The exam has been pushed back a week to April 23rd and the questions have been reviewed and reduced. Take a look:
FILM 2400
Exam II – April 23 (in class, 8:30am-10:30am)
The following short answer questions have been formulated in a way that presupposes that you have read all articles very carefully and synthesized the main line of argument in each article. 15 of the following questions will appear on the exam. Of those 15 you will choose to answer 10.
Evaluation: 10 questions x 10 points each = 100 points
Cinema and Ideology
1. What is an Ideological State Apparatus (ISA) and how does it function?
2. What does Althusser mean when he argues that “ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence” (162-165)?
3. What does Althusser mean when he argues that “ideology has a material existence” (165-169)?
4. What does Althusser mean when he argues that ideology works by “interpellating” individuals as subjects (170-175)?
5. In “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism” Jean-Luc Comolli Jean Narboni distinguish seven types of film depending on the films’ relationship to ideology. Identify and briefly explain three of these film types.
Structuralism
6. What does Barthes mean by “the duplicity of the signifier” i.e. what does he mean when he writes that “the signifier can be looked at, in myth, from two points of view: as the final term of the linguistic system, or as the first term of the mythical system” (116-117) and that “the signifier has, so to speak, two aspects: one full, which is the meaning…one empty, which is the form…” (122)?
7. According to Barthes, how does the Paris-Match picture of the young Negro in a French uniform, saluting, function as a myth?
8. What does Barthes mean when he argues that myth “transforms history into nature” (129) and that myth is ‘experienced as innocent speech” (131)?
Semiotics
9. According to Saussure what is the relationship between the signifier and the signified and what are the implications of this for our understanding of language as a system?
10. According to Metz, are syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations between signifiers in cinema similar to, or different from, those in language? How?
11. How did Metz transpose Saussure’s distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ into film studies?
12. In what way was classical Hollywood cinema as a codifed cinematic system of signification important in the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in film theory i.e. the application of Saussure’s ideas to film studies?
13. What does Metz mean when he argues that it is “through its procedures of denotation [that] the cinema is a specific language” (68)?
14. How are cinematic signs motivated on the levels of denotation and connotation?
15. What does Metz mean when he argues that “the cinema as such has nothing corresponding to the double articulation of verbal languages” (75)?
16. Metz distinguishes eight syntagmatic types. Identify and briefly explain two of them.
Spectatorship
17. What does Metz mean when he argues that the cinematic signifier is, paradoxically, both perceptual and imaginary?
18. Metz claims that insofar as the film spectator identifies with himself as look, i.e. as a pure act of perception or an “all-perceiving subject,” he/she inevitably identifies with the camera too (822-824)? What does he mean?
19. Metz calls cinema “unauthorized scopophilia” (831) and claims that it is different from the theater and from more intimate voyeuristic activities. Why does he think so?
20. Why does Metz discuss disavowal and fetishism in order to explain the cinematic signifier (831-834)? For instance, how is the psychoanalytical notion of ‘disavowal’ similar to the ‘structure of belief’ in cinema?
21. Baudry establishes a series of parallels between cinema and dream. Identify and briefly explain two of them.
22. In “Jan-Louis Baudry and ‘The Apparatus’” Noël Carroll challenges Baudry’s claim that “the apparatus of cinema involves regression to primitive narcissism” (231). Identify and briefly explain three of Carroll’s objections to Baudry’s argument.
Cinematic Excess
23. What is ‘cinematic excess’ and in what sense is it “counternarrative” and “counterunity” according to K. Thompson (517)?
24. Thompson identifies four ways in which the material of a particular film exceeds motivation. Identify and briefly explain two of these.
25. Linda Williams discusses ‘structures of perversion’ in the female body genres. How does her analysis challenge traditional readings of these genres?
26. According to Linda Williams, what is the value of tracing the three body genres (horror, pornography and the weepie) back to the original fantasies to which they correspond? Why does she insist that we should not “dismiss them as bad excess whether of explicit sex, violence, or emotion, or as bad perversions, whether of masochism or sadism” (740)?
27. What is ‘paracinema’? What is the purpose of paracinematic culture?
28. According to Sconce, what is the major political distinction between aesthete and paracinematic discourses on cinematic excess?
