What is an analytical survey paper?
1) It’s a paper that asks you to show how a central idea is developed, extended or revised across a series of films in different ways.
Below are 3 topics for you to choose from. If you want to pursue your own topic, please check with me first.
a) DEMOCRACY
For example, perhaps you might want to consider the Whitmanic dream of American representation in the arts….
Questions to ask:
We started the semester with the Levi’s Ad (remember, shot in post-Katrina New Orleans!) that engaged with Whitman’s poem “America”
Centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love,
A grand, sane, towering, seated Mother,
Chair’d in the adamant of Time.
Starting with Beasts, say how you see US film engaging with Whitman’s idealistic dream to assert/capture equality….
How did film fulfill this vision for you this semester? how did it fall short? has your sense of film’s engagement with democracy through its mirror screen changed this semester? or do you have a dimmer view of film and what it does for the country?
Key films here are Modern Times, Good Time, The Florida Project… but consider also the early cinema shorts; also consider texts such as poetry or Mango Street.
b) REALISM
Film is usually associated with REALISM–showing the actual motion of the world before us unlike any other art.
Starting with Beasts, consider the different ways that realism/un-realism works in these films.
After watching these films, what roles would you say realism plays in cinema? what social/political roles?
When films break from realism, why do they and what do they achieve?
You obviously want to think of documentary and magic impulses here….
Consider drawing on your Good Time essay… the comedy of Modern Times, the realism/childish vision of The Florida Project but also the poems and texts….
c) TECHNOLOGY
“Ain’t that ugly?”
So says Hushpuppy’s Dad Wink as he looks at a factory.
Starting with Beasts, survey how film (as a technology) talks about other machines, and to what end…
you may want to focus on ideas of escape from civilization, on industrial critique, and on the ways that film both embraces and distances itself from its own “roots” in the machine.
You may want to focus on films like Modern Times, obviously… but also how films like Good Time capture the craziness of the 21st Century… or give us an ethical vision in The Florida Project…
Last Completed Projects
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