LITERATURE AND CINEMA outline

Answer two of the following questions. Your two answers, taken together, should not exceed 1500 words and you should provide a total word count for your paper at the end of your answers. Papers of excessive length will be penalised. You may not write on the same text/s twice. You should base each of your answers on a critical engagement with at least one text from the course relevant to the topic, and, unless specifically directed otherwise by the question, you will be expected to make some reference to an associated text from the alternative medium. Thus, in Question 4 if you write on ‘A Modest Proposal’, you should also make some reference to either Borat or A Sense of History or both; however, in Question 1(a) you may write only on La Jete´e, or in Question 7 you may write only on Of Time and the City. In general a good paper will refer to three texts in some detail, and critically engage with both mediums in at least one answer. Please note that rules of plagiarism will be strictly enforced and you should reference all sources where appropriate (material available from the course website may be referred to as ‘accessed from Literature and Cinema Blackboard site’). There is, however, no requirement to use outside sources as you might in an essay, but rather as you would normally in preparing for an examination. Your questions begin on the following page. Question 1: La Jete´e /12 Monkeys Either (a) Chris Marker called La Jete´e a photo-roman, rather than a short film. In what ways do you find it critically useful to consider La Jete´e as a literary text? Or, in what ways do you find it critically inhibiting to do so? Or (b) While Twelve Monkeys and La Jete´e are considered primarily science-fiction films, both incorporate a number of other genres. Discuss the ways in which genre is employed in these films to guide, or subvert, spectator expectation. Or (c) The Maltese Falcon, Oedipus Rex, and Rope all have central characters who solve puzzles. What is the puzzle at the heart of Twelve Monkeys, and do either James Cole or Kathryn Railly come close to solving it? Or (d) Twelve Monkeys is ‘inspired by’ La Jete´e, rather than an adaptation. How might we read this ‘inspiration’ when considering Twelve Monkeys as a highly intertextual film? Or (e) How would you generically classify La Jete´e and Twelve Monkeys? If they are generically similar, how does this bear on your reading of the two films? If they are generically different, how is this so if they have essentially the same narrative? Or (f) Through various visual and auditory tools, Twelve Monkeys attempts to reinterpret the claustrophobic paranoia of La Jete´e, but their different historical contexts and mediums impact this expression of paranoia: Twelve Monkeys is almost always an external threat, the constant reality of surveillance, the possibility of capture; La Jete´e is more of an existential threat, the visibility of dreams, the intrusion into the mind. Discuss Or (g) Film, as audio-visual medium, is an art of duration. How does La Jete´e encourage its viewers to interrogate conventions of film form and spectatorship? Question 2: Tragedy and Thriller Either (a) ‘Irony was a fundamental feature of ancient tragedy and the view of life it inspired, yet it may be argued that some modern cinematic genres – such as the mystery or the thriller – are similarly motivated by an ironic sense.’ Discuss Or (b) Rope is notorious for its use of the ‘long take’, although this was an experiment that Hitchcock did not pursue further. In your view, in what ways does this stylistic feature add to or detract from the cinematic experience, and in what ways is it appropriate or inappropriate to the narrative that unfolds? Or (c) As a ‘family medium’ cinema was obliged to imply many things that were forbidden during the period of the Production Code Authority. In light of this consider the then taboo subject of homosexuality in Rope, and discuss how this is constructed and how it figures within the narrative. Or (d) To what extent do you find it useful to consider Rope through the lens of tragedy, and specifically through Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex? Alternatively, to what extent do you find this approach a distraction? Question 3: Comedy and Satire Either (a) Satire is a sort of glass [mirror], wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. Jonathan Swift If you're going to get into social criticism with absurdity and satire, you can't be politically correct when you do that. Satire is a lesson, parody is a game. John Cusack Vladimir Nabokov Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will, but ill will from a higher point of view [...] hatred against the bogged-down vileness of average man as against the possible heights that humanity might attain. Paul Klee Hey – comedy is not pretty. [Ad lib to audience groaning at joke.] Steve Martin Use one or more of these perspectives as a point of departure for a discussion of comedy and satire in literature and cinema (you may concentrate on one medium more than the other if you wish). Or (b) ‘In a broad sense the “mockumentary” is often seen as a peculiarly postmodern form, and yet its elements have been there, in one form or another, for centuries.’ Discuss Or (c) ‘The function of the satiric persona is to give vice and folly a human face, to elucidate and help us recognize the full implications of ideas, attitudes and perspectives which we might otherwise miss in our day to day transactions with a busy world.’ Discuss Or (d) To what extent are genre conventions and expectations important to the satirist, and to their audience? Or (e) Gulliver's Travels and Borat both satirise versions of the traveller-ambassador, while A Modest Proposal and A Sense of History parody expository formats associated with an elite (the essay and the manor house documentary); all make use of some manner of grotesquerie to question genre-specific notions of teaching and learning. Choose one or two of these texts and consider the question of the social value and effect of satire in relation to the satiric modes and devices employed (e.g. Horatian satire, Juvenalian satire, parody, use of the persona, and so on). Question 4: Non-Fiction and Documentary Either (a) John Grierson famously defined documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. Critically discuss the intersections of authorial creativity and the presentation of reality in The Fog of War or Behind Bars, with reference, if appropriate, to Tom Wolfe’s ‘New Journalism’. Or (b) ‘Some documentarians believe it is their responsibility to communicate a point of view; others believe it is their duty to have none.’ Discuss. Or (c) What interested me was not simply the discovery that it was possible to write accurate nonfiction with techniques usually associated with novels and short stories. It was that—plus. It was the discovery that it was possible in nonfiction, in journalism, to use any literary device, from the traditional dialogisms of the essay to stream-of-- consciousness, and to use many different kinds simultaneously, or within a relatively short space . . . to excite the reader both intellectually and emotionally. Tom Wolfe Paying close attention to form and style, examine how non-fiction literary and/or filmic texts may appeal to both emotional and intellectual faculties. Discuss. Or (d) The Fog of War was based on this belief that I could tell history from the inside out... [It] is a movie that eschews balance. It has no interest in balance, as such. It takes a subjective account of one man and examines it. Often it is set off against the historical record. Set off against evidence – documents, presidential recordings – with the hope of creating a kind of tension between how McNamara and the viewer experienced history Discuss. Or (e) As non-fiction texts are not reproductions but rather representations of reality, ethical questions to do with such representation may be raised. In Behind Bars or The Fog of War consider the question, ‘who speaks for whom?’ Question 5: Poetry and Cinema Either (a) To what extent, and to what effect, does the poetry on which they are based influence the filmic aesthetics of either Howl or Bright Star, or both? Or (b) What Keats wrote about negative capability was very helpful. It explained the way I work, staying in the mystery, not intellectualising. That's where I found the answer; he said he wanted a life of sensations, not thoughts, and I understood that I was trying to photograph sensations. Jane Campion Discuss the proposition that Bright Star is less about John Keats than it is about coming to know poetry, whether the poetry of language or the poetry of film, or both. Errol Morris Or (c) ‘Jane Campion’s Bright Star explores and critiques the gendered character of cultural practices, ultimately proposing that the feminine needle, and, by implication, the feminine camera, is the equal of the masculine pen.’ Discuss Or (d) It has been suggested that the film Bright Star offers the viewer an approach to Keats’ poetry, but in what way might the opposite be the case? That is, in what way does a reading of Keats’ poetry offer the viewer an approach to Bright Star? Or in what way does a reading of Ginsberg’s poem offer the viewer an approach to Howl? Or (e) In what way does the filmic image relate to the poetic image? How effective is the ‘imaging’ of the poem in Howl, and/or the ‘imaging’ of poetic moments in Bright Star, in conveying the aesthetic experience of the literary texts/s? Or (f) Jane Campion’s film Bright Star presents not only a representation of John Keats’ relationship with Fanny Brawne, but figures in this the emotions created by Keats’ poems and the experience of reading them. She adapts the lucid, clairvoyant and sensitive effects of Keats, coming to know them in an embodied filmic form. Discuss.