ESSAY 3
Select one of the following eight questions and write a response of approximately
5 pages. Feel free to modify the topic, but please discuss any modification
with me in person before you start writing. Submissions should be typed
and double-spaced. Please return the essay by December 5, 4 pm.
- Compare Ingmar Bergman's notion of art cinema to either Godard's
or Herzog's self-conception as an auteur director.
- Name a variety of visual, aural, and narrative strategies that typify
films such as Breathless or Persona as "art cinema."
Provide examples!
- What would Dogme 95 say about Persona? What would Bergman
say about Dogme 95? (Materials: Dogme
Manifesto | Dogme
"Vow of Chastity")
- Herzog's Aguirre, Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment,
and Sembene's Xala articulate their respective critiques of
colonial or neocolonial power with the help of certain images of masculinity.
Compare and contrast the different ways in which these three films
represent colonial relations as crises of masculine identity.
- Compare the relation of past and present, tradition and progress,
in two of the following three films: Aguirre, Memories of
Underdevelopment, Xala.
- Does Herzog's Aguirre work as a critique of colonialism?
How does the film articulate this critique?
- Does Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment work as a critique
of neocolonialism? To what extent does the film live up to what Solanas
and Gettino call a Third Cinema?
- On page 222 of "On National Culture," Frantz Fanon describes
different positions of the native bourgeois and intellectual in a
colonial context. Recapitulate and comment on Fanon's theory and discuss
the extent to which it can help to explain the social and cultural
dynamic in Xala.
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