Special Sneak Preview

I'll hand this out in Tuesday's class and we'll discuss it there, but here it is now as a kind of "advance screening."

The first paper was a mostly descriptive exercise which asked students to pay attention to elements of film that they might usually overlook. Some were elements common to all narrative whatever medium: things like narrative structure, issues of closure, and point of view in general. Others were specific to film as a medium: things like editing, camera shots, visual construction of the character’s and viewer’s POV.

The point of the paper was to begin to see. Or perhaps to see differently by paying attention to something other than plot. To put it yet another way, to begin to see films as something constructed in particular ways and for particular reasons, rather than as slick finished products quickly consumed and quickly forgotten. That’s why I chose films that I hoped would stick in your throat, films that might not pass as easily through your brain as a cotton candy does through your digestive tract.

As several of you have pointed out in your logs, the four films that we’ve screened in class, Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices/Still Lives, Chris Marker’s la Jetee and Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation all share a concern with the relation between identity and memory. It is this theme that is the focus of the second assignment, which also asks you to pair a film narrative with a written narrative in your analysis. You can choose to work on either of these pairs:

Memento, Christoper Nolan
"Memento Mori," Jonathan Nolan

or

Tarnation, Jonathan Caouette
"My Body: A Wonderkammer," Shelley Jackson

The first pair are two different treatments in two different media of the same plot "seed." The second pair are two autobiographies which stretch the boundaries of that form.

In this assignment you are basically working on the relation between form (which includes narrative structure, use of genre conventions, and specific medium) and content. Discuss the relation between each text's use of narrative/genre conventions and how it conceptualizes memory and identity. Also address the differences that the medium (film or written narrative) makes. What are some of the specific restrictions or advantages of each for dealing with issues of memory and identity?

Please remember to title and staple your paper.

Length: 5-6 pages, typed, double-spaced.
Due: Tuesday, April 10