that roughly a third of the films in this list could be tossed up at ACF Nationals, plus many others not listed, whereas the number for (say) operas is around an order of magnitude less. That’s not even counting tossups on a director, an actor, a country, or a common link (the same sorts of creative tossup conceits that are so popular in the lit distribution work equally well for film, I think). At the clue level, a single film has ample clues — ranging from plot and dialogue, to visual and auditory elements, to information about its creation or reception or influence — to avoid bumping into stale overuse even for very famous films.

My preference would be for film to be 0.5/0.5, but at the least I think it should be upped from the status quo. The obvious question in discussions like this is what gets cut to accommodate such a change. Assuming the norm of 20/20, there are two options: expand fine arts beyond 3/3, or trim elsewhere within the preexisting 3/3. I prefer the former, though the resulting changes would be much more seismic. Assuming the latter, then, I would propose moving architecture and/or photography into VFA. But I make no claim to having the “right” answer here and would be interested to hear other thoughts.

[Cheynem]

I don't particularly have specific thoughts about film in the distribution, but I did have some thoughts on a couple points related to what Tim said (very good and interesting post, by the way).

First, I would also say that for the *most part* writing film questions is a reasonably easy task. Putting aside the fact that many films can be viewed legally or illegally on the Internet, films also tend to have fairly extensive Wikipedia or IMDB pages that, while sometimes factually dubious, can at least suggest potential clues or link to better sources (as opposed to some literary or historical topics, which on Wikipedia, clearly have been written by some individual using one musty old textbook). At the very least, a lot of films have highlights easily watchable on YouTube or choice lines of dialogue transcribed somewhere. So it's pretty easy to have the information to write a film question, especially when compared to writing tossups on other works of art or even a lot of literature.

However, secondly, I would also say that all this knowledge and exposure to film can make it difficult to determine what are good academic avenues for film and what's just material rewarding "general knowledge." This is especially tricky at times because as Tim indicates, many quizbowlers have pretty strong knowledge of film. Older quizbowl tended to respond to this by pushing the "foreign film" and "older film" buttons repeatedly; modern quizbowl frequently takes a more broader tack, although it can sometimes result in the same sort of art/indie darling films repeatedly asked about. My general take in writing a film question intended to be an "arts" question is to ask "Is this the type of film one just be exposed to through common filmwatching?" Any film can be the object of academic study, but to use an obvious example, unless a tossup really took an academic lens, a question on "Star Wars" (the film series) would be inappropriate as an academic question. However, questions on films originally intended for popular consumption but are unlikely to be experienced by simply casual film watchers now are fair game (something like, say, the films of Alfred Hitchcock or Taxi Driver).

Finally, I have three specific points/questions:

1. I really wish NAQT would allow for some sort of "art film" topic in its distribution, at the very least in college tournaments, instead of having all film be categorized as popular culture.

2. I totally agree with Tim that there are many different avenues to write film questions, and would encourage people to do so--they don't all need to be on the story or dialogue, nor do they all need to be on visuals. Film reception and analysis, although probably tricky to do well, is definitely an undermined avenue for questions.

3. What's interesting to me is that in my experience, overall knowledge of film really jumps from high school playing base to college. I don't know if that's just one of the quirks of a person's knowledge base that expands as they get older, but it's interesting how fairly basic academic film answerlines can get poor conversion in some high school tournaments as opposed to college.

[Krik? Krik?! KRIIIIK!!!]

Great posts. I will say that I was considering putting together a LetterBoxd selection of every movie mentioned at Nats this year. Despite film being relegated to only 4/4, I can think of many examples of film clues coming up across categories - including Hitchcock's ~Stage Fright~, ~The Lunch Box~, and ~Betty Blue~ in Other alone.

But I do sympathize with your point and like the idea of moving some of architecture and photography over to VFA. For instance, the Milan Cathedral TU was already in VFA. Many art history textbooks like my handy-dandy Stokstad spend a lot of time discussing traditional architecture alongside paintings and other sculpture. Similarly, performance art could easily end up in VFA. 24/24 is a lot of room for this stuff.

I'm not quite on board with 0.5 film: that's the entirety of visual OFA right now! But I do support the idea of expanding it. Perhaps it would be wise for ACF to create a formal definition of what is "VFA" versus "AFA" versus "OFA."

[Adventure Temple Trail]

With apologies to Capt. Picard, my main reaction reading this is: Make it so! There's no reason in principle why the next set you (the general you) put together can't make room for more film.

In general, when it comes to distributional tinkering, I think it'd be cool to see more people Just Go For It. I think people are excessively afraid of innovating, in part because specialists tend to howl with rage when their subject area is cut. The best way to end-run around this is probably to use a distribution of 21/21 or 22/22 (or more...?), using the extra space to expand out the thing you want to expand out. This should come alongside a stricter length cap on each question (~6 line cap at 3-dot difficulty or below, ~7 line cap at higher difficulties) and frequent use of brief "Yaphe-style" easy parts.

It might also make sense to relax category purity norms a bit to allow a bit more content about film adaptations into the Literature distribution, especially for works that are primarily or especially famous for a film version (Amadeus and The Leopard come to mind right away). A clue that says "A <year> film adaptation of this <novel/story/play> <added/cut> a scene in which..." could be quite fruitful and doesn't, in my mind anyway, violate the spirit of encouraging people to learn more about academically significant things.

