film final
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Vis150-Midterm_TakeHome.pptxVIS 150: Landmarks of World Cinema
UCSD Visual Arts Department Spring 2022 Section ID: 84618
Midterm
The Exam is a Take Home Essay format. You should choose one of the following prompts and write a response in the form of a paper. The length of your response should be 4 to 5 pages. (2000 words approximate). Successful Essays will engage on film formal analysis, give a critical summary and description of the film discussed, bring relevant citations from the readings and give historical context. Most important, the essay form asks you to engage on a critical perspective that foregrounds the historical and artistic significance of the films, authors and film movements thus far reviewed in our class.
Follow instructions and prompts and write a short essay at home (2000 words approximate) Your written essay must be typed in Times New Roman 12 point font with 1” margins and page numbers. Double Space. You must include proper citations, a short bibliography, and reproduction(s) of discussed films(s).
Exams are due in 7 days: that is by Tuesday May 17 at 5 pm
Essay Prompts:
1. Gillo Pontecorvo´s The Battle of Algiers (1966) marked a paradigm shift in film art. Deeply influencing what came to be known as Third Cinema. In his book, Fifty Years of the Battle of Algiers, Sohail Daulatzai argues that the historical and social context that emerged during the period of decolonization in the Third World galvanized a new global direction in cinematic practices that challenged commercial and First World dominant control over the medium. Discuss the innovations in aesthetic and formal techniques that make the Battle of Algiers a unique film in its formal and content elements: how does the film articulate and presents the historical and social realities for a popular and international movement for decolonization? How the innovation on the documentary elements, narrative, sound, montage and photography create the effect of a direct engagement in the conflict and struggle of the Algerian people for independence? How these elements shift the Point of View of the dominant cinematic form to give a place of representation and enunciation to the peoples of the Global South in their social and political struggles?
2. Emerging initially out of Brazil, Argentina, and Cuba and spreading throughout Africa and Asia as well, Third Cinema arose not just as an alternative but also as a challenge to dominant cinematic practice, whether it was the First Cinema, which was embodied in Hollywood, the commercial industrial cinemas in Europe and the Third World; or Second Cinema, which was the experimental and art house cinemas of Europe and the United States. Taking various forms, Third Cinema Films have been grand-epics, pseudo-documentaries, avant-garde expression and social realism, and initially its main impetus was to complement the national struggle by heightening the residues of colonial power and continued repression of minorities, women, and the poor within the nation itself. Fernando E. Solanas, Octavio Getino´s The Hour of the Furnaces (1973) is emblematic of, and inaugurates, this film movement. Discuss how The Hour of the Furnaces seeks to change the means of production and distribution of cinema? How it aims to decolonize minds? How its formal construction and aesthetic qualities foreground the development of a radical consciousness? How does the Manifesto Towards a Third Cinema by Solanas and Getino gives us further arguments for the understanding of cinema as a revolutionary tool for the transformation of society?
3. Glauber Rocha´s Black God, White Devil [Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol] (1964) tells the story of a family struggling to survive in the arid Northeast of Brazil. The protagonist, Manuel (played by Geraldo del Rey) struggles against all manner of oppressions that conspire to maintain the people of the northeast in figurative chains. In the story, Manuel and his wife Rosa must go from group to group (essentially savior to savior) in their struggle to survive. The movie is critical of the economic structure of the Northeast at the time of production. The travels of Manuel from his patriarchal landowner to the messianic Sebastião and finally to the violent bandit Corisco represent a sharp criticism of the region´s history of highly unequal wealth distribution and the cultural and historical conditions. It makes various references to real historical events such as the massacre at Canudos and the banditry symbolized by the quasi spiritual connection between Corisco and the memory of the bandit Lampião. Rocha´s clear position inside the Cinema Novo movement is unique in the high symbolism of his early films and the forms of allegorical representation and avant-garde strategies of photography, montage, sound and narrative. Discuss the aesthetic and formal experimental strategies that make the work of Glauber Rocha a poetic form of political cinema? How alienation, repetition, narration and mise-en-scene stage the “aesthetics of hunger” of his famous manifesto. How ambiguity and shock wave the formal elements of his cinematic language to create a unique landscape of cinema as a poetic, historical and social medium?
