Reference no: EM132318780

Paper 1: Cinema and Reality

Please write a philosophical essay in response to the following prompt:

What is the relationship between cinema and reality, according to Hugo Münsterberg, André Bazin, and Jean Epstein? Do they agree or disagree with one another? As part of your explanation and comparison of their views, please choose one of the four films we watched during the first week (His Girl Friday, City Lights, Bicycle Thieves, Rashomon) and show how each of the three thinkers' understanding of the cinema-reality relationship applies to or in that one film.

Be sure to address yourself not only to an answer to the question, but also to providing your reader with an account of why you believe your answer to be correct. What are your reasons for understanding these philosophers in the ways you do? In order to justify the claims in your paper to your reader, you must offer substantiation for your claims with quotations from the texts. Quotations are absolutely required; papers that do not use direct quotations to support the claims they make will receive a failing grade. Papers that quote only one or two of the three thinkers will not receive a grade higher than a C.

Please do not consult any sources or resources other than the films specified and the relevant readings from The Continental Philosophy of Film Reader (this includes only the writings by the authors named above, and not the introductory material written by the editor and set in italics before each chapter; quoting posts from the Class Blog is also forbidden). Papers that cite from other sources will not be acceptable; papers that rely significantly on other sources without citation will be considered plagiarism.

The paper should be no less than 3 pages long, typed and double-spaced. Use an 11- or 12-point font with reasonable margins. Citations should be in either the MLA or Chicago Manual of Style formats (information on both of which is available on the UHD Library website, under the heading, "Citing Sources"), and as such must give full bibliographical information for the text in either a "works cited" (MLA) or bibliographical footnotes (Chicago). Quotations should be set off from the rest of the paper (typically by quotation marks), and you must cite the page numbers in the text where the quoted passage appears. Late papers will only be accepted if you have made arrangements with me in advance for an extension; given the brevity of the summer term, extensions will only be granted in the most extenuating of circumstances.