[theMoMA]

Any such proposal would involve writing a lot more film questions. I'd want people to consider, when writing a particular film tossup, whether it's fair to compare the clues and answer you're using to the kind of knowledge that's being tested for in a tossup on a sculpture or architect or photographer or whatever other marginal "fine arts" question you would be replacing. Many film topics clearly are; for instance, there's an "eating your vegetables" quality to watching many classic or foreign films that suggests in the watcher a certain spirit of contemplative interest in film as an artistic medium. But a plot-heavy question on a popular mainstream or indie movie of fairly recent vintage strikes me as more likely to reward people for their entertainment choices than for engaging with "art" as such.

Clearly reading books, going to art museums, or learning about sculptors and architects and photographers is entertaining, on some level. But I think there's something fundamentally different about sitting down to read a novel or making plans to visit a museum when compared with watching a popular movie. I would not necessarily consider someone who well remembers the plot of, say, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once to have taken an interest in the subject commonly called "art." Similarly, I would not consider the knowledge of the cinematography of films of that sort to be particularly "artsy," much like I wouldn't consider knowing the dialogue of well-written TV shows or films to be the mark of a great and voracious reader of worthwhile literature. My point is that good popular movies are clearly artistic on some level, but that is not the level on which most people engage with them, and it's not the level that the typical question on that film will probe.

Many films are almost certain to be encountered purely as entertainments by the vast majority of people who will play the questions on them. These are films that, in my opinion, people should not presume to write "academic" tossups on unless there's a really interesting and worthwhile reason to do so. (I personally do not find the writing of often clumsy questions on "the cinematography of Star Wars" or whatever to be particularly worthwhile, and such questions are often easy to identify by the fact that a tossup on a more obscure or artsy movie would never use the same kinds of obfuscated clues.)

[Banana Stand]

Many films are almost certain to be encountered purely as entertainments by the vast majority of people who will play the questions on them. These are films that, in my opinion, people should not presume to write "academic" tossups on unless there's a really interesting and worthwhile reason to do so. (I personally do not find the writing of often clumsy questions on "the cinematography of Star Wars" or whatever to be particularly worthwhile, and such questions are often easy to identify by the fact that a tossup on a more obscure or artsy movie would never use the same kinds of obfuscated clues.)

This has always felt like a phantom fear to me. I don’t think a fairly marginal increase to the film distribution is going to lead to an explosion in questions on popcorn flicks, and at the higher levels, the canon is so deep and ripe for expansion (I’m not going down an aseemsdb rabbit hole just yet but there are almost certainly largely influential directors, especially foreign ones, that have maybe come up once in a bonus part or else in one of Will Nediger’s sets) that I don’t share this concern. For Nats 2021, my personal criterion was “did this film enrich my soul in some way?” with some consideration for films that I thought hadn’t seen their day in the sun. I was able to ask about the films that influenced Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, one of the more important films of this century that yes, someone could accidentally stumble upon and watch because the guy from Training Day and Gattaca is on the cover. I was also able to cover such ground as the Romanian New Wave, Kurosawa’s films set in modern Japan, and some of the most beautiful pieces of Iranian cinema in A Moment of Innocence and Close-Up. I wish I could’ve written even more for that set.

I feel like the big fear here is that regular difficulty sets will be inundated with questions on Lady Bird or A24 fare that people might’ve gone to the movies to see or could be seen as entertainment more than a tossup on Pather Panchali, but again I’m not really worried about that and plenty of those films are fine material for tossups anyway. Same goes for tossups on Kubrick or other commercially/critically successful directors that are deeply ingrained in the American consciousness. Yeah, if we start seeing the rabble trying to shoehorn questions on James Gunn’s direction of Guardians of the Galaxy into academic sets, there will be concern, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, I think .2/.2 or whatever is allocated for film in most sets, especially at the higher level, is simply too low.

And I say this as someone who isn’t planning to play a tournament any time soon, so full neutrality. Oh and again Tim, disgusting buzz on the priests tossup that I love, one of the highlights of the tournament for me was knowing that clue was buzzable and someone knew it.

[Gene Harrogate]

Thanks for the excellent post Tim. I'm excited to see its warm reception and look forward to seeing what directions some new sets will take.

I'd like to quickly chime in to expand on your point about films having an ample variety of clues from which to draw. My understanding of quizbowl history is that there was a revolution around 2010-2012 in how film questions were written, focusing on more "painterly" clues that aimed to test engagement with film as art by focusing heavily on scene descriptions and cinematography. That's good, especially if previously questions relied on contextless lists of characters played by Spencer Tracy, or whatever. But I would caution that strictly focusing on the visual aspects of film leaves out a good deal of what appreciators of film as art (and makers of movies) learn, write about, incorporate, etc. If one is comfortable cluing that Joan Miró wanted to assassinate painting, there's no reason quizbowl film clues should exclude a film's history or the history of film more broadly, the contribution of actors, film technology, etc. Similarly, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with plot clues if we accept that screenwriters are engaged in making art too. Like you, I think that a good film distribution will include several types of clues.

Any such proposal would involve writing a lot more film questions. I'd want people to consider, when writing a particular film tossup, whether it's fair to compare the clues and answer you're using to the kind of knowledge that's being tested for in a tossup on a sculpture or architect or photographer or whatever other marginal "fine arts" question you would be replacing. Many film topics clearly are; for instance, there's an "eating your vegetables" quality to watching many classic or foreign films that suggests in the watcher a certain spirit of contemplative interest in film as an artistic medium. But a plot-heavy question on a popular mainstream or indie movie of fairly recent vintage strikes me as more likely to reward people for their entertainment choices than for engaging with "art" as such.

