Film

Assessment 2: Essay Proposal (800w choose one topic below) For your essay, we want you to develop the topic and structure in consultation with your tutor over a period of several weeks; an essay should be a work in progress. In your proposal submission, you need to provide: 1 A statement of argument or intention: in scholarship, we call this a thesis statement. This should comprise no more than a single economical paragraph (approximately 100w). 2 A series of 5-6 briefly annotated bullet points that describes the structure of your argument. In this section, you should focus on clarity and continuity in argument. 3 A list of 6-8 sources (including 2 films), properly cited and briefly annotated (approx 50w per source). Your annotations should explain how you will use the sources to build your argument. 4 A statement of conclusion (2-3 sentences) indicating the outcome of your argument. Your word count should not exceed 800 words. Essay Topics (choose one topic and analyze two below films) Please select one of the following as the basis for your argument. Your response must consider at least two films from the weekly screened films in your answer. Please note: you cannot use the film you analysed in assessment 1 (which is Casablanca) as one of your main texts. 1) Offer an analysis of 2-3 films set on this course that subvert the audience’s expectations of genre. 2) In this course, we’ve looked at film as a complex, highly collaborative artistic enterprise. To what extent can film be thought of as the work of an ‘author’? Offer an analysis of Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and/or Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love as the cinematic works of ‘auteurs’. 3) Film positions its spectator; indeed, we could say that film is one of the profound vehicles for ideology of the twentieth century. Do you agree? Offer an analysis of The Blue Angel and/or Marie Antoinette and/or Casablanca. 4) Offer a reading of film style in relation to In the Mood for Love, The Blue Angel, or The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. Consider each film as a ‘stylistic patterning’ of story and image content. 5) Cinema was established very early in its life as a narrative form. And yet, throughout the decades that followed, cinema entertained mass audiences with astonishing audio-visual spectacles. Offer an analysis of what Tom Gunning calls a ‘cinema of attractions’ in relation to 2 or more films screened on the course. 6) In what way does digital cinema change our relationship to film narrative and image form? 7) Narrative is a process of storytelling. Offer an analysis of 2-3 films set on this course as narrative ‘experiments’. What about these narratives make them experimental? How do they depart from a narrative norm, or what Bordwell and Thompson call ‘classical narrative structure’? Weekly screened films: