Posted: May 13th, 2018

Where you will examine a film in terms of its larger context

Where you will examine a film in terms of its larger context

Film contextual analysis paper

Our paper is not strictly a film analysis paper. Rather than simply asking you what techniques a director is using, asks you to delve more deeply into the circumstances and contexts in which the film can be considered.

As the syllabus notes, this is “where you will examine a film in terms of its larger context — its relation to the filmmaker’s body of work and any familiar themes its genre, the circumstances under which it was made, and its place in a historical context.”

From a directorial standpoint, for example, you could point out certain directorial touches that fit in — or don’t — with that director’s “style,” and that director’s history and where the film fits in their career. You could look at the conventions of a genre and look at how a film follows — or does not — the conventions of that genre, or school of filmmaking. You could also look at a film in terms of politics, its treatment of race or gender relations, or how it fits into the time when it was made, the type of films being made then, or the larger social currents going on at the time.

If you are interested, you can also use the “compare and contrast” paper theme — for example, how do two westerns by different directors differ in terms of their preoccupations, how do they obey the rules of their genre (or not), how do two films in the same genre made decades apart differ because of the changing scene of the times? Or, what similarities can you discover in two films made by the same director?

This paper, should be at least 7-10 pages long — a minimum of 2,000 words, but you can go on up to twelve pages if you feel you have ideas you need to explain more fully.

In general, you should still pick a film from the 20th century, but I am open to 21st century films if you think you have a good idea — just ask me first for the official OK. Again, NOT something we have viewed in its entirety in class already.

This is in some sense a research paper – you will need to do some work on a film’s background its genre, or lack thereof, and the historical (and perhaps political) circumstances in which it was made. Please include and cite AT LEAST TWO genuine, printed or published sources for your paper.Books, magazines, newspapers are all good. Web sources are OK, but they need to refer back to something real and published. For example, quoting from something like “Ken’s Kool Movie Blog,” is fine, but will NOT count towards the two sources. Quoting from film reviews at RogerEbert.com, however, does count because those are film reviews published in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Please cite your works properly (Oxford or MLA style, it doesn’t matter) and make sure that your quotes are in quote marks, etc. I’ll need to see a list of references at the end of the paper.

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