Film 10: The Language of Film 2 Section EMQ6 Spring 2010 John Beatty
Brooklyn College Film Department Syllabus


REQUIREMENTS

Text Books

Required: Lehman, Peter and William Luhr (2003) Thinking about Movies Blackwell Publishing Mass.

Harvey, Michael; 2002; The Nuts and Bolts of College Writing; Hackett Publishers Indianapolis

During the term there will be some short readings assigned as well

Recommended:

Corrigan, Timothy; 2007; A Short Guide to Writing about Movies; Pearson, Longman NY

The required books are available in the college book store at the east end of the basement of Boylan Hall.

You may find the texts in some of the on line vendors. You can try:

Half
Alibris
Abe Books
Amazon
 There are two papers and a final for the course. A draft of the papers will be are due the 5th and 10th week of the course. They will be returned the following week and the final version is due the next week. The draft is NOT graded nor is it marked for content, just structure and style. Because this is a WAC course, grammatical and spelling errors will affect your grade. Since there is a two week span from the time the draft is handed in until the final version is handed in, there is no possibility that papers come in late. If the draft is not in on time, you will have to write the final version without having any notes about structural problems.

It may come as a great shock to you, but you can not write a paper in one sitting. In the case of this class, you will need to watch a film (more than once – you can not analyze a film after one viewing) and you need to write the paper, re-write it and most likely re-re-write it several times after that in order to polish it.

You can get help in writing your papers from one or more of several writing "fellows" assigned to the college. Check their schedule with the film department (Room 201 W.E.B.)!

The Papers

DETAILS ON PAPERS WILL BE ANNOUNCED

All papers are to be submitted as hard copies – no electronically transmitted papers are accepted. Papers are due on the assigned date. The paper should have on it your name, the course number and the term in which you are taking the course. Late papers will be given a grade with no comments and there will be no discussion about the paper. Papers more than a week late will lose a letter grade per week.

Although the papers required for the course are not technically “research papers”, some students feel compelled to quote from published sources. All such quotes must be referenced and must appear in a bibliography. While there are different stylistic ways of doing this, all ultimately give the same information. The simplest form I know follows.

If you state the author’s name in the text, then you need not repeat it in the parenthetical reference:

Doane states that “The silent film is certainly understood, at least retrospectively and even (it is arguable) in its time, as incomplete, as lacking speech” (1999 p. 363).

If the author’s name does not appear in the text, then it needs to appear in the parenthetical reference.

“The silent film is certainly understood, at least retrospectively and even (it is arguable) in its time, as incomplete, as lacking speech.” (Doane, 1999 p. 363).

In either case there MUST be a bibliography in which the work cited appears. Again, there are stylistic differences possible. The simplest I know would be:

Doane, Mary Ann 1999 “The Voice in the Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space” in Braudy, Leo and Marshall Cohen (2005) Film Theory and Criticism (pp. 363-375) 6th Edition Oxford University Press, NY

Note:

Titles of books, films, works of art etc. are either italicized or underlined. Shorter works (articles and the like) are put in quotation marks. This is a very simple rule and if you do not follow it, it means you have not read the syllabus. If you put a film title in quotation marks it means you have not read this syllabus which I have put a good deal of effort into writing. I will, therefore, put an "F" on the paper and return it with no comments.

If for some reason you decide to use an outside source you MUST cite the work in the body of the paper and then have a bibliography at the end of the paper which gives the complete reference. Notice that in the bibliographic reference given above the article is in quotation marks and the title of the book in which the article appears is italicized.

Plagiarism

Any material which comes from an outside MUST be cited. Failure to do so is plagiarism and will result in a failing grade for the paper and possible the course. See the college Bulletin for rules about plagiarism.

WAC (HUAC?) Information

The course has three objectives in terms of developing your writing skills:

1. the ability to edit one’s work so that grammar and syntax are correct
2. the ability to develop ideas by using supportive evidence appropriate to the discipline
3. the ability to draft and revise written material

This means that you need to learn how to write a grammatically correct paper in proper academic form. Part of that process involves writing a draft, correcting it and rewriting the material.

The first part of any writing project is not listed. It deals with reading the question and then answering it. In the real world, you may want to write an article about something which is of interest to you. That is fine. There is no specific question for you to answer. In most courses however, the requirements are that you respond to the questions asked no matter how broad they may seem. So the first rule is ANSWER THE QUESTION THAT IS ASKED!

The most brilliant idea becomes lost if the writer can not organize a paper so that the readers can understand the points made. Clarity of expression means writing in a grammatically, stylistically and organized form. Grammar, in this case, means spelling, word choice (semantics), and proper grammatical structure (e.g. agreement between subject and object, and correct use of cases with prepositions).