Stars and Performance
29. According to John Ellis, “the star performance in the fiction [the film] can have three kinds of relation to the star image in subsidiary circulation” (603). What are they?
30. Identify the four ways in which the film historian goes about reconstituting the image of a particular star. Briefly explain two of them as they pertain to Joan Crawford.
Feminist Theory
31. Mulvey claims that “destruction of pleasure is a radical weapon” (838). What does she mean?
32. Mulvey identifies two “contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation” (840). What are they and how do they function in cinema?
33. According to Mulvey, the male unconscious has two ways of dealing with the castration anxiety provoked by the image of woman. What are they?
34. According to Mulvey, there are three different looks associated with cinema. What are they? Which of these looks does mainstream narrative cinema privilege?
35. In “Rethinking Women’s Cinema: Aesthetics and Feminist Theory” Teresa de Lauretis identifies a major contradiction specific to the women’s movement. What is it and what problems does it create?
36. Why does de Lauretis challenge Mulvey’s call for the destruction of visual and narrative pleasure? How does de Lauretis propose to rethink the project of women’s cinema?
37. According to Mary Ann Doane, “sexual mobility would seem to be a distinguishing feature of femininity in its cultural construction” (253). She goes on to argue that unlike transvestism, which is fully recuperable, masquerade is not as recuperable “precisely because it constitutes an acknowledgement that it is femininity itself which is constructed as mask” (253). What does she mean by that? How does masquerade challenge the theorization of female specificity in terms of spatial proximity?
Reception Theory
38. Noel King cites three instances of ‘not understanding’ a text we read. How does he account for our inability to understand the text in those cases?
39. How does Staiger challenge the three dominant speculative histories of reception (Gunning, Corrigan and Hansen)?
40. In “The Perversity of Spectators: Expanding the History of the Classical Hollywood Cinema” Staiger lists seven reasons for the failure of normative description of film reception. Identify and briefly explain three of these.
41. In “Spectatorship and Subjectivity” E. Diedre Pribram discusses three concepts of subjectivity (the psychoanalytic, the discursive, and the social). Briefly explain one of them.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
So my comment was helpful, then. Great!
Excellent, this is a very generous move. Thanks a lot!
Spectacular. 73 questions was a bit daunting to try and prepare for. Very generous of her to cut them down like this and give us another week.
Our questions need to be up by this Thursday on here right?
see new post
11. How did Metz transpose Saussure’s distinction between ‘langue’ and ‘parole’ into
film studies?
• Saussure felt that speakers’ and listeners’ shared knowledge of the grammatical RULES that make up a language system (the langue) enables them to develop and understand a virtually unlimited range of individual utterances (the parole). Context provides meaning to the words. (693)
• Metz feels that film des not constitute a ‘langue’ in the strict sense of constituting a language system, but it qualifies a language in a looser sense of its recognized, orderly processes. For Metz the shot = the sentence or statement, not the word (parole). (3-4)
• Metz felt Saussure’s scientific approach in applying linguistic parallels to film studies was too restrictive. Metz felt that as the medium of film is a one-way system of communication, the strict application of the concept of a language is probably inapplicable to film.(94)
• So Metz took Saussure’s idea of using film as a scientific ‘language’ of cinematic ‘word’ shots and transposed the concept to become the view that in film studies the cinematic shot is the ‘langue’ that is the meaning – not tied to specific words (paroles)
12. In what way was classical Hollywood cinema as a codified cinematic system of signification important in the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ in film theory i.e. the application of Saussure’s ideas to film studies?
• Saussure’s idea that ‘commercial cinema is a codified communication system’ (692) meant that if one recognized the significations (components), one could both understand and group films scientifically.
• Film studies are cues one looks for these structural elements in the same way as narrative is deciphered by examining the language used.
• Grammar in film is manipulated by the speaker to make meaning, which provides a tension between grammar and usage.
• Saussure felt that like language, films & genres were similarly coded, had both deep and surface structures, rules and conventions – which provided the conceptual basis for film study. For him ‘All cinematic meaning is essentially linguistic. Meanings of signifiers are determined by their relation to other signifiers, rather than by their reference to any extra-linguistic reality’. (3-4)
• Saussure’s ideas shaped film studies by making it the analysis of the relative components of which the film was made – using the analogy of deriving meaning from the rigid structure of grammar. As with film studies, Saussure believed that film transmits meanings that are counter to the real-world observations of the spectator. (94)
Dan Clements
25. Linda Williams discusses ‘structures of perversion’ in the female body genres. How does her analysis challenge traditional readings of these genres?
