French political cinema
ESSAY – 4000
GENERAL GUIDELINES:
• Please note that you cannot duplicate materials across assignments, i.e. you cannot write your essay on the film you did your research exercise on, but you may write on another film by the same filmmaker (Godard, Varda, Truffaut).
• Your tutor will give you advice about writing, research, bibliographies, citation methods etc. on session 11. You are strongly advised to devise an essay plan by session 12 and to bring it to your final one-to-one tutorial so that you can go over it with your tutor before you start writing.
ESSAY QUESTIONS:
French cinema has often engaged quite directly with politics. Select a film you think of as a political text, and analyse closely its formal and narrative techniques, the nature of its engagement, and its relationship to theories of ideology. How is politics staged textually and to what effect? What counts as political in the film you’ve chosen and why?
The film to be political text is La Chinoise (JLG, 1967)
ESSAY GUIDANCE:
• Your essay should be discursive; presenting a debate, developing a thesis and coming to a conclusion. It should make an argument, presenting the case for its ideas and conclusions, and providing both critical and textual evidence for its assertions.
• It should include close analysis of relevant films, demonstrating appropriate knowledge of French cinema and skills in film analysis. Your analysis should provide evidence for your critical and historical arguments.
• It should involve close reading of, and page references to, critical articles associated with that topic, as well as engage with wider reading in the field. Please make sure to reference this material correctly, using either the Harvard or Chicago referencing style. You must include a correctly cited bibliography at the end of your essay.
• It should combine use of critical readings with film analysis and your own ideas. Thus, the essay should demonstrate your ability to synthesise knowledge, research and analysis.
FURTHER NOTES:
Originality: A lot has been written on The 400 Blows, for example. Hence it is often difficult to conceive of having anything new to say about it. However, this course is partly concerned with encouraging you to develop your own ideas and to engage critically with the existing literature. Your essay does not have to rewrite the history of French cinema, but nor should it simply present what others have written. Aim to locate your ideas within a field: map out a debate and decide where you stand in relation to the various critical positions, or take a critical concept and try applying it to a different film.
Scope: The best essays are those that get the scope right. You are unlikely to say anything compelling about the entire history of authorship in French cinema, as your essay will be so general as to be banal. (If you find yourself writing “in today’s society” or “throughout history”, chances are you are not really saying anything!) On the other end of the spectrum, if you pick too small a topic, you might struggle to have enough to say. The best topics take on a small aspect of a large area. For instance, you might consider national representation specifically through the construction of the heroine figure. This way, you can refer to a wide range of theoretical and historical issues, but focus your textual analysis, allowing you to read the films in detail and make a unique argument.
Quality of research: Part of the project of learning to write more advanced essays is developing your research skills. The library is well-resourced for French cinema and culture, and you will be expected to look beyond the assigned readings. Spend some time in the library stacks, browsing the various French sections. Investigate journals that might be especially useful. Learn more about the online holdings in the library: many scholarly journals are to be found via JSTOR, Project MUSE, and individually in the online journal section. Do not use web sources that you are not sure are scholarly! The internet is a vast resource, but it has a lot of material of dubious quality and little scholarly content. Hence, please be very cautious when using material from the web (as opposed to published scholarship that you access online).
Textual analysis: Your essay must use close textual analysis of films to back up the points you are making. Film is a different medium to novels or plays. Narrative analysis will not suffice. Engage with the text and use the specific vocabulary you learned in your first year to write about film as film. Your essay should include analysis of specific shots, sequences and elements of mise-en-scene, editing and/or narration.
Use of critical sources: Like film texts, critical texts must be contextualised and analysed. Don’t plop quotations into your writing unannounced, and don’t let them speak for themselves. The reader always needs to know what the quoted text is doing in your argument. Thus, introduce critics (“As Hawkins argues…” or “Bazin’s account of the auteur theory thus contradicts that of Truffaut…”) Similarly, after your quoted text, explain your take on it. Does it provide evidence for your argument? Set up a position you are going to reject? Introduce a critical term that you plan to apply elsewhere? Always tell the reader how the different voices you draw upon relate to your own ideas.
Core Reading: ( but don not use all of them)
· Jill Forbes, “Political and Documentary Cinema,” in The Cinema in France After the New Wave (London: BFI, 1992).
· Kristin Ross, “The Police Conception of History,” in May ’68 and its Aftereffects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
· Alison Smith, “Revolutionary Form in Theory and Practice,” in French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005).
Colin MacCabe, Godard: Images, sounds, politics (London: BFI/Macmillan, 1980).
Sylvia Harvey, “Ideology and the impression of reality,” in May ’68 and Film Culture (London: BFI, 1978).
J. Narboni and T. Milne (eds.), Godard on Godard: Critical Writings (London: Secker 1972).
Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York: NYU Press, 1998).
Julian Bourg, “Hello to all that: Rescuing May 1968,” French Cultural Studies 14, no. 40 (2003).
Peter Wollen, “Godard and Counter-Cinema: Vent d’Est,” in Movies and Methods Volume II, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