Clearly reading books, going to art museums, or learning about sculptors and architects and photographers is entertaining, on some level. But I think there's something fundamentally different about sitting down to read a novel or making plans to visit a museum when compared with watching a popular movie. I would not necessarily consider someone who well remembers the plot of, say, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once to have taken an interest in the subject commonly called "art." Similarly, I would not consider the knowledge of the cinematography of films of that sort to be particularly "artsy," much like I wouldn't consider knowing the dialogue of well-written TV shows or films to be the mark of a great and voracious reader of worthwhile literature. My point is that good popular movies are clearly artistic on some level, but that is not the level on which most people engage with them, and it's not the level that the typical question on that film will probe.

Many films are almost certain to be encountered purely as entertainments by the vast majority of people who will play the questions on them. These are films that, in my opinion, people should not presume to write "academic" tossups on unless there's a really interesting and worthwhile reason to do so. (I personally do not find the writing of often clumsy questions on "the cinematography of Star Wars" or whatever to be particularly worthwhile, and such questions are often easy to identify by the fact that a tossup on a more obscure or artsy movie would never use the same kinds of obfuscated clues.)

I'm not entirely convinced by the reasoning here. I think neither of us want to see film tossups on The Emoji Movie, but making whether or not a viewer enjoys a film the cutoff for artistic merit is a dangerous attitude, especially given that 1) many people do in fact find old Hollywood and foreign films entertaining; and 2) these movies were more often than not intended as entertainment in their original contexts. I also find the comparisons with novels unhelpful, as novels (like films) have their origins in popular entertainment and continue to fulfill both functions while having a very low barrier to entry on the part of the viewer/reader. I think the best we can do is create film distributions that seek to draw broadly across the "artistic" canon. A small space in these well-balanced subdistribtuons will consist of recent or popular movies, and there will inevitably be judgment calls about which reseasonable people can disagree. But this happens already in other categories such as literature and seems not to have resulted in any disasters.

[Cody]

With apologies to Capt. Picard, my main reaction reading this is: Make it so! There's no reason in principle why the next set you (the general you) put together can't make room for more film.

In general, when it comes to distributional tinkering, I think it'd be cool to see more people Just Go For It. I think people are excessively afraid of innovating, in part because specialists tend to howl with rage when their subject area is cut.

It’s been tried (0.40/0.33), and the headache was not worth it. Granted, it’s a new decade…

The best way to end-run around this is probably to use a distribution of 21/21 or 22/22 (or more...?), using the extra space to expand out the thing you want to expand out. This should come alongside a stricter length cap on each question (~6 line cap at 3-dot difficulty or below, ~7 line cap at higher difficulties) and frequent use of brief "Yaphe-style" easy parts.

For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of this status quo where quizbowl cordons off experiments in 21/21+ sets because it requires writers to do a lot of extra work and staff/players to deal with longer matches and days (even with length caps).

I agree that a strict bonus length cap (including Yaphe-style easy parts) is absolutely essential. Bonuses are huge time killers with extended formats and bonus length is one of the biggest problems with 21/21+ sets. (as of the last time I staffed them, pre-COVID.)

My understanding of quizbowl history is that there was a revolution around 2010-2012 in how film questions were written

2012

[theMoMA]

Responding to Jack, my post was more a caution to write good film questions (especially if more slots become available) than a dire prophecy about the inevitable consequence of writing more film questions. I really do not care for a question that's presented as some kind of bold provocation on the artistic merits of some widely popular movie that just about everyone has seen, which in reality plays out as several lines of extremely hard clues announcing that the answer is something incredibly famous (because otherwise the clues would not sound like this on the sixth line) followed by a condensed tossup on well-known plot points or images from the Indiana Jones series, or whatever. To me, that is not a worthwhile use of the art distribution, and I start to worry that these are the kinds of things people will want to write if there are a bunch more film slots available.

I would sum up this argument as basically: write good questions, and don't think that every tournament needs a tossup on Roger Deakins, or a tossup that tries to shoehorn really famous popular movies using difficult-to-convert "cinematography" or "criticism" clues followed by a speedcheck on a movie everyone saw when they were ten, or a tossup premised on the notion that seeing the latest A24 movie is just as academically "artistic" as knowing facts about the Villa Rotonda or the Belvedere Torso. Certainly there are good and interesting ways to engage with popular media as art, but please just do it well and sparingly, and leave the majority of questions to things that are not edge cases!

Responding to Henry, I think you may have a mistaken impression of the criteria for decision that I'm proposing. Obviously, plenty of people find watching "difficult" movies (or reading novels, or going to museums) to be entertaining pursuits. The last movie I watched was Chantal Akerman's News From Home, even though I couldn't find subtitles, because I thought it was very entertaining to look at long shots of New York in the 70s with unintelligible French voiceovers interjected from time to time. When I watched that movie, however, it was primarily because I wanted to engage with a particular aesthetic and artistic experience in the medium of film, not because I was selecting one from a limited number of mass-market entertainment choices.

I'd venture that experiencing a specific aesthetic and artistic moment via film is the primary motivation for just about anyone to watch that particular Akerman film. Hence, it would be a good film to ask about as art (coincidentally, it did come up at Nationals, presumably in the art distribution). By contrast, I would venture that the primary reason most people watch a mass-market blockbuster or A24-style critically acclaimed indie film, no matter how artistic, is purely for entertainment. Clearly, these films do have some artistic merits, and some people clearly do engage with them as such. But the vast majority of people playing that question are going to be drawing from the sort of experiences that, in just about every other area, quizbowl generally considers to be appropriate for the "pop culture" distribution.

