Paper Topics for CINE 340

Assignment One:
Apply the course material on Soviet Montage theories to the opening sequence of David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet.

See stills from the sequence.
For a possible point of comparison, see the ‘slaughter’ sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s 1924 film, The Strike.

Assignment Two:

Apply some of the concepts of Structuralism to the selected sequence from Roger Vadim’s “… and God created woman.”
1. What connotations can be drawn from the sequence?
2. How might suture operate within this sequence?
a. Where is our identification within this sequence?
b. Who or what becomes ‘our stand in’?
c. What conclusions can be drawn from such an alignment?

See stills from the sequence

Assignment Three:

Choose ONE of these three topics.

1. Discuss the characters Gorodish and Saporta in Diva [clip 1, clip 2] in relationship to Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle. What are these characters possibly representative of? If as Jameson says that “traditional ‘France’ finds allegorical expression in the figure of Jules …[whereas] a post-industrial, media, jet-set style is persuasively dramatized by Gorodish,”  how might we situate Saporta?1
see stills from clip one
2. In Errol Morris’ Mr. Death: the rise and fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., we see Leucther a holocaust-denier descended into the apparent ruin of gas chamber at Auschwitz. The voice-over is that of a historian denouncing Leuchter. Discuss the significance of the arrangement and the visual imagery. In what ways does the voice-over correspond to the visual imagery? What cultural connotations can be drawn from the visual imagery? Does the artifice of the scene jeopardize the ‘truthfulness’ of the argument? If so explain. If not, why? And if the artifice of the scene in some way supports the validity of the argument, how does it do so?

3. Stam and Spence argue in “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation,” that it’s not just matter of hurling “charges of racism at individual film-makers or critics … but rather to learn how to decode and deconstruct racist images and sounds.”2  In addition, they argue that to empower filmmakers (and spectators) it is necessary to mobilize cinematic codes in their favor. Discuss the opening of Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss. Is this sequence ‘empowering’? If so, how?

For a possible comparison, compare this video clip from The Battle of Algiers to the selected sequence from Baadasssss.
_________
1. Fredric Jameson, "On Diva," Social Text, vol., 0, no. 6 (Autumn 1982), 116-117.
2. Robert Stam and Louise Spence, “Colonialism, Racism, and Representation: An Introduction,” Movies and Methods Volume II, Bill Nichols, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 647.



Assignment Four:

Choose ONE of these three topics.

1. Adopting Laura Mulvey’s mode of analysis – such as found in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” – discuss the opening sequence of Peeping Tom. How is the spectator’s gaze situated? How are the characters situated? What is the function of the ‘hidden camera’? And do you think Michael Powell is being critical of the ‘male-gaze,’ or does Peeping Tom re-enforce it?

2. Horror films tend to deal with social anxiety. As a culture we are on the whole misogynistic, fearful of female sexuality and female generative powers. Discuss the opening of Carrie; what exactly is monstrous here? Is it Carrie’s apparent sensual pleasure, is it the presence of menstrual blood, or is it the ‘sign’ of female generative powers (e.g., in the presence of menstrual blood)? What can be said of the response from the other women?

3. “Like the midwife attending a birth who,” Christian Metz writes, “simply by her presence, assists the woman in labour, I am present for the film in a double capacity (though they are really one in the same) as witness and as assistant: I watch, and I help.”1  Insofar as Metz might describe it, how is the spectator in the selected sequence from Antonioni’s Blow Up [clip one, clip two], like a midwife? What can be said of the interplay of voyeurism and exhibitionism here? (You can use one, or both of the selected clips.)

1. Christian Metz, “Story/Discourse: Notes on Two Kinds of Voyeurism,” Movies and Methods Volume II, Bill Nichols, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 647.