Category: Cinema

As part of the preparation for your final research project, you are required to submit three research sources accompanied by an annotated bibliography. This assignment will ensure that your chosen sources are relevant and valuable for your research topic.

Instructions:

1. Select Three Sources:

• Choose three academic sources that are pertinent to your final project topic. These sources can be journal articles, books, film critiques, documentaries, or academic essays.
• Ensure that the sources are credible and provide significant insight into your topic.

1. Annotated Bibliography:

• For each source, write an annotation of about 50-100 words.
• Your annotation should include:
• A brief summary of the content.
• An evaluation of the source’s credibility and relevance to your topic.
• A reflection on how this source will contribute to your research project. Discuss any unique insights, perspectives, or arguments the source offers.

1. Formatting:

• Format your annotated bibliography in either MLA or APA style, consistent with the formatting of your final project.
• Include full bibliographic citations for each source at the beginning of each annotation.

1. Submission:

• Compile your annotated bibliography in a document following either MLA or APA format.
• Submit the document as a .doc, .docx, or .pdf file.

Movie: Tootsie (Sydney Pollack, 1982) – Watch this movie for the assignment online

Instructions: Research Materials

You will find two critical reviews of the film, following these guidelines:

• Both reviews must be by legitimate, professional critics or other kinds of writers (e.g., film scholars, film festival curators, etc.), and must have been published either in print or online.
• At least one of the reviews must have been published at the time of the films original theatrical release.
• The reviews should be noticeably different, either in their evaluation of the film (e.g., a positive and a negative review) or in the way they approach the film critically.
• These should be critical reviews rather than scholarly or academic texts or historical accounts of the film. They will likely be relatively brief but should still be substantive.

Do not simply select the first two reviews you find. Find multiple reviews, read them carefully, then select two that best meet the above criteria and that are substantive, interesting, and different from one another in meaningful ways.

You will also find one additional reading about the film other than a critical review, following these guidelines:

• This reading might include evaluative commentary about the film but should not just be another film review.
• It might be an article about the film in a newspaper, magazine, film-related website, or a more scholarly account of the film.
• Avoid texts that use confusing academic jargon or that are for a highly specialized, narrow readership.
• The text may be a blog entry as long as the author is a noted critic, scholar, director, film curator, etc. This is easy to determine with a Google search.
• Ideally, this text should be relatively short say, between 4 and 10 pages.

You will download the two critical reviews and the additional text as PDFs and label them like so:

• The critical reviews should be labeled: Film Title Review in Source by Author Last Name (e.g., No Country for Old Men – Review in Washington Post by Hunter.pdf)

The additional reading should be labeled: Author Last Name Title of Text (e.g., Prose All Hell Breaks Loose: No Country for Old Men)

Written Text

Once you have completed the above research, you will write a short essay about the critical reviews and the additional reading. This is NOT simply a report of what each reading says, but a more synthetic account of the readings. Synthetic means that you are drawing together ideas from all three readings to produce your own original take on what they say about the film. What common ideas, criticisms, or references do the readings share? How do they differ? What bigger picture do they paint of the films status as great? Do they agree that the film is great or worthy of a place in the cinema canon? If they do, is it always for the same reasons? If they disagree about the quality of the film, what is the basis for the disagreement?

This essay should be approximately 500 words, or about one full page of single-spaced text assuming standard 12-point font.

At the bottom of the essay, write two questions about the film for us to discuss in class. These should be modeled on the questions I provide on the Screening Guides for each weeks film. These questions are not part of the above-mentioned word count for the essay.

Turning it in

Save your essay, with discussion questions, as a Word doc, labeled: Your Last Name Essay on Film Title (e.g., Walley Essay on The Thin Blue Line). Submit the essay and the three readings you have found in a folder on Google docs. The folder should be named: Your Last Name Film Title. Email me the link to the folder on Google docs; be sure that the Share settings will allow me to access the folder when I click on the link.

The due dates for this assignment are staggered. Your folder should be completed and made available to me by 5:00pm on the Wednesday prior to the screening of your film. For example, if you choose Do the Right Thing, which screens on Wednesday, March 4, your folder will be due by 5:00pm on Wednesday, February 25.

