| Essays
should be five to six pages in length. The primary purpose of this paper
is to develop a persuasive thesis about the material at stake. I do not
expect you to carry out major research for your topic. What I would like
to see, however, is some closer reading of a selected scene or two in
order to illustrate your argument. Please do not hesitate to talk to me
about your topic so as to discuss it in further detail. Due date is December
15, 2004
Here are some suggestions:
- Whose body do we really
see during the credit sequence of Mad Love?
- Compare the politics of
lynching in Fury with the politics of mob mobilization in M.
- Compare Lang’s aesthetic
and ideological treatment of courtrooms in Fury and M.
- What do Lorre’s bulging
eyes tell us—in M as much as in Mad Love?
- To what extent is Lang
or Lorre a representative of what Gerd Gemünden calls an “ultimate
auteur,” i.e., “a director whose lack of industrial power
and aesthetic control resurfaces on the narrative and visual level of
a film as a story of being “out of control,” thereby turning
the film into an allegory of its director’s experience of displacement,
dispossession, and deprivation.”
- Compare the image of urban
space in Scarlet Street and M.
- Who is sovereign in M
if we define sovereignty according to the terminology of Weimar
decisionism? Why?
- Why does M continue
to speak to us today?
- Discuss exilic motifs in Peter Lorre’s directorial debut, Der
Verlorene, using or modifying the conceptual tools provided by
Hamid Naficy
- Discuss the last shot of Der Verlorene. To what extent can
we read this shot as Lorre’s attempt to kill off the shadows of
the past, including his career-making and career-breaking role as Hans
Beckert?
- Discuss images of Peter Lorre looking at the mirror in M,
Mad Love and Der Verlorene. What is their narrative
function? What do they reveal about Lorre’s different roles? About
his peculiar style of acting?
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