Political Interpretation and Formal Analysis

Choosing one of the films from the list below, discuss your understanding of the work’s meaning from a political perspective, and evaluate the formal choices and filmmaking methods that you think contribute most to conveying that meaning.

Please note that this is a two-part prompt. You are being asked (1) to advance an overall textual interpretation that takes the film as a whole into consideration and (2) to write critically about cinematic form and method.

The assignment asks you to pick out aspects of form and method based upon your view of their overall significance to the film’s meaning. The reasoning behind your specific areas of focus should come through in the way you set forth your points.

Be sure to state your thesis clearly and build an argument for it using concrete evidence and lucid reasoning. As before, write as though the reader has not seen the film, but focus on what is necessary and relevant when summarizing narrative events.

You do not need to conduct outside research, but if you do, please be sure to cite your sources. You may wish to make references to the assigned readings, which should also be cited if used.

You do not need to cite content from the course lectures or from the quiz review handouts, but please spell out in detail your own understanding of that material if you refer to it.

Film Choices:

Daisies, Vĕra Chytlová, 1966, Czechoslovakia

Born in Flames, Lizzie Borden, 1983, USA

Perfumed Nightmare, Kidlat Tahimik, 1977, Philippines

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, Kazuo Hara, 1987, Japan

Lumumba, Death of the Prophet, Raoul Peck, 1990, France/Haiti

Word Count: 450 (maximum 600)

Guidelines:

First, you want to fully present your interpretation of the film in the first paragraph. There's a tendency to think of this a place to summarize at a high level, but I would like you to actually go as far as you can straight off the bat. Get rid of any fluff, any generalizations. Thoroughly explain each concept and each set of relationships that you introduce. Contextualize any characters, plot events and themes that you mention. Make the writing very tight and concrete. There shouldn't be any ambiguity. Make the ideas your own.

Second, when you're writing in other academic disciplines, the expectation is that you will directly cite texts and data to substantiate claims. You do this also when you're writing about art, but the difference (and the challenge) is that you have to translate audio-visual objects into words in order to use them as evidence. You can't quote an image, a sound, or a cut in a written essay. But you can, and should, describe them. In writing about art, description = argument. That is, what you choose to highlight about something and the nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, similes and metaphors that you use to characterize it constitute a personal reading. You state an abstract claim and then you offer that same claim in the form of a fine-grained description of something from the film--or you do the reverse. That's the secret to being persuasive in this genre of writing.

Third, I know I said that the prompt encompasses two parts, but you actually want to develop the interpretation and the stylistic analysis together. If you try to tackle these things separately, you'll likely have problems tying them together. The trick, then, is to talk about style and filmmaking approach as you are crafting those fine-grained descriptions that I just mentioned. The prompt to discuss form doesn't mean picking a few formal attributes and writing about them separately. It means attending to cinematic form as you are writing about narrative events, characters, scenes, etc. Always stop and ask yourself, could my description here apply just as well to something from, say, a novel, or have I put my finger on how this thing works in the cinema? Am I thinking in terms of images, sounds, and how they are assembled? Or in terms of the relationship between the cinematic representation and the represented idea or reality? Or in terms of something else that uniquely has to do with the art of moving images and reproduced sound?

Fourth, look at your draft with the advice above in mind. If you have an essay that splits into a discussion of narratives, themes and arguments and then a separate discussion of the cinema, then you need to figure out how to meld the latter into the former. If you have a million examples but no thick descriptions, identify your most salient examples and work on fleshing them out. Go with your gut, with what you remember most vividly; those are likely the most important elements to dwell on. You can mention further examples in passing to demonstrate relevance and to show that you're taking into account the entire film, but have a definite anchor, a leading instance. After you give your complete reading of the film's political significance in paragraph one, the rest of your paper should focus on clarifying and complicating that reading by going in depth into specific passages, like peeling back layers of an onion. 

Thanks!!!!