FILM2002 A4 Major Project

Due date: May 30, 2025 (see dropbox in Canvas)
Length: 1750-2000 words or 8-12mins’ duration

This final assessment task allows students to apply their
learning in film genre by producing an essay in EITHER written
or video form. Major projects will need to critically engage
with core ideas and texts throughout the course, and demonstrate
deep engagement with selected film works and secondary
scholarship.
Your essay should include no fewer than 8 secondary sources
cited in your bibliography. These sources should be in addition
to any films included in your bibliography.
The written essay must conform to the principles of academic
essay writing. For a great site on academic writing in the essay
form, see: https://students.unimelb.edu.au/academic-
skills/resources/reading,-writing-and-
referencing/essays/writing-a-great-essay

For this task, it is essential that you watch Bruce’s
instructional video on ‘Essay Production for Academic Work’
(available in Canvas from Friday May 9).

Major projects must conform to the following:
• Either an 8-12 minute video essay, comprised of images,
sounds, text, and/or voice-over in an argument-based
structure.
• Or a written essay, using the conventions of the
traditional essay with an introduction, body, conclusion,
and bibliography.
• All works must include a bibliography of sources cited –
for video essays, include a final slide in your video with
all sources identified. All source material should be
formatted to Chicago 17th edition style guide:
https://www.library.sydney.edu.au/support/referencing/chica
go-17th. Footnotes in written essays should cite page
numbers.


Essay Topics
For your essay, you have the option of selecting one of the
topics provided below or designing and developing your own topic
in consultation with your tutor.
If developing your own topic, you will need to provide your
tutor with a thesis statement (1 paragraph and a list of 4
sources) by email no later than May 20.
Regardless of whether you use one of the topic statements below
or develop your own, or whether you work in video or written
form, your essay must have title. Make your title catchy,
provocative, and engaging. I should read your title and want to
go on!!

Topics – select ONE as the basis for your essay:

1. Genre form is always, already, a politics of
representation.

Discuss with reference to:
i. The commodification of human and/or other bodies, using
Titane and The Substance as central to your argument;
ii. Resistance to authority and tradition, using Titane,
Roma, and/or Civil War as central to your argument.

2. A filmmaker cannot be both an ‘auteur’ and a genre writer-
director.

Discuss using Ang Lee, David Lynch, and/or Alfonso Cuaròn
as central to your argument. In your essay, you will need
to engage in scholarship on both genre theory and history
(which we’ve considered extensively in the unit) and auteur
theory.

3. “Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency
from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity
. . . instituted through a stylized repetition of acts.
Further, gender is instituted through the stylization of
the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way
in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of
various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding
gendered self . . . Significantly, if gender is instituted
through acts which are internally discontinuous, then the
appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed
identity, a performative accomplishment.”
Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution:
An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988)

Discuss with reference at least two of the following: Blue
Velvet, Roma, Titane, and The Substance. Note Butler’s
emphasis on the notion of an ‘appearance of substance’.

4. Cinematic realism is no more than a generic ‘special
effect’. Discuss with reference to Roma, 2001: A Space
Odyssey, and/or Civil War.

5. Discussing the media and cultural transformations wrought
by major streaming studios, Gerald Sims writes: “For genre
studies, the notion that a media company can reconfigure
genre in delivering particular films to individual viewers
brings grave implications.”

Discuss with reference to Civil War and one other A24 film.


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