Category Archives: writing assignment

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Reminder: Project Proposal Due on Thursday, 4/22

This is a reminder that your project proposals are due in my inbox before class on Thursday the 22nd. I need to know the following:

Who is involved in the project? Is it a group or individual project? If the former, who is in the group?

What are you planning to do? Give me an idea of what you’re doing in as much detail as possible.

Why are you proposing what you are proposing? In a few sentences, describe the connection between your project and the themes and movies of this course. Why, in your opinion, does it make sense for you to do what you are proposing for the final project? Why and how does your proposed project fit the goals of this course?

Do you have any additional questions or requests? How might I help you with your project?

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Blog Assignment #3

Ok, bloggers, here’s the last round. I was really impressed with what you did with found material from the Internet so let’s do it again but with one new parameter.

For this next round of blog posts, I’d like you to once again do what you did for the last assignment: find something interesting on the Internet (video, image, blog post, a conversation on a forum, etc.) that relates to our films or to the broader themes of this course and respond to it, much as you did last time. This time however, don’t use YouTube. That’s right, no YouTube. We can discuss my reasons for this in class if you wish.

So feel free to scour Flickr.com, Photobucket.com, the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, Vimeo.com, Veoh.com, even the forums at movie sites like IMDB, Cinema Blend, or Movie-Vault. You can even try shopping sites like thinkgeek.com or even Google Products. Use your imagination. Just no YouTube.

Please don’t forget to embed or link to whatever you’re writing about and to tag your posts and to assign them to the “blog assignment #3” category.

I look forward to another great round of posts. So far, they’ve been truly great.

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Midterm Exam

This is a take-home exam due at the start of class on Thursday, April 8th.

Choose 3 of the following 5 questions (not including the extra credit question) and respond to each as thoroughly as you can. Each of your responses should be 2-3 double spaced pages in length. Be sure to address every part of each question you choose.

1. Is Romero’s Night of the Living Dead scary? Why or why not? If so, what about it frightened you? If not, how might it have been scarier? Does it still resonate for the reasons Phillips discusses?

2. Peter Dendle argues that movie zombies can be seen as a “barometer of cultural anxiety.” According to Dendle, the preponderance of zombie movies over the years, in other words, speaks to various anxieties and fears that inform a particular cultural moment. What other genre (or sub-genre) of movies speaks to our fears and anxieties in a similar way? How? Why? Has it evolved in a way that might be compared to zombie movies? Be sure to use plenty of specific evidence from movies or our readings to back up your arguments.

3. Watch Touch of Evil and pay careful attention to the final scene. Consider the last few lines, spoken by Marlene Dietrich’s character, and discuss their significance to the movie. What does she mean by “He was some kind of a man . . .What does it matter what you say about people?” How might we interpret that line? How might we connect it to the moral sensibility typical of film noir according to Schrader, Naremore, Grossman, or Borde and Chaumeton? Use evidence from the film and our readings to back up your argument.

4. Watch a movie released in the 1940s or 1950s (it can be one that’s assigned, recommended, or one you choose to watch on your own on Netflix or archive.org) and discuss how it does or does not adhere to one or more of guidelines for patriotic, anti-communist movies as delineated by Ayn Rand in her 1950 pamphlet, “Screen Guide for Americans.” Be sure to back up your assertions with evidence from the movie and Rand’s infamous pamphlet.

5. Released in 1964 by Columbia Pictures and based on similar source material, Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove both speak to prevailing fears and anxieties over the very real threat of global nuclear war. They do so, however, in distinctly different ways. Discuss how each film presents the threat of a nuclear apocalypse. What sort of conclusions do they seem to reach about the cold war conflict and the possibility of a doomsday scenario? Be sure to cite evidence from the films and our readings by Whitfielfd and Perrine in supporting your argument.

EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION (optional)
6. “Are you now, or have you ever been a Communist?”

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Blog Assignment #2

Since we’ll be reaching the end of our first posting cycle at the end of this week, here’s your next blog assignment:

1) find a video, audio file, blog post, image, article, or even a whole website that is somehow related to themes of this course or one or more of our assigned movies. (By themes I mean fear, anxiety, paranoia, most obviously, but also topics like zombies, nuclear war, conspiracy, terror, monsters, etc., etc.)

