English 102 Spring 2023
Cinema, Self, Society Class Assignments
· Session in class with Reference Librarian Christine Elliott.
· Please watch the video Writing and Thinking about Movies (Here is the link: Thinking and Writing About Film – Annenberg Learner)
· Write a paragraph or two about your thoughts on the video.
· Pick a movie that you really like, one that you think is great (or hate), one that might have had some sort of significant effect on you. Any movie is okay. Then tell me what the movie is and why you think it is so good or so significant. When we like a book and tell people about it, that says something about us: about our tastes, our preferences, our dreams, our personalities. What might your chosen movie say about you? (You don’t have to be too revealing about this .)
Read: pages 365 to 375 from Hollywood Sign I; hooks: Introduction, Making Movie Magic. Write:
· Do the exercise at the bottom of page 369.
· “Reading a film, then, is much like reading a novel” (370). Do you agree? Why?
· Do you find the analysis of Batman: The Dark Knight suggestive, persuasive? Why, or why not?
· What makes movies magical, according to hooks? What makes movies magical to you?
· What is hooks’s critique of essentialism? What do you think of her critique?
Read: Ray, A Certain Tendency, pages 25-32 and pages 55-69 . Write:
· Why does Ray think it is important to study Hollywood’s Classic Period films (26)?
· What are the “two key factors that converge[d] to encourage a kind of filmmaking that would for the first time draw systematically on a basic American mythology,” one internal and one external?
· What two “permanent habits of the American Cinema” did sound help encourage (30)?
· What were the principal external influences and how did they operate?
· What is the “ideological power of Classic Hollywood’s procedure” (55)?
· What American Cinema maneuver was a decisive break with the silent era?
· What does Ray claim is the “traditional task” of American historians?
· What are the two factors on which the American Cinema version of the traditional mythology rests?
· What does that mythology do? What key “conversion” does it make?
· What is the “reconciliatory pattern” of Classic Hollywood films?
· What, according to Ray, does the commercial success of Hollywood films derive from?
· Since the American Cinema “never simply reflected contemporary events,” what most affected its evolution?
· What might Ray mean when he says, “American Cinema’s significant role in consumer merchandising . . . completed the industrial age’s fusion of base and superstructure” (68)?
· What does Ray claim is the “chosen thematic paradigm” of Classic Hollywood? Is his claim convincing to you?
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