If you think the reason that most people would watch or know about a particular film is because they're engaging with movies as an artistic and aesthetic tradition, then go ahead and ask about it as art. If you think the reason that most people would watch or know about a particular film is because it's an incredibly famous entertainment property or a relatively recent critically acclaimed entertainment option, then consider that you're writing what amounts to a pop culture question for most of your purported audience. I have no problem with writing pop culture questions, obviously, but just call them what they are.

[Cheynem]

This is sort of what Andrew is getting at, but I tend to look at potential film questions on a sliding scale:

1--Films with little or strained academic/artistic engagement that almost everyone has general knowledge of. Your latest MCU film, most Disney films, any movie starring The Rock, etc.

2--Films that have some level of academic/artistic engagement but lots of people have general knowledge of--things like The Godfather, for example.

3--Films that have a strong level of academic/artistic engagement, the overall majority of people probably don't have general knowledge of, but probably most quizbowlers would--This would be like a non-blockbuster winning Best Picture or a Best Foreign Film or an indie film that was a major critical darling. I would put something like Parasite or Lady Bird here.

4--Films with a good level of academic/artistic engagement, that require effort to obtain knowledge of and which most people, including quizbowlers, do not have general knowledge of. Older films, a large chunk of foreign films, independent films, etc. The films that aren't being talked about a lot on social media but people would still probably have heard of.

5--Extremely independent, experimental, hard to access foreign films that almost no one has general knowledge of and which would require a fair amount of work to obtain knowledge of. Things you watch only in film studies courses or foreign film festivals, etc.

I would think everyone in quizbowl would agree that questions on 1 are not appropriate for academic tournaments and questions on 5 are appropriate. We would probably agree that questions on 4 are appropriate and that in general, questions on 2 are inappropriate but there a few exceptions particularly if they take an academic slant. That leaves 3. I think we would likely agree that questions on 3 are fine, but we should strive to avoid things like "everybody writes on the newest critical darling" or "you've written a question on a film that the entire field is likely to have seen."

[theMoMA]

I'm not sure that spectrum is perfectly linear.

In skilled hands, I think a film like The Godfather, or Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark is much more likely to yield a good academic question than something like Lady Bird or Parasite. Things that are incredibly famous (including films) have immense bodies of scholarship (and related art and cultural production) around them, and I'm sure there are ways to write excellent academic questions on these things. (I just don't think it has to happen at every tournament, and I think a lot of the ways that eager but perhaps less thoughtful writers might go about writing on these things could end up being hamfisted and pretty obvious.)

By contrast, I think a tossup on Lady Bird or Parasite would probably be written based on descriptions of those films themselves, because they're probably not famous or old enough to have generated other ways to ask about them; perhaps most relevantly, the mass-media environment after the 1990s is more fractured and doesn't allow films to become all-consumingly famous and to be analyzed as such. Furthermore, we don't really know which of these movies will stand the test of time.

As Mike pointed out, a lot of quizbowlers see these indie darling movies. At a basic level, I just don't think having a bunch of players compete to remember the images or plot of a popular indie film of recent vintage is comparably "academic" to the analogous tossups on sculpture, photography, architecture, etc.

[Cheynem]

You're correct that it isn't linear and it is also somewhat dependent on the difficulty you're shooting for. I think (personally) at regular difficulty and below tournaments, straight tossups on the films in category 3 are perfectly appropriate, whereas at higher difficulty tournaments, I would be be more open to harder academic tossups on films in category 2 because I would expect more of the field to be able to buzz on such clues.

[1.82]

I will say that I was considering putting together a LetterBoxd selection of every movie mentioned at Nats this year.

https://letterboxd.com/naveedic/list/fi ... nationals/

[Dantooine is Big!]

I'm not sure that spectrum is perfectly linear.

In skilled hands, I think a film like The Godfather, or Star Wars, or Raiders of the Lost Ark is much more likely to yield a good academic question than something like Lady Bird or Parasite. Things that are incredibly famous (including films) have immense bodies of scholarship (and related art and cultural production) around them, and I'm sure there are ways to write excellent academic questions on these things. (I just don't think it has to happen at every tournament, and I think a lot of the ways that eager but perhaps less thoughtful writers might go about writing on these things could end up being hamfisted and pretty obvious.)

By contrast, I think a tossup on Lady Bird or Parasite would probably be written based on descriptions of those films themselves, because they're probably not famous or old enough to have generated other ways to ask about them; perhaps most relevantly, the mass-media environment after the 1990s is more fractured and doesn't allow films to become all-consumingly famous and to be analyzed as such. Furthermore, we don't really know which of these movies will stand the test of time.

I was curious if you would also object to / be wary of the way we have, by now, been asking about modern foreign films, such as Yi Yi, that are probably comparable in artistic merit, but much less known worldwide, to Parasite. If you search on Google Scholar, the search term "Edward Yang Yiyi" yields about 5,000 results, and the search terms "Greta Gerwig" and "Lady Bird film" and similar searches get about 1,500 results. I'm not here to argue about the exact delineation, but I would argue (somewhat disingenuously, because I agree with some of the points made about how asking about it mostly results in pop culture questions) Lady Bird is a bad example here because that film and similar ones are, indeed, studied widely in the academy. What about directors such as Kelly Reichardt? Or Chloé Zhao? I think those directors are, indeed, taken quite seriously, and have generated other ways of asking about them (though, perhaps those other ways are too difficult and niche to be used as clues in a reasonable way at most difficulties).

