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Visual & Performing Arts
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BA (Hons) Film and Screen Studies:Moving Image as an Art Form

Essay Instructions:

BA (Hons) Film and Screen Studies 
 Unit title: Moving Image as an Art Form (Element 2) 
Aims / Context To offer you the opportunity to watch a curated programme of films and investigative analysis to underpin the intellectual core of your studies on this course.  
You will be introduced to the moving image as an art form with a huge influence on society. You will watch the films and discuss the content and context that will enable you to move backwards and forwards along the historic filmmaking timeline of the 20th and 21st centuries and equally, across the global breadth to develop your critical, analytic evaluation of the art form. You will explore films, theory, debates and contextual studies, based on the historic, national, geographic or genre perspective including World Cinema, European Arthouse, Independent Cinema, Soviet, Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood, and the Experimental. You will be offered an introduction to the theoretical, critical and analytic methodologies that will open up your frames of reference and you will be encouraged to make connections to wider issues and contexts. Gender and diverse inclusivity are embedded throughout programmes.  Through both formative and summative assessment, you will be supported in understanding research methods and your development of your written and verbal communication skills.  
Assessment requirements 
 This unit is assessed on a pass/fail basis. You will receive written feedback but no grade will be assigned to your work. 
   A  2000 word piece of writing  There will be a choice of essay titles ( see below) 
  This unit is marked elementally. This assignment is 70% of the overall unit mark.  
Assignment information 
Choose one of the essay questions to answer:  
  1. Critically compare and contrast the representation of a city in two films of your choice.  
 2. Examine the relationship between early cinema, the city and modernity.  
 3. Discuss the significance of 1920s Soviet Montage Cinema or German Expressionism to Hollywood Cinema.  
 4. In what ways has the industrial and economic context of cinema determined film form and narrative? Critically discuss with reference to a national cinema of your choice.    
 5. Examine the gender and/or race aesthetics and politics of a genre film. Choose one genre: Film Noir, Melodrama, Science Fiction, or Horror. Critically discuss with detailed analysis of at least one film of your choice.  
 6. To what extent is Laura Mulvey’s critique of female representation and classical Hollywood cinema in her article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema still pertinent now? Examine with detailed analysis of one historical (over 50 years old) and one recent (last 10 years) films.  
 7. Does auteur theory or theories of cinema spectatorship and audiences best explain the meaning and pleasures of film? Examine with reference to specific theories and films.  
 8. Examine the strengths and limitations of social realism in the politics of representation of working class culture. Undertake a Marxist ideological analysis of two films of your choice from any city or nation.   
 9. Examine Walter Benjamin’s critical ideas in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in relation to developments in technology and contemporary cinema.  
 10. In what ways is postmodernism ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’? Discuss Fredric Jameson’s arguments in relation to transformations in film, or television. Are we at the end of postmodernism? 
 11. Is cinema dying? Assess with reference to developments in at least two of these media: film, television, digital communication and online distribution and viewing.   12. Critically examine the possible differences between a journalistic review and a theoretically informed academic essay of a film or a television programme? Discuss with reference to specific reviews and essays.  
 
The essay should be submitted in one word document. The submission should be A4 word-processed, double-line space.  The document should be submitted to Turnitin via the link on the Moodle unit site for the essay assignment.  
 The essay should be referenced in the Harvard system with references cited correctly with a bibliography at the end. Here are the details of the University’s online referencing system for practical and written work: http://www.citethemrightonline.com/Home 
 
You need to make sure that this is your own work and not a copied from other sources. It is fine to quote another source as long as you cite the author in the correct format. To copy any part of an article without referencing is plagiarism. This is a serious university breach of regulations. The Turnitin system is able to identify what sources you have drawn upon and possibly plagiarised if not referenced.    

Essay Sample Content Preview:

Walter Benjamin’s critical ideas in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
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Introduction
Walter Benjamin is a German Jewish philosopher and theorist that writes influential essays in the 1930's usually about the perception of the human senses, aesthetics and materialism (Nelmes, 2012). One of Benjamin's famous essay is The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) where he expressed an elaborate criticism about mechanical reproduction and how it voids the value of art in its original sense and how it removes the “aura” of art in general. Benjamin's context of "aura" is purely based on the authenticity of aesthetic value that asserts the originality of an artwork that was lost due to the mass reproduction of art during the technological advancements of the 20th century (Benjamin, 1935).
Additionally, the essay Benjamin's essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935) have about 15 parts where each part focuses about a specific topic about the decline of art due to the changes in technology where the ideas are centralized to about five themes. The first themes focused on the rise of printing and mechanical reproduction such as lithography technique and photography that caused significant change in the form of art. The second theme is focused on the aura of art and the lost element: authenticity, due to technical mass reproductions.
The perception of a single human's ability to sense the present time and space of art. The third theme of the essay is about contemporary perception of art that was adjusted to the thinking of the mass population rather than a single individual that further decayed the aura of art. The fourth theme was about the redefinition of art from tradition, rituals, and history to a form of political expression and future propaganda. The fifth theme is about the effects and problems of photography and film in capturing real world adventures of daily life but lacks the aura of visually representing the real world (Benjamin, 1935).
Although Walter Benjamin's essay argued the redefinition of art due to the advancement of society, art in relation to the developments of technology and contemporary cinema should be further studied since these ideas significantly changed the sense of art or the loss of art’s “aura” from traditional ritualistic history to contemporary political mass reproduction.
Art in Relation to Developments of Technology
In the effects of technology, Benjamin (1935), presented the place of art in changing the social-norm of a society into a more capitalist focused economy. Art was used as a socio-economic trigger to promote future developments to abuse the naivety of the working class and make them be more productive under the fascist propaganda. Benjamin traced the evolution of mechanical reproduction from manually tracing an art of a painter, to engraving, to lithography and to photography that eventually hastened the population to engage in mass production as directed by the manipulative bureaucrats to prepare in the engagement of war (Benjamin, 1935).
At the beginning of Benjamin's (1935) essay, he stated that artifacts made by men can always be recreate...
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