- As my good friend Linda quotes on page 732, “The categories of fetishism, voyeurism, sadism, and masochism frequently invoked to describe the pleasures of film spectatorship are by definition perversions. Perversions are usually defined as sexual excesses, specifically as excess, which are deflected away from “proper” end goals onto substitute goals or objects - fetishes instead of genital, looking instead of touching”. William’s uses Carol J. Clovers work - the “final girl” theory in 1970’s horror films (the last girl to suffer through the killings until the end) - to express the torture of woman in films for the spectators viewing pleasure. She challenges these genres of horror, melodrama, and porn, to suggest that each one of them is an over exaggerated display of sexually charged/sexually explicit relations (as if we didn’t know that about porn). Such as the innocent “final girl” theory of Clover’s, showing the victims sexual pleasure via domination. In horror genre, the “good girl”, is often the one to suffer throughout the duration of the film, as if she deserves torture, and the pleasure she receives is not her choice. The “bad girl” is sexually active, enjoys pleasure, and endures pain willingly. She continues to explain that even the most hurt, bruised, bleeding, suffering female victim still, at some point, no matter how briefly, achieves a moment of power/pleasure during the innuendo. What appears to be simple genre pleasure by the spectator, as William’s suggests, is in fact sexual pleasure on the part of the viewer, caused by the fetishized torture, domination, and the suffering of women in these body genres. Basically, she challenges traditional readings of these body genres by suggesting that they resemble that of a dominatrix den, in which women are sexually punished and victimized for the pleasure of the punisher, or the spectator. The “good girl” does not ask for this punishment, but receives it anyways. The “bad girl” desires it and gets pleasure out of the pain.
26. According to Linda Williams, what is the value of tracing the three body genres (horror, pornography and the weepie) back to the original fantasies to which they correspond? Why does she insist that we should not “dismiss them as bad excess whether of explicit sex, violence, or emotion, or as bad perversions, whether of masochism or sadism” (740)?
-Williams believes that these genres should not be dismissed as simple trash, because their very popularity is in fact effecting, or infecting, actually human relations. These genres are changing the way men and women are viewed not just in the film genre, but in the real world too. These genres suggest definitions on what it means to be a man, and what it means to be a woman, and what a relationship between the two mean. These definitions are carried out into social circles and practiced because of their on screen popularity. As long as these body genres are drooled over, the same problems will exist in real life, and should not be passed off as harmless trash. It is not harmless. The smut of these genres are exemplified in real life genders and in real life relations and in real life cultural forms.
21. Baudry establishes a series of parallels between cinema and dream. Identify and briefly explain two of them.
Two major parallels between cinema and dream, as argued by Baudry, are the limiting or inhibition of movement and the absence of reality testing. Because both film and dream force a sort of regression towards a primitive narcissism, where the self does not differentiate itself from the world it perceives, both feature these two qualities. As in the sleep of dreams, film limits an individual’s capacity for movement, as they are reserved to their seat. And also just as in dreams, film lacks a sort of reality testing, because it offers a more-than-real impression of reality, and we can not enter the world we see and validate the truth of what we are seeing.
22. In “Jan-Louis Baudry and ‘The Apparatus’” Noël Carroll challenges Baudry’s claim that “the apparatus of cinema involves regression to primitive narcissism” (231). Identify and briefly explain three of Carroll’s objections to Baudry’s argument.
Firstly, Baudry’s argument is based entirely on analogy, and therefore, it’s conclusions are at best probable. So, too test the validity of his claim, Carrol observes his premises. Baudry speaks at length about the inhibition of movement, but film viewers are barely inhibited at all people stand, move in their seats, go to the washroom, or go get popcorn. It is only a vague notion of social acceptability that keeps a person still in their seats, and it is hardly constrictive. Carroll also challenges the notion that both dream and film are absent reality testing, that the dreamer has no means to test for reality inside the world of a film. The viewer is able to test their experience of the film with repeat viewing, corroborate it with other viewers in order to test the reality of our experience. Dreams, on the other hand, no intrapersonal validation is possible.
Post a Comment