EDIT: Adding the point that if you take "amount of video essays about [insert film]" as a sign of people taking such film seriously artistically, a lot of films you are noting should only be asked about sparingly are taken super seriously. I understand, though, that this does not justify asking about something in and of itself.

[halle]

If you think the reason that most people would watch or know about a particular film is because they're engaging with movies as an artistic and aesthetic tradition, then go ahead and ask about it as art. If you think the reason that most people would watch or know about a particular film is because it's an incredibly famous entertainment property or a relatively recent critically acclaimed entertainment option, then consider that you're writing what amounts to a pop culture question for most of your purported audience. I have no problem with writing pop culture questions, obviously, but just call them what they are.

I generally agree with these guidelines, and I think they’re a safe place to start when it comes to picking film answerlines, but there are a lot of films in the middle ground between these options, mostly movies that are auteur-driven works that have broken into the mainstream (everyone seems to have seen Tár , but what I enjoyed about it was largely the same type of thing that I enjoy about the older or less-popular films I watch) or somewhat older movies that started out as on the higher-brow end of mass media and are now equally engaged with by people trying to understand the history of film as an art form and people whose dads said “oh man, this movie was my favorite in college” and put them on for family movie night (this applies in particular to genre-leaning films like Goodfellas, Alien, and The Thing). Wes Anderson's entire career is in a similarly hard-to-place spot between these two categories--it would be easy for me to think of countless more examples, many of which seem perfectly fine in a film distribution.

Something that really makes a difference here is the kinds of clues that are chosen, and in what order. There are things that someone watching a movie for fun simply would not know, unless they were so interested that they took it upon themselves to go back later and learn more about what they'd watched. These include clues like artistic or otherwise academic sources cited by filmmakers as inspirations, technical details about the filmmaking process, and later art/literature/criticism that fits in the academic distribution that draws from the film. There are also clues that someone watching the film for fun would likely be aware of, but which would stand out much more to someone engaging with the film as a text than just as a story: shots, costuming or set details, and scenes which don't advance the plot much but do have major symbolic significance; some clues about the score or soundtrack; descriptions of innovative visual effects that are evident to the viewer, but that a more casual viewer wouldn't know originated the effect; and so on. Then there are the things that you won't miss if you've seen the film with any degree of attention paid: plot points, including minor ones; character names; symbolic motifs that are handled in more obvious ways or are included in the film's advertising; particularly recognizable cast and crew names. Putting clues from the first two categories I elaborated before clues from the last category, and at times not including any of the last category of clues in power, are pretty solid ways to make sure that the subset of the field that has engaged with these borderline movies as art will convert the tossups before those who watched for entertainment, although ideally those people will still convert by the end as well. To be clear, if a film is watched almost entirely by an audience that is interested in its artistic merit or historical significance, then it's fine to put the third category of clues early in the tossup, provided that the character names or plot points are deep enough cuts. In my set curation thread, I alluded to making a case for less fundamental/unquestionably academic answerlines' inclusion; this kind of careful clue selection is a large part of what I meant by making a case. If you approach the film as a text or artwork while sourcing your clues, and you're able to find good clues while treating it like that, you're likely in the clear when it comes to including it (provided that you don't have a set that only has these borderline mass media-art films and no fundamentals to balance them out).

[Note: I considered starting a new thread with this post, since it serves more as a brief manifesto on how to write film questions than an answer to how many of them there should be, so if I'm getting a lot of responses to my points that are far afield of Tim's, I'll come back and split the thread. If someone else wants to quote or link my post in a new thread specifically responding to it, that's fine too.]

[Adventure Temple Trail]

It’s been tried (0.40/0.33), and the headache was not worth it. Granted, it’s a new decade...

I think the existence of multiple distinctive all-film sets (and two more coming up this year!) suggests that it's possible to find .5/.5 per packet or so of non-repeating, sufficiently academic material. What did you find to be headache-inducing about your try?

For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of this status quo where quizbowl cordons off experiments in 21/21+ sets because it requires writers to do a lot of extra work and staff/players to deal with longer matches and days (even with length caps).

Fair, though I made the "expand packet size" suggestion largely because I've seen little evidence that editors (by and large) have the stomach to deal with the howls of specialist rage that come with cutting a subject in the typical 20/20. If you (general you) have the stomach to cut something and deal with said howls, by all means go for it.

...I would sum up this argument as basically: write good questions, and don't think that every tournament needs a tossup on Roger Deakins, or a tossup that tries to shoehorn really famous popular movies using difficult-to-convert "cinematography" or "criticism" clues followed by a speedcheck on a movie everyone saw when they were ten, or a tossup premised on the notion that seeing the latest A24 movie is just as academically "artistic" as knowing facts about the Villa Rotonda or the Belvedere Torso...

Andrew, I find that I:
(a) largely agree with your arguments, when interpreting them as advice to someone who has already decided to write a larger-than-qb-typical share of film outside the Pop Culture distribution of their set
(b) find them somewhat baffling, in that the community has successfully followed the analogous advice for 4/4+ of Literature at every all-subject tournament for over a dozen years...? Yes, some canonical mainstays of the lit canon are on the recent and/or popular fiction end, but having a massive 4/4 per packet largely hasn't resulted in a race to the bottom to ask about Percy Jackson or whatever. My default attitude towards experienced editors selecting answers for a larger-than-conventional amount of film questions would have more basic trust that they'd have similar discretion to Lit editors.

