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 in class with one excetion: you cannot write on a film on which you did the film clip exercise assignment: 
This paper 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, and it means perhaps paying attention to the film’s form and its genre rather than making stuff up not in the film or the text in order to make the film mean one thing. (This means letting things be what they are rather than making symbols out of them.)  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.)

Paper Topics (The topics listed below are far from being exhaustive. The questions are meant to get you asking questions of your own. Do not answer the questions below.) All of the topics involve general questions we have raised in class or that I have put up on the course description and on "how to destroy a film." Address these general topics concretely with reference to a single film on which you have not written for this class.

1. The concepts of "The End" and "death" to mark a transition in the history of cinema from silent to sound or celluloid to digital or film to media (film as part of the prehistory of media with the advent of digital computers). How does a film like The Artist or Lisbon Story put these ways of markng transtion into question by foregrounding what is not hear or what is not seen in cinema (the unseen being not ony what is not in a given shot but also what is archived in Lisbon Story, left as trash in an abandoned movie theater)?
2. We have seen many self-reflexive films, films about film and films that show audience watching a film. How do these film put into question the distinction we commonly draw between a silent film and a sound film? (If a silent film always had music and / or film explainers and sound film often moments of silence (unheard dialogue, for example).
3. How does the production of different editions of the same silent film on DVDs, blu-rays, and on the internet (archive.org; youtube) makes Usai's ditinction in Silent Film: An Introduction) between a film and it copies untenable? Does the existence of different digital deliveries make a philological criticism based on restoration and recovery (of the film's production history and box office, for example) impossible? Without cellulid projection as hte gold standard, how is one to evaluate differences in delivery (by streaming or discs)? Without an centralized archive that has all known digital editions, not just celluloid prints or negatives or interpositives, can one do philogical criticism at all? Or does the decentralization of the archive mean that criticism necessarily becomes more philological than ever but in ways that the object of criticism is media, not film (film no longer existing except in a few college film festivals)? We have seen that resotration always focuses on the image quality. What problems does composing soundtracks pose to the noiton that a restored film has really been restored? How do different soundtracks for a silent film on the same DVD or blu-ray further complicate Usai's distinction between a film and a copy? The Lodger and The Phantom of the Opera would be good films to discuss in relation to this topic.
4. Can film ever come to end? In The Artist, we see Georges burn all but one of his films. In Hugo, we see Melies burn his films. Yet it turns out he didn't burn them all, and we end up seeing a restrospective of some of the films he made that weren't destroyed. We also see the book at the library turning into a film and the pages that fly out of the box Isabelle accidentally knocks down are the source of A Trip to the Moon. How does the use of animation in these scenes of the history of film and of pre-production cinema change our understanding of what film is and what film history is. A related question that might be its own topic is about the meaning of the automaton. Why is it such an important plot element? How does its restoration obscure the question of film restoration (all of the silent films we see in Hugo have been digitally restored). And does it matter that Hugo is a 3D film? How has film survived in new media?