2) embed it or link to it somewhere in your post (make sure you credit the source) and

3) use it as a springboard for a substantive discussion of one or more of our assigned movies or ideas explored in our readings or in class discussion. You might talk about the connections between what you’ve found and our movies and themes or you might take an idea expressed in what you’ve found and explore it in the context of the movies we’re watching and the ideas that run through them. Feel free to run ideas past me if you’d like some help brainstorming. Please be sure to assign your post to the “blog assignment #2” category and to add 3 or 4 tags based on the themes your post covers, (e.g. “coldwar, zombies, fear”) You can enter tags just above where you select your categories.

You’re free to use anything you find in a Google or YouTube search but I encourage you to look beyond those and explore the Internet Archive, which is an amazing treasure trove of all sorts of media on an incredibly wide range of topics. You might play around on Flickr, Photobucket, Vimeo, delicious and the Creative Commons as well. You’re welcome to use any of the items I’ve posted to our class delicious account, but your choices will be rather limited. If you’re feeling more adventurous, you could try sites like WFMU’s Beware of the Blog or Ubuweb, a collection of avant-garde writing, video and audio.

If you have questions, please feel free to ask me in a comment or via email.

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Writing Assignment #2: Be the Critic

Double spaced, standard 12pt font (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, etc.), approximately 3 pages, stapled.

Due Thursday, Feb. 25th in class.

You have two options for this assignment:

1) Imagine that you are a contributor to a collection of brief essays on the influence of classic film noir on contemporary film. Choose a movie you’ve seen recently that you feel owes some significant debt to film noir of the 1940s and 1950s and discuss how your movie draws on, pays homage to, enters into conversation with, updates, or subverts the various thematic or stylistic elements that are typically associated with film noir. Be sure to draw on Schrader, Naremore, Grossman, or Borde and Chaumeton where approporiate to back up your arguments — chapter 5 of Naremore (now on the readings page) might prove especially useful. If you choose to work with Schrader (and you probably will want to), be mindful of Naremore’s take on his famous essay in chapter 1 of More Than Night. Try to be as specific as possible when talking about your movie — feel free to focus on individual scenes or even shots rather than merely broad themes. While you may wish to briefly summarize the movie you’ve chosen, please don’t spend a whole lot of time on plot summary — no more than a brief paragraph. The bulk of your essay should be devoted to analysis.

2) Imagine that you are a film critic writing for a special issue of a journal of film criticism devoted to the key ideas in Laura Mulvey’s famous essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Choose a recent film and discuss it through the theoretical lens Mulvey offers us in her essay, applying the concepts she uses to the themes, individual scenes, or even single shots of your movie. Do, in other words, with your movie what Mulvey does with Vertigo, Marnie, and Rear Window toward the end of her essay. (If you are interested in discussing a movie that you feel subverts the structures of looking that Mulvey talks about, or if you wish to offer a critique of Mulvey’s persepctive in relation to a given film, please let me know and I will give you several critiques and analyses of Mulvey to work with.) Be as specific as possible and use Mulvey to support your arguments. To make your life easier, here are some notes on Mulvey that outline her central ideas.

Regardless of which option you choose, try to be as focused and as specific in your discussion as possible. You don’t have a lot of room for a broad, wide ranging discussion so try to keep it somewhat narrow. Please feel free to run ideas by me or to show me drafts. I will be happy to discuss any aspect of this assignment with you and will help you work out your arguments as best I can. What I am looking for here, more than anything else, is how well you articulate and support your arguments with evidence from your movies and the text. If you have questions about this assignment, please feel free to post theme here in a comment.

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Blogging Assignment and Posting Schedule

As I noted on the syllabus, participation on this blog, both posting and commenting, counts towards your participation grade. So, if you have not done so already, please add yourself as a member of this blog. Instructions for doing this are here.

I am asking all of you to post to the blog at least 3 times over the course of the semester. The posting schedule can be downloaded here. Please post a response to the prompt below by your scheduled date but feel free to post more often on related topics as well.

I also ask that you read and comment substantively on others’ posts. The more you comment, the livelier the blog will be. I am not going to require you to comment a specific number of times but will suggest that you should try to comment at least two or three times a week. If you are someone who tends not to speak much during class discussion, commenting frequently is a great way to make up for that and ensure that your participation grade does not suffer. I’ll say more about commenting in class.

