English 4950: Cool Old Movies

Spring 2019

Grady

Third Longer Essay Assignment—DUE TUESDAY MAY 7

An 1800- to 2000-word essay (typed, double spaced, 12-point font) on one of the topics below is due, via email submission, on Tuesday, May 7; extensions must be requested by class time on Monday, May 6. Essays should have a strong, identifiable thesis that is carefully supported with evidence drawn from relevant films. Don't make mistakes with the evidence--that is, don't reconstruct from memory what you think happened in a particular scene; review the films as necessary.

· Feel free to use any topic from essay assignment #2, with the exception of the film noir topics, which are off-limits. Any topic you haven’t already written about, that is.

· Discuss the ways in which the Depression-era films like The Grapes of Wrath, Gone with the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz represent and comment upon the lives of agricultural workers and families. You might want to look back at Lawrence Levine’s essay, “American Culture and the Great Depression,” if you take up this topic. And you might also bear in mind that, by 1940, almost 57% of Americans lived in cities—which is also where most of the movie theaters were.

· Hollywood films of the 1930s/1940s seem to take us on the road a lot: Sullivan’s Travels, The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz (and maybe even Sahara and Air Force?). Write an essay about some films that spend time on the road: does being on the road rise to the level of a theme? Does putting your characters in motion enable (or demand) certain kinds of interactions or adventures? Does the binary of road/destination map onto any of the discussions we’ve had about middles/endings? Following this topic could lead to a lot of different places…

· Choose a single idea (“Washington DC” or “the family” or “home” or “love”) and trace the way it is used in several of the films we’ve seen this semester.

· Hollywood almost never throws anything away, and that includes characters, structures and conflicts from genres whose era of peak production has passed. For example, we don’t see too many Westerns anymore, but many of the genre’s tropes have migrated to other kinds of films (official/outlaw heroes in cop-buddy movies, e.g., or space cowboys vs. savage aliens in sci-fi frontier stories).

What about the combat film, a genre essentially invented for wartime production (as Schatz shows) that quickly developed a recognizable structure (as Basinger details)? Has Hollywood repurposed its elements in films that belong, at first glance, to another genre?

· With four John Ford films under your belt, you should be in a position to write an auteurist essay about that director’s work. Are there common stylistic or thematic or narrative (or other) elements that mark Judge Priest, Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and “The Battle of Midway” as typical John Ford films?

· We’ve noted the romanticization and mythologizing of a particular view of the South, both antebellum and postbellum, in films like Gone with the Wind and Judge Priest. But it sure seems like there’s also a lot of cheerleading for American values in combat films and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (and The Grapes of Wrath and Dodge City and….). Are these observations related in any interesting way?

· In “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism“(1969), French film theorists Comolli & Narboni describe five types of films, (a) through (e), which are distinguished by their various relationships toward the dominant ideology of their era. They are most interested in films of type (e):

(e) . . . films which seem at first sight to belong firmly within the ideology and to be completely under its sway, but which turn out to be so only in an ambiguous manner. For though they start from a nonprogressive standpoint, ranging from the frankly reactionary through the conciliatory to the mildly critical, they have been worked upon, and work, in such a real way that there is a noticeable gap, a dislocation, between the starting point and the finished product . . . The films we are talking about throw up obstacles in the way of the ideology, causing it to swerve and get off course . . . . An internal criticism is taking place which cracks the film apart at the seams. If one reads the film obliquely, looking for symptoms; if one looks beyond its apparent formal coherence, one can see that it is riddled with cracks: it is splitting under an internal tension which is simply not there in an ideologically innocuous film . . . . This is the case in many Hollywood films for example, which while being completely integrated in the system and the ideology end up by partially dismantling the system from within.

Thinking about Hollywood in the 1930s—and drawing on specific examples--can we say that there really is such a thing as a “type (e)” film, or are all films potentially “type (e)” when given sufficient scrutiny?