Assignment Question
Choose your own topic for the final essay or, if you do not have a topic of your own, you may choose from the prompts suggested here. The subject matter can be anything you find to be noir/neo-noir related. Use whatever you wish. Mix and match topics, bring in new texts (graphic novels, films not seen in class, books, music, photography, painting and more).
Remember, this assignment is not a research paper. It is a medium-length film analysis essay, designed to encourage you to develop your own critical, observational and analytic skills. However, to support your own arguments you may use course readings or outside texts, but do so sparingly. If you do use citations, MLA of Chicago Manual of Style.
How does the iconic figure of the “femme fatale” function in Ex Machina (2015)? How does Ava’s uncanny status as non-human behave within this archetype? Compare Ava to the earlier (biological) incarnations of the “femme fatale” from the 1940s like Phyliss Dietrichson or Kathie Moffat. Think about how Ava functions compared to the non-human replicants, Pris, Rachel, and Zhora in Blade Runner (1982) Do you agree with Stephen Teo that Asian noir borrows from classic American noir but was also born out of its own regional, cultural and historic realities? How can we position Chungking Express (1994) and/or Fallen Angels (1995) within a noir sentiment? What does it take from American historic noir? What does it add to its own Neo-noir sentiment? Describe the character types, style and structure of the film within a noir and neo-noir context. The specificity of American cities and the complex realities of increasing urbanization in the U.S. figure very large in the historic American film noir of the 1940s and 1950s. How is early 21st century Shanghai imagined as a noir-tinged city in Suzou River (2000)? In the essay “Problems of Memory and Identity in Neo-Noir’s Existentialist Antihero,” Andrew Spicer argues that neo-noir “remains a form that continues to accommodate complex, difficult ideas” whereby “existentialist attitudes continue to flourish.” How do these attitudes manifest in Memento (2000)? According to Jerold Abrams in the essay “Space, Time and Subjectivity in Neo-Noir Cinema,” the postmodern condition in neo-noir films such as Memento (2000) increase the inability to distinguish the real from the unreal and makes the self and world so unstable that social alienation borders on psychosis and paranoia. Can we apply this sentiment to Oldboy (2003) as well? Writing about numerous films produced by Black directors in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Manthia Diawara writes that they “participate in the discourse of film noir” but also “force the audience to reexamine the genre and its uses by Black filmmakers. They orient the noir style toward a description of a Black public sphere…and the specificity of Black culture.” Do you agree with this assessment? Can we apply this theory to the film A Rage in Harlem (1991)? Compare and contrast the imaging and depiction of “heartland noir” in Night of the Hunter (1955) and/or Fargo (1996). How has the darker, more pessimistic urban sensibility of noir migrated to “idyllic” small-town America in each film? Using the argument developed by Giuliana Bruno in her formative and historic 1987 essay, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” evaluate the postmodern attributes of Blade Runner (1982) as they relate to neo-noir themes and aesthetics.