Gentlemen prefer blondes, film by Howard Hawks. Visual Arts Essay

CSCL/SCMC 1201W-001 Cinema: Fall, 2019 Essay #2 Assignment: Visual Language and Historical Context PLEASE READ CAREFULLY THROUGH THIS ENTIRE PROMPT SPECIFIC EXAMPLES FOR STARTING ESSAYS INCLUDED HERE Due: Submit IN LECTURE ON NOVEMBER 1st. See syllabus for late essay protocols. SEE US IN THE OFFICE AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE: Re: CLA, We are NOT supposed to go over e-mailed drafts as their asre fairness issues involved. Lengh: 750 words. Please include computer-generated word count at the bottom of your essay. Format: 12 point times new roman font, 1” margins, double space, staple. Citations: See MLA Guidelines on our Moodle Site Please: Describe your scenes in your own words. If you point out what you actually see on the screen, you are a film analyst. You have a lot of room to move in this essay. Do: --Telegraph --Limit passive voice (‘to be’ verbs) to five per page. --Remember that every sentence needs a subject. --You may use first person (‘I’), but choose what’s most comfortable for you. Stay in the same voice (1 st ,2 nd ,3 rd ) throughout your essay and in the same tense (past, present, future) as well. PLEASE LOOK AT THE REVISION POWER POINT SLIDES FOR THIS: These will help you to easily give every sentence a subject, use three tips to avoid passive verb overuse, learn to easily use colons instead of dashes, help you with when to use italics and quotations, encourage paragraphing, aid in avoiding vague redundancies, i.e., I, Personally, previous experience, sharing together, thinking to myself, advance warning, past history etc,, and how to fine-tune wording, i.e., how regard and toward sound better than regards and towards, why ‘oftentimes’ should disappear from your work, why NEVER to use there is or there are, and so much wore. --As always, read aloud after you are finished. Make sure that you like what you have written: that it communicates! Prompt: Please choose ONE OF THESE FIVE FILMS Fritz Lang’s M Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca Minahan’s, Series 7: The Contenders Howard Hawk’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Euzhan Palcy’s Rue cases-nègres (Sugar Cane Alley) Please DO NOT use more than one film, DO NOT compare the films, and DO NOT introduce another film. You may of course discuss the film theme in general, but the smaller the sequence you use as your example is, the better your essay! Each of these films stand as very different examples of what Burch would call Standard, Institutional Cinema and clearly express ideological concerns of their respective historical periods, Weimar Germany, the Start of WW II in the U.S., the dawn of reality television, the post-war classical Hollywood musical, and 1930’s Colonial Martinique. They express their concerns through their visual, or camera, strategies, which we have discussed in class: PLEASE KEEP IT NARROW: START WITH A DETAIL!!! --M of course employs German Expressionism’s language, --Casablanca uses Classical Hollywood film grammar, --Series 7: The Contenders uses televisual editing chopped into segments (episodes) and lots of repetition to “catch viewers up,” --Gentlemen Prefer Blondes uses full technicolor and staged musical numbers and montages, such as the shopping spree, to complete one of Dyer’s substitutions, --Sugar Cane Alley uses multiple point of view shots and long-shots to describe José’s eyes. To accomplish this, in your own words, and using no more than two SPECIFIC SCENES or SEQUENCES but ONE IS BEST to discuss how your film’s scene communicates this theme through its use of two or three, at most, (TWO IS BEST) key VISUAL elements to discuss, which will help you structure your Essay. You MAY of course discuss history and themes, but PLEASE DO NOT FORGET HOW THE FILM USES VISUAL TECHNIQUES. Do not forget race, class, and gender and music in your short but interesting discussion. Some elements to choose from within your essay text: Camera movement Angles Editing Soundtrack Dialogue pace Mise-en-scéne Shots Dimension: Long, Close-Up, Medium, etc. Point of View, Key, Filler or Back Lighting... other elements of your choice! Some examples for starting (from student essays last term): FOR EXAMPLE: THE LIGHT OF GUILT In Fritz Lang’s M, we know the identity of the maniac