Assignment One:

1. In The Battle of Algiers some FLN members have disguised themselves to blend into the background of the French district. We are given close-ups of average French people (even little children eating ice cream), and we know what is about to happen to them, and yet the spectator probably has little sympathy for them. These people are ‘seemingly innocent,’ and yet we are rooting for the FLN. How is this achieved? In what ways might suture help to achieve this counter-intuitive affect, where we ‘root for babies to be blown to bits.’

2.  Guy Debord writes in his Society of the Spectacle that, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images”(¶4). And again he notes, “It is rather a Weltanschauung [a world-view] which has become actual, materially translated”(¶5). How does Gus Van Sant ‘make the spectacle material’ in his film Elephant? How does his cinematic grammar illustrate how the spectacle might mediate social relationships? What possible comparisons are being made between so-called ‘first-person-shooter’ games and Van Sant’s cinematic style?

3. In Fight Club Tyler markets and sells a commodity: soap. Discuss how exchange-value is dramatically increased by the time it is sold in department stores. Discuss this particularly in the context of Marx’s discussion of the “magnitude of the value” of a commodity on pages 38 and 39. Discuss how capital/the spectacle is subverted in Fight Club?

4. The cannibalistic zombies in Dawn of the Dead are often interpreted as mindless consumers. What is the implication of setting zombies in a shopping mall? How does Dawn of the Dead, by setting zombies within the context of a shopping mall, illustrate the Marxist thesis: “the productive origins of commodities are easily forgotten.”1  

5.  Much of Elephant is depicted as a dérive, as drifting – wandering through the corridors of a high school. Discuss how Michelle’s ‘confrontation’ with the gymnasium might be “therapeutic.” How does this confrontation possibly challenge, or attempt to work-through her own issues concerning ‘body image’? And how might we contextualize Michelle’s concerns regarding ‘body image’ as an aspect of the spectacle economy? (See for example ¶17). In what ways does wearing ‘granny-panties’ single Michelle out?


 1. Stephen Harper, “Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate: George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead,” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture 1900 to Present, vol. 1, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 13. http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm

Assignment Two:

 1. The Valley of the Dolls in the context of Irigaray’s ideas (provide specific examples from the text). How are prostitutes ‘different’ from other women (e.g., wives, mothers, daughters)? What ‘value’ do prostitutes have? In what ways do prostitutes circulate in the patriarchal economy? And in what ways is the Jennifer North character treated in Valley of the Dolls? Is there a difference between the character Jennifer North and the actress Sharon Tate? What is the possible effect of screening a film within a film? Is this in anyway ‘revealing’ of the patriarchal economy? In many ways we might think of actresses, movie starlets, or sex symbols as prostitutes.

2. At the beginning of Kelly Dennis’s article, "Leave to Beaver: The Object of Pornography," she says, "What cannot be seen in pornography is displaced onto what can be seen: onto both the "hydraulics of male ejaculation" and the expression of ecstasy on the woman’s face ­ often coupled in the film cum shot onto the woman’s face."1 One of the ‘problems’ with representing female sexuality is that it doesn’t necessarily have a ‘visual’ equivalent to male ejaculate (i.e., there is no visual ‘proof’ of climax). Does  Carolee Schneemann's 1967 Fuses attempt to represent the female orgasm? If so, how? In what ways might Schneeman giving 'a positive voice' to female sexuality? Does Schneemann’s gender shape the aesthetic of Fuses?

 3. Apply Laura Mulvey’s ideas to The Stepford Wives. A group of conspiring husbands transform the wives of Stepford into ‘perfect women’, how does this potentially relate to Mulvey/Freud’s conception of fetishism? What is the significance the ‘real women’ vs. the ‘robot’? What does this possibly say about ‘male desire’? Given Mulvey’s ideas are the women of Stepford punished, transformed into fetish objects, or perhaps both?

