critical essay

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Length: 750-800 words. Please include computer-generated word count at the bottom of your essay. Format: 12 point times new roman font, 1” margins, double space, staple. Citations: See MLA Guidelines on our Moodle Site

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Essay #2 Assignment:
Visual Language and Historical Context
PLEASE READ CAREFULLY THROUGH THIS ENTIRE PROMPT
SPECIFIC EXAMPLES OF STARTING ESSAYS FOR ALL OPTIONS INCLUDED BELOW!
CHOOSE TOPIC QUICKLY. THE CHALLENGE IS IN YOUR WRITING, VIEWING AND
INTERPRETATION ONCE YOU START COMPOSING, NOT IN THE TOPIC ITSELF.
Due: online in Canvas Assignments by Monday, November 16th
Length: 750-800 words. Please include computer-generated word count at the bottom of your
essay.
Format: 12 point times new roman font, 1” margins, double space, staple.
Citations: See MLA Guidelines on our Moodle Site
Please: Describe your scenes in your own words. If you point out what you actually see on the
screen, you are a film analyst.
You have a lot of room to move in this essay.
Do:
–Telegraph
–Limit passive voice (‘to be’ verbs) to five per page.
–Remember that every sentence needs a subject.
–You may use first person (‘I’), but choose what’s most comfortable for you. Stay
in the same voice (1st,2nd,3rd) throughout your essay and in the same tense (past, present,
future) as well.
PLEASE LOOK AT THE REVISION POWER POINT SLIDES FOR THIS:
These will help you to easily give every sentence a subject, use three tips to avoid
passive verb overuse, learn to easily use colons instead of dashes, help you with when to use
italics and quotations, encourage paragraphing, aid in avoiding vague redundancies, i.e., I,
Personally, previous experience, sharing together, thinking to myself, advance warning, past
history etc,, and how to fine-tune wording, i.e., how regard and toward sound better than
regards and towards, why ‘oftentimes’ should disappear from your work, why NEVER to use
there is or there are, and so much wore.
–As always, read aloud after you are finished. Make sure that you like what you have written:
that it communicates!
Prompt:
Please choose ONE OF THESE SIX FILMS
Fritz Lang’s M
Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca
Minahan’s, Series 7: The Contenders
Zhang Yimou’s Raise the Red Lantern
Howard Hawk’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Euzhan Palcy’s Rue cases-nègres (Sugar Cane Alley)
Please DO NOT use more than one film, DO NOT compare the films, and DO NOT introduce
another film.
You may of course discuss the film theme in general, but the smaller the sequence you use, the
better your essay!
Each of these films stand as very different examples of what Burch would call Standard,
Institutional Cinema and clearly express ideological concerns of their respective historical
periods, Weimar Germany, the Start of WW II in the U.S., the dawn of reality television, the
post-war classical Hollywood musical, and 1930’s Colonial Martinique. They express their
concerns through their visual, or camera, strategies, which we have discussed in class: your
task? Tell us what you interpret is the movie you choose’s main theme and describe ay least
one visual or aural (sountrack or score) way that you feel the film gets its theme across to you,
the viewer.
PLEASE KEEP IT NARROW: START WITH A DETAIL!!!
–M of course employs German Expressionism’s language,
–Casablanca uses Classical Hollywood film grammar,
–Series 7: The Contenders uses televisual editing chopped into segments (episodes) and lots
of repetition to “catch viewers up,”
–Raise the Red Lantern conficts SOUND (and pacing, which benefits sound) with image to help
us understand both panoptic surveillance/control and the characters’ resistance to their places,
–Gentlemen Prefer Blondes uses full technicolor and staged musical numbers and montages,
such as the shopping spree, to complete one of Dyer’s substitutions,
–Sugar Cane Alley uses multiple point of view shots and long-shots to describe José’s eyes.
To accomplish this, in your own words, and using no more than two SPECIFIC SCENES or
SEQUENCES but ONE IS BEST to discuss how your film’s scene communicates this theme
through its use of two or three, at most, (TWO IS BEST) key VISUAL (camera) or AURAL
(Soundyrack, Score) elements to discuss, which will help you structure your Essay. You MAY of
course discuss history and themes, but PLEASE DO NOT FORGET HOW THE FILM USES
VISUAL TECHNIQUES. Do not forget race, class, and gender and music in your short but
interesting discussion.
Some visual and aural term reminders for when you compose your essay;
Please do NOT feel that you have to use all or any of these.
Camera movement
verisimilitide
Angles (High, Low, Dutch)
Editing cross-cutting (paralell editing), continuity editing, jump cuts
Soundtrack diegtic sound, embedded sound, foregrounded sound, score (music)
Dialogue (Language style [vernacular])
Mise-en-scéne, art direction
Dimension: Long, Close-Up, Medium, etc. Depth of field.