[tpmorrison]

Thanks to everyone for all of the interesting responses so far. Echoing some others, I must admit that I find the “art film vs. non-art film” question to be a bit overblown. Quiz bowl relies on distinctions of this sort — tethered in general critical consensus and with some inherent degree of judgment call — all the time, and I don’t think we’ve run into any major issues in doing so. I’m also not aware of a plague of OFA tossups on Star Wars or Indiana Jones in the time that I’ve been playing quiz bowl.

I would have no problem with Lady Bird, Parasite, Tár, or similar coming up from time to time, though their wide popularity would have to be taken into account. The fact that people derive entertainment value from them seems beside the point to me; surely such people do so because they enjoy the artistic merits of those respective films (all of which are a far cry from “popcorn movies” that one can engage with far more passively). The contemporary literature that comes up in quiz bowl is a source of entertainment for a great many of us, but that does not preclude more serious engagement with it.

That being said, I expect such questions would be rare, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to anticipate that an increased film distribution would yield loads of questions on the A24 films du jour. If a tournament had 7/7 film questions, then maybe 2/2 of those would be slotted for 21st century film, of which there are a great many candidates that lie firmly on the “art film” side of the spectrum.

[Cody]

It’s been tried (0.40/0.33), and the headache was not worth it. Granted, it’s a new decade...

I think the existence of multiple distinctive all-film sets (and two more coming up this year!) suggests that it's possible to find .5/.5 per packet or so of non-repeating, sufficiently academic material. What did you find to be headache-inducing about your try?

oh, the material was no problem because there is plenty of accessible film to write on.

it was, as you say, "the howls of specialist [and other's] rage" on the forums and IRC that made it not worth it - even though it was a middle of the road experiment that deliberately maintained all the other OFA categories at levels that didn't (and to this day, don't) merit mention in other sets. part of the problem is that the perception of a set is based on film writ large (art and trash) rather than art film as a percentage of OFA. this means any set with trash can't expand film without the perception (and attendant howls) that it was film heavy.

For what it’s worth, I’m not a fan of this status quo where quizbowl cordons off experiments in 21/21+ sets because it requires writers to do a lot of extra work and staff/players to deal with longer matches and days (even with length caps).

Fair, though I made the "expand packet size" suggestion largely because I've seen little evidence that editors (by and large) have the stomach to deal with the howls of specialist rage that come with cutting a subject in the typical 20/20. If you (general you) have the stomach to cut something and deal with said howls, by all means go for it.

I agree, but it's an unfortunate situation. I would rather that quizbowlers reform their expectations of subdistributions in tournaments ;-)

[Cheynem]

I loved that tournament, Cody!

[theMoMA]

Young, I don't have a strong opinion about the individual merits of particular films. Likely, the distance someone would have to venture from the beaten path to watch a particular film corresponds pretty well to the danger that a question on that film becomes a pop culture question for the field. Presumably, for instance, a contemporary foreign film that is similarly meritorious in some abstract way to Parasite would be much easier to justify asking about as "art" because there just aren't as many people who have casually seen it.

I agree with Halle that clue selection is important, and with much of the criteria she proposes. I do think sometimes people can go too far in the direction of assuming that vague descriptions of notable images from a film can be justified as "cinematography," when those questions often end up playing poorly if not executed thoughtfully. Ultimately though, the art experience of film is the watching, and it's not necessarily the case that everyone who enjoys or appreciates the artistic merits of a particular film will want to know a lot of details attendant to its creation. So although Halle presents a good case for writing some questions based on secondary facts, I think it's better for most questions to ask about films that can be asked about as films, with the occasional edge case asked about in a different way.

Responding to Matt, I'm not convinced that literature is a perfect analogy for film. For historical reasons, literature writers and editors have a strong model of what a 4/4 literature distribution looks like; stretching back to time immemorial, or at least 2007, pretty much every tournament's lit distribution looks very similar, occasionally including some genre literature but rarely asking about anything that strays so far from the light as Percy Jackson. Film has never had a particularly large distribution, and my impression is that the idea of what a "film distribution" looks like is the subject of contending claims that have never really been adjudicated. Furthermore, I think lit has some analogous issues involving contemporary authors, who can become fashionable question subjects in ways that I don't necessarily think are testing for "literature" knowledge (instead rewarding popular reading habits, which is a part of literature but, in my opinion, tends to be overemphasized at open events; I could easily see A24-style films being overemphasized for analogous reasons in a world in which film came up much more often).

Finally, I don't disagree with Tim's most recent post, with the caveat that I think there's a strong parallel between critically acclaimed movies and contemporary literature (discussed above) that isn't necessarily a credit to either as a common topic of quizbowl questions. I also wonder if reserving ~30% of a film distribution for 21st-century film is excessive; maybe it's fine, but if we shouldn't really care whether people have casually seen the film, it seems like a lot to me.

[halle]

I agree with Halle that clue selection is important, and with much of the criteria she proposes. I do think sometimes people can go too far in the direction of assuming that vague descriptions of notable images from a film can justified as "cinematography," when those questions often end up playing poorly if not executed thoughtfully. Ultimately though, the art experience of film is the watching, and it's not necessarily the case that everyone who enjoys or appreciates the artistic merits of a particular film will want to know a lot of details attendant to its creation. So although Halle presents a good case for writing some questions based on secondary facts, I think it's better for most questions to ask about films that can be asked about as films, with the occasional edge case asked about in a different way.