4. Manthia Diawara writes that “Mise-en-scene, or the formal disposition of objects in front of the camera, is a pleasure to look at in Looking for Langston. The plastic beauty of the images in classic black and white film, and the construction of male body parts in the same way that Hollywood fetishizes its goddesses of the screen, position the spectator to identify with the camera.”2 Is this ‘objectification’ of the black male body ‘positive’? In what possible ways does Julien ‘sanction’ the spectator’s voyeurism? How does Julien manage to make the male body appealing to a heterosexual spectator, or perhaps the question should be, does he make black male bodies appealing across sexual orientation?

5. Pasolini frames the language of cinema as a “cinema of poetry,” and emphasizes that the “cinema of poetry” allows for the “camera to be felt.” He also suggests that the cinema of poetry might be found in 'im-signs' and 'free indirect discourse.' How might Pasolini’s ideas apply to Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book? I might suggest looking at the following article which is available via JSTOR:
Bruno, Giuliana. "Heresies: The Body of Pasolini's Seomiotics." Cinema Journal vol. 30, no. 3 (Spring 1991): 29 - 41.

1. Kelly Dennis, "Leave it to Beaver: The Object of Pornography," in Strategies for Theory: From Marx to Madonna, Randy L. Rutsky and Bradley J. Macdonald, eds. (Albany: State University of New York, 2003), 187.
2. Manthia Diawara, “The Absent One: The Avant-Garde and the Black Imaginary in Looking for Langston,” Wide Angle, vol. 13, no. 3-4 (July-October 1991), 100.
Final Paper

  1. Bill Nichols divides non-sync sound/image combinations into three categories: illustration, counterpoint, and extension. Categorize each clip accordingly. Provide justification for each characterization (i.e., why would you categorize a particular clip as ‘illustration’ as opposed to ‘counterpoint’). The clips are from the following films:
    1. The Fog of War
    2. Mr. Death
    3. Night and Fog
    4. Blood in the Face
  2. In ethnographic and documentary film authority is in the voice-over, in the presentation and mastery of images, or in expert testimony. In what ways is authority presented in the Guatinaui performance? What makes us, or the visitors believe that what is being presented is ‘authentic’? Nichols establishes how regimes of ‘authority’ are configured in ethnographic films. How are those regimes of ‘authority’ revealed here? Using the selected clip also apply Nichol’s analogy to ethnographic film to pornography.
  3. Bill Nichols discusses the dissemination of (scientific) knowledge in his writing on ethnography. He compares knowledge to cargo on a ship; it is transported, unchanged from one ship to another. Nichols is working towards a different mode of ethnography, one that doesn’t necessarily relate ‘cognitive knowledge,’ but leaves room for an visceral or emotive dimension as well, as he says an ethnography “that will not abolish experience, the body, and knowledge from the belly but affirm it.”1 In what ways does the Guatinaui performance enact this alternative form of ethnography? Is there a visceral dimension to the performance, and if so how is it elicited?
  4. Trinh T. Minh-ha in her writing and her filmmaking, such as we find in Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, continually questions the possibility of representing the ‘reality’ of a particular culture. In what ways does Minh-ha use the conventions of ‘reality,’ only to undermine the whole convention? 
  5. Toshio Matsumoto is an important figure when considering the theoretical issues pertaining to ‘documentary realism.’ Abe Mark Nornes comments that, the “shifting attention to [the cinematic] surface, process, and detail may well embody the qualities Matsumoto called for in evoking the unheimlich [uncanny] lurking beneath the sure surfaces of documentary realism.”2  Although not a documentary per se, discuss how Matsumoto seems to employ these ideas to Funeral Parade of Roses [clip 1, 2]. If it is useful compare the selected clip to the opening of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour.
1. Bill Nichols, "The Ethnographer's Tale," in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from VAR 1990-1994, Lucien Taylor, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 69.
2. Abé Mark Nornes, “The Postwar Documentary Trace: Groping in the Dark,” positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 10, no. 1 (Spring 2002), 53.