Reference no: EM132418945 , Length: word count:2000

PMA 3550 - Global Cinema I - Cornell University

Please choose two of the questions below and answer each in a five-page essay (about 1200 words), double-spaced. [Make sure that you name appears on each essay.] In each essay, you should cite specific shots and sequences from each film as evidence to support your argument. You may, of course, make reference to the readings that have accompanied the screenings, but you need not provide formal citations to them.

Question 1. The category of the national has been at the center of our discussions all semester, even as it has been contested, troubled, or put under pressure by the films we have engaged. Discuss the way that these films themselves address national politics, borders, and ideals: Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings, 1942), Grand Illusion (Jean Renoir, 1937), and Rome, Open City (Roberto Rosselini, 1945).

Question 2. We have screened a number of films that might be categorized as belonging to popular genres: melodrama, the Western, and slapstick comedy, to name a few. Melodrama is a particularly fertile genre through which to explore the ways that public conflicts are displaced onto familial relationships, and emotion becomes the primary register for human expression and conflict. Discuss these films as melodramas: An Unseen Enemy (D.W. Griffith, 1912), Queen Christina (RoubenMamoulian, 1933) and Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945).

Question 3. Discuss the relationship between truth and cinema in the short films of the Lumières brothers, Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), and Night Mail (Watt and Wright, 1936).

Question 4. Many of the films we screened this semester highlight what Tom Gunning calls the "cinema of attractions," the demonstration of the capacities of the new medium of cinema and its own visibility. Discuss the experiments in vision undertaken in Sherlock, Jr. (Buster Keaton, 1924), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1920), and Man with a Movie Camera (DzigaVertov, 1929).

Question 5. This is the hardest question. Choose three films we have screened this semester, and make a case for addressing them in a question of your own writing. Precede your five-page essay with the question you have crafted, and answer it.