At this point, you’re probably wondering what it is you will be blogging about. Rightly so. So here’s the blogging prompt for the first round of posts (I’ll give you a new one around the 1st week of March):

The Prompt

Pick a a scene, a character, a single frame, a sequence of shots, basic plot, or any other element from a movie (required, recommended or one one you’ve seen on your own) and connect it to either 1) any of the main themes of this class — fear, anxiety, and paranoia, or, 2) an idea explored in any of our readings, whether those assigned already or those that will be assigned by the time your post is due.

For example, you might write a post where you explore how Peter Lorre’s character in M might be said to exhibit paranoia, or you might consider the 1931 Dracula from the perspective of the definition of fear we read for our second class. You might even discuss the figure of Lugosi’s Count Dracula and what Phillips says about him in light of various contemporary, updated vampires we see in movies like Blade,  Twilight or Daybreakers.

Use your imagination. Be creative. Feel free to link to other sites and to incorporate images, video or other media into your posts (YouTube, Flickr, Photobucket, or Google Images can be goldmines.)

Please be sure to select “blog assignment #1” in the list of categories on the right before you publish your post.

Before you write: Keep in mind that your post is not a term paper. It should be more exploratory and open ended (not to mention shorter). Your post’s goals are to 1) enable you and your readers to play around with new and interesting ideas and 2) to generate conversation rather than present a finished, polished argument. I don’t expect you to have all the answers, but to move towards finding them. Don’t be afraid to ask your readers questions.

I am happy to discuss post ideas with you so if you are stuck and don’t know what to post about, let me know and we can brainstorm together. If you have questions about the blogging assignment in general or any aspect of the prompt above, feel free to ask it in the comments to this post.

A Note on Blogging: A blog is a kind of online journal or diary. Blog posts are usually less formal and more conversational than the sort of academic writing you are typically asked to do. There is more room for creativity and experimentation here than in the typical academic paper in no small part due to the fact that you can easily incorporate various media — still images, video, or audio.

Your audience and purpose are different here as well. You’re writing not for a professor to whom you hope to demonstrate mastery of your subject matter, but sharing ideas with a broader audience — your “readership” — who, in this case consists of your classmates, me, and whoever happens to visit our site and read your post. Keep in mind that your writing to this blog is public — don’t be surprised if you get a comment form someone not enrolled in this class.

Try to have fun with your posts and comments. Keep in mind that this is your space. You are now a member of what’s typically called a “group blog” where multiple authors contribute posts on related topics — in this case, fear, anxiety and paranoia and the movies.

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Response Paper #1: Significance Statement

Double spaced, standard 12pt font (Times New Roman, Arial, Verdana, etc.), approximately 2 pages.
Due Thursday, Feb. 4 in class.

The assignment:
Choose a short passage (1-3 sentences) from one of the assigned readings (Phillips, Monaco, Plantinga, or the 3 entries from the Dictionary of Psychoanalysis that you found particularly interesting, illuminating, infuriating, or otherwise significant and write a brief essay discussing this passage and why you think it is important to the the central arguments of the reading as you understand it. Please include your passage at the top of the page and be sure to note the author and the source, including page number.

Consider the following questions and use them to help you formulate a response; you don’t have to answer every one. What does the passage mean? Does it mean something different on its own than it does in the context of this essay? Why? How are the ideas in the passage related to the author’s main argument? What can you say about the meanings of individual words, particularly the technical terms? Do particular words have more than one meaning in the sentence? Try to really dig into the quote you’ve chosen — look at it as closely as you can.

Some Tips:
Before you start writing, take some time looking at your quote, taking notes, looking up words, or whatever else you need to do to formulate your argument. Try to have some sort of idea of what you will say before you start writing. Good planning is a large part of good writing.

Support your arguments with evidence from movies and/or the text. Make sure you back up your assertions.

Don’t worry about impressing your reader with fancy vocabulary and sophisticated syntax; big words and convoluted sentence structure do not necessarily make good writing. Don’t use a thesaurus and make sure that you know the meaning of each word you use. Work to get your thoughts across clearly and accurately rather than to impress your reader. Substance is much more important here than style but proofread carefully and avoid careless mistakes.

If any of this is unclear, or if you think you might have misunderstood the instructions, be sure to let me know. You can post a question in a comment if you’d like or email me.