I don't want to nitpick or go back and forth for too long, because I don't think my stance on clue selection is the ultimate correct answer to film tossups anyway, but I do want to clarify my thinking a bit. While I mainly listed information external to the texts of the film in my "clues you wouldn't know if you watched for entertainment" categories, I think the "shots, costuming or set details, and scenes which don't advance the plot much but do have major symbolic significance" part is the most important, and where the majority of clues should draw from. This time, I bolded the part about symbolic significance, because I'm not sure if it was clear that this was supposed to apply to the shots, costuming/set details, and scenes, not just the scenes, in my original sentence, and it is absolutely essential to my point that it does. I'd also like to add narrative structural significance as a quality alongside symbolic significance that can be sought in these types of clues. I really dislike vague descriptions of images that are treated as important because they're "cinematographic," and I've never buzzed on a description of a type of camera angle because I've never learned to tell those apart. I'm talking about the kinds of details and moments (including lines of dialogue, for instance) that you will not miss if you are engaging with the film--yes, as a film, but as an artistic creation or text specifically.

An example from literature might highlight the different kinds of scenes you notice when you're reading for entertainment versus with a critical or literary eye: I'm thinking of the scene of Isabel Archer by the fireplace. If you've read secondary sources on The Portrait of a Lady, you'll likely recognize clues on this scene immediately, because it's been pointed out to you as highly significant and worth remembering. If you've read the book with any eye towards key character moments and narrative structure, it's extremely doubtful that you'd forget that chapter, because it is a core turning point in the structure of the text despite its lack of plot action. If you're mostly caught up in the plot of the book, it might strike you as a strange and forgettable scene to clue--for instance, I was unable to buzz on the tossup on this scene at last year's CO, despite being in the middle of the novel and having recently finished that chapter, because I hadn't yet resolved the plot and come to understand how the story was structured, so I didn't realize this was such a turning point and thought there might be another similar moment later on that was more obviously telegraphed as a big moment. For an example of a film tossup that clues scenes and images of this type, I will cite one of my own tossups, not because I think it's perfect, but because a couple of times people have brought it up and told me that they'd gone back to read the tossup after watching, and that every single early clue I'd chosen was something that had stood out to them at the time they were watching, which I'm pretty proud of achieving.

In a scene in this film, a mirrored cafe booth splits the frame between the protagonist and an arguing
couple. An off-duty soldier in this film forgets that Ceres, not Flora, is actually the goddess of summer. The
camera cuts to close-ups of ominous tribal masks during a taxi ride this film’s protagonist takes with Angel,
her assistant. This film’s protagonist tries on many hats and remarks that they all suit her before settling on
buying a seasonally inappropriate one. Early in this film, a (*) fortune teller pretends not to be able to read palms
in order to avoid giving the protagonist bad news. This film ends before the amount of time suggested by its title
after the protagonist runs into her doctor as he’s driving away from the hospital. For 10 points, name this film
following an afternoon in a young singer’s life as she waits to receive the results of a medical test, directed by Agnes
Varda.
ANSWER: Cléo from 5 to 7 [or Cléo de 5 à 7] <HF>

My intention with most of these clues were things that specifically foreshadowed or misled about the ending of the film--moments that hinted at Cléo continuing to live into the next cycle of the seasons balanced against moments that were palpably ominous, as the major impression the film left on me was how masterfully it disguised its ending by leaving the narrative open to both options. I also peppered in a minor character's name and the sense that the main character was concerned with her appearance and perhaps even vain, to keep the tossup from being merely a sequence of images and quotes. (I also made sure not to spoil which way the test results go, because I'm often hopeful that my tossups will serve as recommendations for the things I'm writing on, and I think that reveal would take away from this particular film more than others.)

I hope this clarifies that you can avoid cluing films in an entertainment-y way while still cluing them as films! Of course, some may not find this tossup as successful, and I welcome any commentary on why that might be, especially if it serves as a counterpoint to anything I've said rather than just personal dislike of the cluing (I will note that if I was writing this now, I'd likely swap the first and second sentences, but I don't think that matters too much).

[Mike Bentley]

Given the endless discourse over the last 10+ years of the end of film, the rise of television, and the lack of a high culture / low culture divide between film and television, one natural next question to me becomes, "does TV become a small part of the academic film distribution?"

I do think one historical reason that film hasn't come up as much as it could in academic sets is that quizbowl as a whole has always had pop culture tournaments where film is rightly given a very large portion of the distribution. I do wonder if one reason non-foreign and non-old film, along with other borderline OFA topics, have crept more into academic tournaments is that these pop culture tournaments happen with less frequency than two decades ago when I was starting out on the collegiate scene. There are others, but in a world where a decent circuit team like us were playing maybe 4+ trash tournaments a year, I think there was less of a need for an outlet in the arts distribution. Plus, the typical academic tournament had more dedicated trash in it than today.

Anyway, agree with the overall sentiment that people should be the change they want to see. Go ahead and write a tournament where there's 1/1 film or whatever. No one is going to stop you.

[Votre Kickstarter Est Nul]

(b) find them somewhat baffling, in that the community has successfully followed the analogous advice for 4/4+ of Literature at every all-subject tournament for over a dozen years...? Yes, some canonical mainstays of the lit canon are on the recent and/or popular fiction end, but having a massive 4/4 per packet largely hasn't resulted in a race to the bottom to ask about Percy Jackson or whatever. My default attitude towards experienced editors selecting answers for a larger-than-conventional amount of film questions would have more basic trust that they'd have similar discretion to Lit editors.

