ARTS1060 Final Essay Questions 2024
Answer TWO questions. Word limit 1000 words per question. Total 2000 words (excluding
bibliography). 10% over or under the work limit is acceptable.
Before commencing, make sure that you have read the Assessment Criteria and Essay Guidelines
and Requirements available on Moodle. Please ensure that the referencing style and presentation of
your work adheres to the course Referencing and Style Guide, also available on Moodle. Harvard
style is also permitted; all quotations and paraphrasing must include page numbers of the original
text. eg. (Schatz 2004, p. 691). Marks will be determined according to the extent to which your
essays adhere to or depart from the guidelines and assessment criteria in Moodle.
NOTE: You cannot write on the same films in both essays. You are NOT permitted to write on a
topic that corresponds to your tutorial presentation.
Submit both your essays in a single document. Make sure that the document you submit is the correct
version. Do not contact your tutor with an updated or corrected file. This will not be marked. Include
the question number on the first page of each essay.
SELECT TWO OF THE FOLLOWING QUESTIONS
Word Limit: 1000 words each question (total 2000 words)
You are NOT permitted to write on the same topic as your tutorial presentation.
1. Mise-en-scène
Film openings are thresholds: they mark a passage from an everyday world to a world constructed in
cinematic terms. Traditionally, the mechanics of this process are hidden; this is to create the
impression that the world that forms the basis of the story has always been there. Analyse two films
screened in the course where the operations of mise-en-scène render this process of world-building
explicit, rather than implicit. How does this shift our experience of the film? Your answer needs to
include detailed and accurate analysis of specific scenes and the formal elements that comprise
mise-en-scène.
2. Auteurism
In its most progressive guise, the auteur is an effect of style, rather than simply a biographical
person. With reference to the films of two auteurs studied in the course, explain what is of value in
this reconceptualization. How does it shift the assumptions and practices of filmic analysis that
underpin an auteurist approach to cinema? Your answer needs to include detailed and accurate
analysis of specific scenes and the formal elements that comprise an ‘authorial signature.’
3. Narrative & Narration
‘A film’s narration not only manipulates degrees of knowledge but also manipulates the depth of our
knowledge. . . Just as there is a spectrum between restricted and unrestricted narration, there is a
continuum between objectivity and subjectivity.’ (Bordwell, 85) Discuss how this relationship
between restricted and unrestricted narration as well as objectivity and subjectivity operate in two
films screened during the course. Your answer needs to include detailed and accurate analysis of
specific scenes and formal elements.
4. Editing & Montage
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson cite Eisenstein as the basis for their claim that discontinuity
editing, in contrast to classical continuity editing, invites the viewer to make emotional and
conceptual connections between shots (Film Art, 12th edition, p.259). Explore this claim via
Eisenstein’s various forms of montage, explaining how they produce effects that are different from
continuity editing style. Your answer needs to include detailed and accurate analysis of specific
scenes and formal elements related to both Soviet montage and continuity editing in two films
studied in the course.
5. Sound
In a good film, the heard space is, at the very least, as dynamic as the visual space. This is to say that
with all films we need to look closely at the construction of not only the optical, but also the auditory
point of view or, better, the ‘point of audition.’ The idea of a point of audition is concerned with the
matter of where a sound comes from and whose auditory capacities a film invites us to share.
Analyse two films screened in the course where the possibility of identifying a point of audition is
questioned. In what ways does this occur? Your answer must provide an accurate and detailed
analysis of specific filmic moments and evidence a close engagement with the ideas and concepts
presented in the lecture.
6. Genre
The study of film genres and genre films lies at the intersection of three approaches to the cinema:
the industrial, the historical and the critical. Drawing on concepts and ideas about genre discussed in
the lecture and set readings, how do these three approaches shed light on Unforgiven’s relationship to
the Western? Your answer needs to include detailed and accurate analysis of specific scenes and
formal elements in this film and others of the genre.
7. Documentary
The Essay Film is not as a new form of documentary, but rather is the distillation of a particular
tension that has characterized documentary cinema since its inception, a tension between the impulse
to document experience and the necessity to narrate what this experience might mean. The Essay
Film converts this tension into a process of critical self-reflection—on its processes, operating
assumptions and outcomes. With this statement in mind and drawing on key concepts about
documentary film presented in the lecture and set readings, how does Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners
and I engage in this process of critical self-reflection? Your answer needs to include detailed and
accurate analysis of specific scenes and formal elements from the film.
8. Weimar Cinema
Anton Kaes describes Fritz Lang’s M as ‘[a]t once a documentary of Berlin’s underworld and a
modernist art film, it oscillated between detailed reportage and abstract ornament’ (p. 27). Utilising
your understanding of how films work stylistically developed through the course, analyse the ways
in which the film both documents its times and experiments with various cinematic techniques. How
does this experimentation mark the film as a late example of Weimar Cinema? Your answer must
provide an accurate and detailed analysis of specific scenes and filmic moments from Fritz Lang’s
M (1931).