English 4950: Cool Old Movies Spring 2019

Grady

First Essay Assignment—Due Mon, Feb 25 via email to fgrady@umsl.edu

Specifications: ±750 words, double-spaced, 12-pt font

This assignment is designed to help you practice writing about the film image itself: about mise-en-scène, which can include the composition of the frame, the role of blocking, color, lighting, camera angles, shot scale, etc. To that end, you may choose either to write about one particular frame or shot or sequence, or to compare and contrast two related shots or sequences, in an essay of about 750 words. Your goal will be to demonstrate how the images you analyze contribute to some effect in the movie from which they are drawn: how the placement of characters or things helps to establish the relationship between them, or how a repeated visual motif reinforces a theme, or how a particular color or lighting scheme evokes a particular mood or emotional state—how, in other words, space is used expressively, to convey information to the viewer.

There is considerable freedom in this assignment—the thematic or dramatic or structural emphasis is yours to choose—but a successful essay will succeed in part by paying close attention to the image, and to describing it accurately and thoroughly. (Please include the image(s) with your essay, either integrated into the prose or as an appendix.)

The excerpt from Timothy Corrigan’s A Short Guide to Writing About Film offers some useful tips for getting started on writing about the cinematic image, as does the “Space I” chapter (pp. 311-38) in Maltby’s Hollywood Cinema.

Here are some possible topics to get you started thinking about potential scenes:

· Light and shadow in particular scenes in The Grapes of Wrath

· Long shots in The Grapes of Wrath or Casablanca

· Interior staging in My Man Godfrey

· Shots from the down-and-out montage in Sullivan’s Travels

· Establishing shots in next week’s westerns