First Paper Due by Midnight, March 2. Please email it to me at (click here: [email protected])

General Comments:  This paper will be on a film we have watched since you did the film clip assignment:  Vertigo, Wild Strawberries, Taxi Driver, and Carnival of Souls. 
This assignment is more demanding than the film clip assignment: now you will not only read scenes or sequences very closely, with formal attention to editing, cinematography, mise-en-scene, and sound; in addition you will make a general interpretation about the film based on your close readings of particular scene or sequences in the film.  You will need a thesis, an argument that you can state in one sentence and that should go at the end of your first paragraph.
You are free to develop a paper topic of your own. You may write on any of the films we have watched except for the one on which you wrote your film clip exercise.  See Paper Guidelines.  The genre of your essay is a persuasive essay.  That means you are writing to persuade an audience that your interpretation of a film is right, and to do that, you have to use evidence from the film.  It means close reading the film, paying attention to HOW the story is told more than what the story is.  It means being a patient reader, tolerating ellipses, ambiguities, enigmas, and indeterminacies (parapraxes or other symptoms, in Freud's sense) and perhaps paying attention to the film’s genre rather than making stuff up not in the film or the text in order to make the film mean one thing. Films are not riddles to be solved by following clues, Carlo Ginzburg not withstanding.  (Even the film Clue has three endings.) If the film does not make sense, then you have to ask: why does the film not make sense?   Given that your essay is 2,000 words, you will have to select a small part or parts of the film to make your case about the meaning of something in the film more generally.   (You could discuss a kind of scene that relates to similar scenes, or a scene about a character that relates to the character in general.)
You need not draw directly on any of the readings.  Although I am asking you to do a psychoanalytic reading, I only expect to be familiar with the psychoanalytic vocabulary we have learned thus far in the semester (concepts like the slip, symptom, unconscious, repetition compulsion, repression, disturbed memories, the uncanny, the double, castration anxiety, the death drive, linear narrative and looping narratives) and that psychoanalytic readings are primarily structuralist (narrative structure, not sound, character, theme, dialogue or plot, has primacy; of course, you can talk about everything in a film.).   I also leave open what a psychoanalytic reading is and whether the films both invite and resist psychoanalytic readings.  I will say that the psychoanalytic reading is always a close reading of a film it assumes to have a cinematic unconscious (what we see – repetitions, for example--is as important as what we don’t see).  Moreover, a psychoanalytic reading does not always pay attention to what seems central but instead to what seems marginal; and a psychoanalytic reading may end up taking lots of detours, arriving at dead ends rather than “getting somewhere.” Remember that even Freud says several times in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life that his examples could have gone in other chapters. Moreover, he says both in "The Uncanny" and Beyond the Pleasure Principle that psychoanalysis makes no claim for originality, for being the first. A good psychoanalytic reading never knows where it’s going in advance. By the way, you should focus on the film you're discussing and use Freud only as he is relevant. Do not, that is, constructs a Freudian reading machine or program and then run the film through it.

Paper Topics (The topics listed below are far from being exhaustive. Feel free to combine elements of topics into a new topic or invent one of your own. The questions I've asked are meant to get you asking questions of your own. Do not answer the questions below.)

1. The dream sequence in Vertigo; the dreams in Wild Strawberries (WS); the psychiatrist in Vertigo says that Scottie is suffering from “acute melancholia and a guilt complex.” What is he suffering if diagnosed by a psychoanalyst?
2. Memory, dreams, forgetting, and misrecognition are present both in Vertigo and Wild Strawberries (WS): both Scottie and Isak have “weird” dreams, for example. Write on either film (not both). I compare them here in order to bring them both into better relief. In Vertigo, the dream, or nightmare, is a set-piece. In WS, however, distinctions between dreams, memories, dreams-within-dreams, memories, the present and the past are much less clear. What is the effect of separating the dream off from the rest of the film so clearly in Vertigo (even from other similar sequences whenwe are made to wonder if the dead really can possess the living). What is the effect of Bergman's blurring distinctions between dreams, memories, dreams-within-dreams, memories, the present and the past without our ever being unable to tell what is "real" and what is not. WS is much less clear about the limits of a dream than is Vertigo.  Also more obviously than Vertigo, WS blurs the present and the past and the present (Isak is always old, for example). (Scottie's hallucinations of the past as he opens his eyes while kissing Madeleine / Judy at the mission are marked as extraordinary by the circular camera movement and the music.) Vertigo is of course a very complex flm in its own right, no less so that WS.
3. The (apparently) dead coming back to life, the living dead:  when do you know you’re dead?  When do people die? Are the dead ever really dead? How do Vertigo, Wild Strawberries, and Carnival of Souls complicate our sense of what a means for a living person to be dead or a dead person to be alive, especially with respect to the repetition compulsion and repression.  Vertigo and Carnival of Souls are ghost stories; is Wild Strawberries a ghost story too? You might want to relate haunting to the uncanny?
4. Wild Strawberries and Taxi Driver areboth established initially through voice-over as the  autobiographies of the central character.  What happens to the voice-over during the film? Is the film Isak’s story?   
5. Is Carnival of Souls Mary Henry’s story?
6. The role of the detective in Vertigo as analyst. How does the film subvert the function of both the detective and the psychologist?  Why does the film dupe us, put us in a position very similar to Scottie's, at least until Judy writes the letter she never sends Scottie and delivers it insteda in voice-over?  
7. Doubles, the same actresses playing different roles in Vertigo and Wild Strawberries.   Father and son in WS.  How does the way a woman is doubled related to the way women matter to the main male character? You might consider mirrors and mirror images as well.
8. Voyeurism and guided tours.
9. The function of Gavin Elster in Vertigo: he certainly has Scottie’s number.  Does Scotte have an Oedipus complex? Is Scottie a machine, a kind of computer on which Elster runs a program, a kind of virus?   Does Scottie “clean” the virus by repeating the crime and acting it  out? Or does he wilfully blind himself?
10. The function of Midge in Vertigo. What is she doing in the film? Why does she have a bara displayed next to her desk? Why don't we learn why she dumped Scottie? Why is her painting a failure when she shows it to Scottie? Why don't we see what she does to it after he leaves? Why can't she get through to Scottie? Is she always right? Why does she drop out of the film after the mental asylum scene?
11.  Soundtracks.  Apart from Taxi Driver, the films we have watched are fairly dark in suggesting that the present and future are determined by the past; attempts to make what was represses conscious involve repeating the past, or repeating experiences (like dreams) in a way that turns out to be either highly idealized (Isak) or as mechanical as it is willed (Scottie).   How does the soundtrack contribute to making it appear that the main character has a death drive?