Evaluation

When I evaluate your work on this assignment, I will consider the following:

• That you have completed all portions of the assignment and followed all the instructions (including labelling and submission instructions) in the above prompt.
• That the critical reviews you have submitted follow the guidelines listed above. Were they well chosen? Are they different from one another in meaningful ways? Are they substantive, addressing the film in at least some detail to illustrate and support the critical claims they make?
• That the additional reading is also well chosen, aligns with at least some of the ideas in one or both critical reviews, and offers original and insightful information or ideas about the film.
• That the short essay genuinely addresses all three texts you have found; that is does not merely summarize them but draws their ideas together, offering an original perspective on them (i.e., your own!).
• That the essay has a central idea about the film and the responses to the film you are writing about. This makes for a cohesive piece of writing, and one that goes beyond merely summarizing the readings.
• That the short essay was carefully written and proofread. Pay close attention to grammar, punctuation, and spelling.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE ASSIGNMENT: For Tuesday, February 3rd, you will read two quite different accounts of cinematic artistry and the person or persons responsible for it: Andrew Sarriss Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962 and Thomas Schatzs The Whole Equation of Pictures. You will also read a modern review (by David Sterritt) of The Awful Truth, written in 2018 when the film was released on DVD by The Criterion Collection.

Written Assignment

For this assignment, you will place Sterritts review in relation to Sarris and Schatz, showing how both Sarriss notion of the auteur and Schatzs of collaboration inform a contemporary critics perception of a great film. Another way to think about it is that you will use Sterrits review to illustrate the tension or argument between two opposing explanations of filmmaking as an art form.

First, summarize in a short paragraph Sarriss conception of the cinematic auteur: what is the definition of an auteur, according to Sarris, and what distinguishes them from just any film director? [Since Schatz offers his own summary of Sarris, you may draw on him, but your explanation of the auteur theory should mostly be in your own words.]

Second, summarize in another short paragraph how and why Schatz differs from Sarris in explaining filmmaking art. Specifically, explain the core of Schatzs disagreement with Sharits.

Finally, select two passages from Sterritts review that relate to these two opposing perspectives (you may also draw from the reviews of The Awful Truth in The New York Times and The Hollywood Reporter, and even from the PCA case file for The Awful Truth if you desire). The goal is to make connections between specific critical comments Sterritt makes about The Awful Truth and the general ideas about the source(s) of a films greatest offered by Sarris and Schatz.

You are writing a substantial paragraph each for Sarris and Schatz, and two paragraphs on how Sterrits review reflects or is in dialogue with their ideas. Expect the total length of this assignment to be about 400 words.

When you directly quote an author, place the passage in quotation marks and indicate the page number in parentheses at the end of the quote.

In evaluating this assignment, I will consider the following:

• The accuracy and clarity of your summary of Sarriss conception of the auteur, and of Schatzs alternative account of the collaborative nature of Hollywood filmmaking
• That the connections you make between Sterritts review and the other two readings are clear and specific (i.e., you make point-to-point links between Sterritts words and the ideas of Sarris and Schatz).
• That the assignment overall reflects an understanding of the auteur theory and the more collaborative theory of filmmaking.
• That the assignment is well written, showing evidence of care in the writing (including word choice, grammar, spelling, and punctuation) and proofreading.

This assignment is due on Canvas by the 10:00am on Tuesday, February 3.

Some Notes on Sarris

Sarris makes references to individuals and films with which you may not be familiar. Here is a little information about them, to help better orient you to Sarriss argument.

Franois Truffaut: a French film director who began his career as a critic in the 1950s, moving on to film directing in 1959 and becoming an auteur himself. As a young critic, Truffaut championed the idea of the director as film author over the more popular (at the time) idea of the importance of the scriptwriter and of the literary qualities of the stories films told.

Andr Bazin: a French film critic who founded a very influential journal of film criticism called Cahiers du Cinma (Cinema Notebooks) for which Truffaut, among many others, wrote. Cahiers was where auteur criticism began, though a little later Bazin would criticize the auteur theory (as Schatz notes in his essay).

Orson Welles: an American film director best known for Citizen Kane (1941), long considered the best film of all time. Welles was one of the first American directors to be identified as an auteur by French film critics.

Alexandre Astruc: another French film critic whose writing in the early 1950s lay the groundwork for the conception of the film director as author.

Jean Renoir: one of the greatest French film directors of all time, best known for La Rgle du Jeu

(The Rules of the Game, 1939). He also acted in some of his own films, which is what Sarris comments upon in his essay. Renoir was beloved by the later generation of French film critics like Bazin and Truffaut, and one of their auteurs.

metteur en scne

: this term was coined by Astruc and refers to a director who is technically talented but not at the same level of an auteur. It literally means scene setter, suggesting that the director knows what they are doing but has not risen to the status of auteur for lack of a distinctive artistic personality or vision.

Boccaccio 70 and The Seven Capital Sins: These are two long-forgotten omnibus films, meaning collections of short films by different directors. Sarris uses these two films, which contained episodes directed by both auteurs and metteurs en scne

, to better illustrate the differences between those two types of directors.

Link for the David Sterritt Review of The Awful Truth: https://www.cineaste.com/fall2018/the-awful-truth

The computer screenshot tell you everything to do the assignment, the other screenshots are sources to be carefully examined and used for the writing, there is also a screenshot of the paper version of the instructions which are the same.