“The number of films he made are very big” is an unacceptable sentence.

“The number of films he made is very large” is acceptable.

“He made a large number of films” is still better.

Stylistics involves the correct levels of formality used in scholarly or academic writing. Papers should not sound like notes left for your friends or in the style used in writing quick e-mails. Slang is unacceptable.

“The film sucked” is unacceptable.

“The film is poor” is acceptable.

“The film is badly crafted” might be still better.

Organization is too complex an area for short examples, since it has to do with arrangement of sentences into paragraphs and paragraphs into larger units. The basic idea is that the logic of the argument should be clear and ideas should follow one another in a reasonable way.

I will use the weakest of the three areas in your paper to discuss with you. I will start with the grammatical level since if that is weak, the rest may become unintelligible. A student asked me whether a line from a song was correct or not. The line was “So baby, if he loves you more than me, maybe it’s the best thing for you, but it’s the worst that could happen to me.”. The student wanted to know if the phrase should have been “if he loves you more than I”. The problem, of course, is that both are correct, the question is what does the author of the text mean? My guess is the author has it wrong, since it is male singing about his girl friend. If the line says “…if he loves you more than me…” it means “if he loves you more than he loves me” then the song has a very different potential interpretation than if he sang “if he loves you more than I (love you)”.

You can (hopefully) see from this that if the grammar goes awry, then the meanings are confused and style and organization become increasingly difficult to follow.

If the grammatical structure is strong, then I will work on the organization, and if that is strong, then on the style.

GRADING

F: Total catastrophy; major grammatical errors (run on sentences, sentence fragments etc., retelling of plot virtually no analysis)

D. No major grammatical errors, minimal or no analysis, simple retelling of story no mention or just a cursory mention of film techniques (camera placement, editing)

C. Some analysis of text and subtext (better than “The subtext is “life can be beautiful”) as well as discussion of some film techniques

B. A reasonably good analysis of text and subtext. Discussion of film techniques and their relationship to advancing the text (and sub-text).

A. Well written. Good use of semantics and grammatical structure. Excellent analysis of plot construction and ways in which film techniques are used to accentuate high points, build suspense, tension etc,.

Final Exam

THE FINAL EXAM: IS MONDAY MAY 24th from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. STUDENTS ARRIVING MORE THAN 5 MINUTES LATE WILL NOT BE ADMITTED TO THE FINAL

It meets in the same room in which the class meets. Students who arrive more than FIVE MINUTES LATE WILL NOT BE ALLOWED TO TAKE THE FINAL! Students who miss the final will have to file for a make up final in fall. Do not make plane reservations etc. earlier than the last day of your finals.

Attendance

Absences
The film department policy states that a student who misses more than two class meetings fails the course. Reasons for the absences are irrelevant. Students are obligated to get the notes for the classes they missed and are responsible for all information assignments, announcements etc. made in classes whether they attended the class or not.

Latenes
In general, students who arrive more than 10 minutes late will be counted as absent.

E-mails

If you contact me by e-mail put your full name and course number on the e-mail. Do NOT e-mail me asking me questions that are answered in the syllabus or the schedule of classes (e.g. "When is the final?")

Cell Phones

Turn the damn thing off if you have one. If the phone goes off during class it is an automatic “F” in the course, plus expulsion from the college and a slow painful death. Your cell phone will also be destroyed. No joke. Additionally if you are on the phone you are not in class, therefore you will use up one absence if you are talking on the phone during the class.

COURSE OUTLINE

Although the course is specifically a writing course, it actually will try to look at film theory as well. In terms of that the course deals with the nature of aesthetics, especially as it applies to film. The course deals with art as a communication and how that communication operates.

The course also deals with the specific aspects of organization in the frame as well as those aspects of motion pictures that deal with time and movement.

Finally the course examines the paradigms of specific genres.

FILMS (Tentative)

1. Third Man (information given to audience not other characters)
2. King Kong (finding subtext(s))
3. Without a Clue (use of camera to comment and make visual jokes)
4. Lady in the Lake (First person camera) FIRST PAPER DRAFT
5. The Innocents
6. Quatermass and the Pit (Problems of Genre)
7. Black Narcissus (use of color) FIRST PAPER FINAL VERSION
8. Rear Window (read story)
9. Night of the Demon (use of camera to tell story)
10. High Noon (genre western reel time and real time) SECOND PAPER DRAFT
11. Little Fugitive (independent seminal film)
12. Bad Seed SECOND PAPER FINAL VERSION
13. Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
14. Business of Fancy Dancing