Reference no: EM132968058 , Length: 1900 Words

Question: Answer two of the following questions using specific examples from the readings, lecture handouts and screenings as appropriate. Your answer should be about 1000 words for each question and your total word count for this assignment should not exceed 2000 words. When citing information from articles, place the author's name before a comma and the page number in parentheses like so (name, page #) after quotes or paraphrasing. This assignment will reward you for carefully reading the course articles and thoughtfully analyzing screenings used in class. The approximate page count for the assignment is 8. (If you need to expand your word count to complete your responses, please do so, but use good judgment).

1. What are the three primary characteristics that David Bordwell uses to separate "classical" cinema from "art" cinema in his essay "The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice?" According to Bordwell's model, is David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) an art film? Using three examples from the film, argue whether or not the film qualifies as art cinema. Finally, how do Lynch's films Eraserhead (1977) and Mulholland Drive (2001) voice a singular and alternate worldview to those in mainstream cinema, while expressing his unique style as a director?

2. How does Francis Ford Coppola, a filmmaker committed to epic storytelling and the art cinema mode of film production marry the two in two ways during his unprecedented artistic output of the 1970s namely in The Conversation (1974) and Apocalypse Now (1979)? How does sound design play a crucial role in these films as both an expressive and realistic formal component that complements their imagery and subject matter? Finally what is Michel Chion's theory of the "acousmêtre" in cinema and how does Coppola use it The Conversation to great visceral effect?

3. According to film critic Robert Kolker in Cinema of Loneliness, what major effect does the struggle between "realism" and "expressionism" produce in the films of Martin Scorsese? How does his film work point to his presence as the primary guiding force, invested in not just telling a story but showing how a story is being told? How is this evident in The Last Waltz (1979) and Raging Bull (1980)? Finally, how is Raging Bull a film about image-making, detailing the fraught process of producing Jake LaMotta's persona while inventing a history for 1940s Italian Americans that was largely ignored by classical Hollywood cinema?

4. According to Warren Buckland in "The Role of the Auteur in the Age of the Blockbuster," which examines our contemporary moment of mass(ive) film production, what is the singular quality that defines "internal authorship", and why must it be reconciled with so-called "external authorship" for Steven Spielberg to reach the highest echelon of success and be in Buckland's assessment an auteur? What two things characterize Spielberg's internal authorship and how are they evident in Jaws (1975) E.T. (1982) and Saving Private Ryan (1998)? Finally, which filmmaker does Buckland name as a capable external author but not an internal one and why?

5. What is a primary criticism that the literary icon Amiri Baraka levels on Spike Lee in his article "Spike Lee at the Movies?" Do you think that his films Malcolm X (1992) and Jungle Fever (1991) privilege a middle-class black perspective at the expense of other valid viewpoints? How are those films engaged in the work of raising a collective American consciousness about the place of race in post-civil rights era U.S. society in the 1990s? How do they point to Lee's thematic concerns and visual style that mark him as a film auteur?

6. How does media scholar Glen Mimura historically align burgeoning Asian American media practices with the radical tradition of Third Cinema in the 1970s in his chapter "In the Afterglow of Regenerative Violence"? What two formal qualities or thematic tendencies tie together Justin Lin's Finishing the Game (2007) and Better Luck Tomorrow (2002)? As a filmmaker, what characterizes Justin Lin's visual style? How is the foregrounding of Asian American youth culture in Better Luck Tomorrow innovative? How does the narrative focus on these Asian American characters and their concerns in the film paradoxically both culturally specific and universal?

7. According to Ntongela Masilela, what are two conditions that spurred the emergence of the Los Angeles School of Black Filmmakers in the 1970s? How do the films Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1978) and Sankofa (Haile Gerima, 1993) express the movement's "fundamental tenet" of opposing Hollywood? Finally, in what two ways is Julie Dash's breakthrough representation of Gullah culture in Daughters of the Dust a deeply expressive work of personal vision?