preying on the little girls of Berlin even though the plot never introduces him. The camera shows us a worried mother, a “wanted” poster, and the show of a hat that reveal the killer. Here, German expressionist high key lighting reveals what dialogue cannot, and points to a small, shy, average citizen as the cause for the city’s anxiety and the location of guilt. He looks no different than you or me, but M’s lighting... FOR EXAMPLE: HERE’S LOOKING AT CASABLANCA A voice-of-god narrator tells us that multitudes need to flee Europe in 1941 in desperate attempts to reach the “free world.” From this opening scene, a map places us in the Morroccan city of Casablanca, where refugees “wait, and wait, and wait.” We soon learn, however, that this film’s core does not concern itself with these people at all, but instead with a cafe owner, Rick, and his lost love, Ilsa. The Hollywood studio system camera, which stands in for our eyes’ perspective, swoops up to introduce us to Rick, a man whom we have heard so much about that he cannot be unimportant to us. He signs an invoice with “OK, Rick,” and the plight of the refugees vanishes. From now on, Casablanca’s camera and editing make sure that Rick and only Rick’s life, will grab us as viewers. FOR EXAMPLE: J’ADORE DIOR In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Howard Hawks efficiently replaces scarcity with abundance in the Paris shopping montage during which two single, unemployed women spend thousands of francs at high-end designer boutiques, such as Balenciaga, Chanel, and Dior. This scene hits the audience with energetic music and brightly colored shop storefronts featuring expensive brand names that we still recognize today. Our protagonists, Dorthothy and Lorelai enter this fashion wonderland to replace everyday scarcity and worries about money, and that explains why audiences enjoy the classical Hollywood musical: it substitutes anxieties about scarcity, and thus sexual vulnerability, with images of wiid spending thus.... The Hollywood studio system camera, which stands in for our eyes’ perspective, swoops up to introduce us to Rick, a man whom we have heard so much about that he cannot be unimportant to us. He signs an invoice with “OK, Rick,” and the plight of the refugees vanishes. From now on, Casablanca’s camera and editing make sure that Rick and only Rick’s life, will grab us as viewers. FOR EXAMPLE: THE ENDLESS SERIES Marc Andrejevic’s article and class lecture discuss the differences between the cinematic and television mediums, and when watching Series 7: The Contenders, I could see some ways in which the two forms share little in common. Movies start and end, but television seems potentially endless, which produces enervation: we want to keep watching even if we grow irritated and tired. From the start, I know that the contenders in Series 7 could never really win the game. If they “won,” they needed to continue to contend until death. But why don’t I want to stop watching? I will explain by focusing on… FOR EXAMPLE: THE REAL AND IMAGINARY CARIBBEAN Against a beautiful, sunny blue sky and tropical background, Euzhan Palcy’s Sugar Cane Alley films a young boy, Leopold, tied to a horse and led to his death as watching workers sing in hopeless protest. Palcy uses this horrible image to allow us in to a stark difference between the Caribbean of the first world imagination and the real conditions in post-colonial Martinique. Her observations help to highlight what Stam and Spence discuss as colonialism and representation by showing what filmmakers usually leave off of screens, especially when the islands are involved. In this scene, racism, a term I will define later on, erupts in machtpolitik, as we know that this young man will be killed for exposing the corruption of his French “masters”: even though he has a French father, he sees, and we see, the violence of colonialism the cinema often ignores. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Again: sequence is an idea or concept that starts and finishes in a brief series of scenes and which can re-emerge in different from later on in the film. Think of a SHOT as analogous to, or like, a WORD; a SCENE as analogous to, or like, a SENTENCE, and a SEQUENCE as analogous, or similar, to a PARAGRAPH that introduces and concludes an idea We Look Forward to these!!!