Point of View, Subjective Shots, Framing!
Key, Filler or Back Lighting Contrast and Shadow
Technicolor, Grain
Soundtrack: dialog, foley effects, ambient sound (In Raise the Read Lantern ppt.
Score: the film’s music, whether diagetic (ffrom a source inside the film’s world) or extra diagetic
(from off-screen)
Sound Bridges: on scene’s sound continues over an edit
The use of Silence as MORE than “no sound,” or as meaningful
Discordant Sound: when sound does not “agree” with the image
Some examples for starting (from student essays):
FOR EXAMPLE:
THE LIGHT OF GUILT
In Fritz Lang’s M, we know the identity of the maniac preying on the little girls of Berlin even
though the plot never introduces him. The camera shows us a worried mother, a “wanted”
poster, and the show of a hat that reveal the killer. Here, German expressionist high key lighting
reveals what dialogue cannot, and points to a small, shy, average citizen as the cause for the
city’s anxiety and the location of guilt. He looks no different than you or me, but M’s lighting…
FOR EXAMPLE:
HERE’S LOOKING AT CASABLANCA
A voice-of-god narrator tells us that multitudes need to flee Europe in 1941 in desperate
attempts to reach the “free world.” From this opening scene, a map places us in the Morroccan
city of Casablanca, where refugees “wait, and wait, and wait.”
We soon learn, however, that this film’s core does not concern itself with these people at all, but
instead with a cafe owner, Rick, and his lost love, Ilsa.
The Hollywood studio system camera, which stands in for our eyes’ perspective, swoops up to
introduce us to Rick, a man whom we have heard so much about that he cannot be unimportant
to us. He signs an invoice with “OK, Rick,” and the plight of the refugees vanishes. From now
on, Casablanca’s camera and editing make sure that Rick and only Rick’s life, will grab us as
viewers.
FOR EXAMPLE:
J’ADORE DIOR
In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks efficiently replaces scarcity with abundance in the
Paris shopping montage during which two single, unemployed women spend thousands of
francs at high-end designer boutiques, such as Balenciaga, Chanel, and Dior. This scene hits
the audience with energetic music and brightly colored shop storefronts featuring expensive
brand names that we still recognize today.
Our protagonists, Dorthothy and Lorelai enter this fashion wonderland to replace everyday
scarcity and worries about money, and that explains why audiences enjoy the classical
Hollywood musical: it substitutes anxieties about scarcity, and thus sexual vulnerability, with
images of wiid spending thus….
The Hollywood studio system camera, which stands in for our eyes’ perspective, swoops up to
introduce us to Rick, a man whom we have heard so much about that he cannot be unimportant
to us. He signs an invoice with “OK, Rick,” and the plight of the refugees vanishes. From now
on, Casablanca’s camera and editing make sure that Rick and only Rick’s life, will grab us as
viewers.
FOR EXAMPLE:
THE ENDLESS SERIES
Marc Andrejevic’s article and class lecture discuss the differences between the cinematic and
television mediums, and when watching Series 7: The Contenders, I could see some ways in
which the two forms share little in common. Movies start and end, but television seems
potentially endless, which produces enervation: we want to keep watching even if we grow
irritated and tired. From the start, I know that the contenders in Series 7 could never really win
the game. If they “won,” they needed to continue to contend until death. But why don’t I want to
stop watching?
I will explain by focusing on…
FOR EXAMPLE:
THE REAL AND IMAGINARY CARIBBEAN
Against a beautiful, sunny blue sky and tropical background, Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley
films a young boy, Leopold, tied to a horse and led to his death as watching workers sing in
hopeless protest. Palcy uses this horrible image to allow us in to a stark difference between the
Caribbean of the first world imagination and the real conditions in post-colonial Martinique. Her
observations help to highlight what Stam and Spence discuss as colonialism and representation
by showing what filmmakers usually leave off of screens, especially when the islands are
involved.
In this scene, racism, a term I will define later on, erupts in machtpolitik, as we know that this
young man will be killed for exposing the corruption of his French “masters”: even though he
has a French father, he sees, and we see, the violence of colonialism the cinema often ignores.
————————————————————————-*Again: sequence is an idea or concept that starts and finishes in a brief series of scenes and
which can re-emerge in different from later on in the film.
Think of a SHOT as analogous to, or like, a WORD; a SCENE as analogous to, or like, a
SENTENCE, and a SEQUENCE as analogous, or similar, to a PARAGRAPH that introduces
and concludes an idea We Look Forward to these!!!

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