I broadly agree with you here about having faith in editors, and am only slightly concerned about film leaning too much towards borderline or cuspy works. But newer and more "pop" works in literature and film diverge in convertibility; I'd reckon questions on newer and more "pop" lit plays harder than older, "definitely in the canon" works, whereas the opposite would be true for film.

Because of this I think it'd be easier for a tournament's film distro to just tossup multiple cuspy things, which would represent a solid chunk of the disro for that tournament, whereas in literature at non-high difficulties, the analogous works become bonus parts, or early to middle clues, etc. which can largely blend in. And because we've had sets (WORKSHOP 2022 probably being the most obvious example) that have made decisions in the overall OFA that leant much more towards more towards contemporary and cuspy subjects, it wouldn't catch me totally off guard if some future tournament's film leaned that way too.

[The King's Flight to the Scots]

I think it would honestly be criminal to put Better Call Saul or Succession in the arts distribution. Even with some of the most critically-acclaimed TV programs, showrunners have way less freedom to experiment than arthouse filmmakers do; these are products for consumption and it shows.

[yeah viv talk nah]

I agree with the points Tim has put forth, especially that (a) quizbowl has a strong existing knowledge base about film among its players into which it would be great to tap more; and (b) there are a few subcategories of what we consider OFA right now like architecture and photography that would be better placed in what we consider VFA. I would be interested in seeing sets with expanded film distributions.

I think a good path forward, at least for the near future until we get data about sets with more film questions, would be to be more open to including film-related clues in other adjacent categories. This seems like the most natural way to tap the existent rich film knowledge base among players while not making wholesale sacrifices to other valuable parts of the distribution.

This framework has already been in place to test film knowledge in VFA (clues about paintings / set design) and AFA (composers of film scores). However, I think there are lots of streams for broadening to other categories as well:

• Literature: There are many authors already firmly in the quizbowl canon that made valuable contributions to screenwriting (e.g., William Faulkner's work on The Big Sleep, Tony Kushner's collaborations with Steven Spielberg). However, knowledge of these works are rarely, if ever, tested in literature questions. As Tim pointed out, film plot and dialogue is quite natural to clue in quizbowl questions, so I think cluing screenplays would be a straightforward endeavor for writers of literature questions. Halle's points about cluing events of symbolic or narrative significance would also apply here. Two side notes here:
  • As Matt Jackson brought up, film adaptations of novels/plays could be clued much more often as well.
  • There are also many novelists/playwrights known for both screenplays and written works, like Marguerite Duras and John Logan; as well as "specialist" screenwriters like Nora Ephron and Cameron Crowe. It would be great to see clues about screenplays by "specialist" novelists/playwrights, "specialist" screenwriters, and writers known for both.
• History: Questions could clue knowledge about films that dramatized historical events (e.g. All the President's Men or Hunger); or films that comment on history (e.g. the Paris massacre of Algerians in Caché).
• Geography: questions could clue movies with notable filming locations (e.g. The Mission and Iguazú Falls); or films that raised awareness about specific areas or communities (City of God, Honeyland).

There are surely many more avenues, but these were just the first that came to mind personally. I would love to hear others' thoughts on this.

I particularly loved how recent sets like 2023 ACF Regionals and 2022 Winter Closed sprinkled film knowledge like this many over other categories:

• Regs lit tossup on Clifford Odets: Barton Fink and Sweet Smell of Success
• Regs lit tossup on ballet schools: Altman's The Company
• Regs VFA tossup on winter: Melancholia, Solaris
• Regs lit tossup on libraries: Greenaway's Prospero's Books
• Winter Closed lit tossup on Murakami: Burning
• Winter Closed history bonus on Boxcar Bertha
• Winter Closed lit bonus on Elia Kazan
• Winter Closed geo bonus on Bond hideouts

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I also don't really buy the concerns about "pop" film suddenly becoming overrepresented with expanded film distros. I honestly don't really remember any such "flavor-of-the-month" tossups or impossible-to-buzzer race tossups on very famous movies in recent years. For example, the EEAAO tossup from Winter was classified as pop culture rather than OFA, and I think most editors will be conscious of such concerns when choosing the appropriate category and clues for questions like that on popular movies.

---

I'd like to quickly chime in to expand on your point about films having an ample variety of clues from which to draw. My understanding of quizbowl history is that there was a revolution around 2010-2012 in how film questions were written, focusing on more "painterly" clues that aimed to test engagement with film as art by focusing heavily on scene descriptions and cinematography. That's good, especially if previously questions relied on contextless lists of characters played by Spencer Tracy, or whatever. But I would caution that strictly focusing on the visual aspects of film leaves out a good deal of what appreciators of film as art (and makers of movies) learn, write about, incorporate, etc. If one is comfortable cluing that Joan Miró wanted to assassinate painting, there's no reason quizbowl film clues should exclude a film's history or the history of film more broadly, the contribution of actors, film technology, etc. Similarly, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with plot clues if we accept that screenwriters are engaged in making art too. Like you, I think that a good film distribution will include several types of clues.

I also strongly agree with this; I think that if film distributions do expand, writers should be careful to vary the ways film knowledge is tested. This is particularly important in my view because of the historical barriers against women and other minorities in direction and cinematography. I feel that film writers should make sure to recognize influential figures like Thelma Schoonmaker, Anna May Wong, Edith Head, and Bruce Lee.