Create a project that stages the dialogic nature of some theoretical concept that weve explored in the class: REALISM, FORMALISM, REFLEXIVITY, SPECTATOR, IDENTIFICATION, EMBODIMENT, THE GAZE. Clearly identify the concept that you are working with, cite it, provide an explanation of it, and explore how you have come to understand it by citing at least 2 people (authors or filmmakers) you have read or watched this quarter. The goal here is to demonstrate that you understand the term and that you can illuminate it’s meanings by discussing how it appears in the works of two different authors/makers.
For example, if you choose ‘Realism’, how do you define this term and how do you understand it through your reading of 2 different authors/makers? You might choose E+H and Trinh T Minh-ha as the two people you put into conversation. How do E+H define realism (chapter 1) and how does Trinh seem to work with the concept in her film, Reassemblage? Or perhaps you want to work with ‘the Gaze.’ How does Laura Mulvey define the gaze and how does Jen Proctor work with the gaze in her video, Am I Pretty? (that you are watching week 7)?
Write a 3-4 pages essay
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My requirement:
# Talk about the term: Realism
# Please read (attached): Elsaesser and Hagener (E+H), Cinema as Window and FramePreview the document in Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (New York: Routledge, 2105), 14-38.
# Talk about this film in the essay: Reassemblage: from the firelight to the screen (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982, 40 min.)
Write 3-4 pages on how do you define the term REALISM and how do you understand it through your reading of Elsaesser and Hagener and Trinh T. Minh-ha.
The goal here is to demonstrate that you understand the term and that you can illuminate it’s meanings by discussing how it appears in the works of two different authors/makers.
Although this assignment allows for some creativity, we are approaching it as a piece of engaged scholarship, so make sure that it engages centrally and substantially with a concept from one of these readings
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Knowledge for writing this essay:
In chapter 1, E+ H detailed how the cinema keeps the spectator visually at arms length while nonetheless drawing her in emotionally by deploying the window and frame as mutually regulating conceptual metaphors.
1. Film, as a medium, has a particular way of situating the viewer. Different film theorists have different ideas about how this works
2. E+H point out that film theorists have identified 2 different tendencies in cinema: realism and formalism. They use the figure of the window and the frame to describe these concepts:
cinema as window highlights film’s ability to capture the world with a lot realism, to make you feel and see the drama (the joy, the pain, the textures of reality) and experience it as real
cinema as frame highlights cinema’s constructed-ness, how film creates the world through the frame, editing, sound and image relationships.
Both tendencies are usually present in cinema, but different filmmakers and different theorists have focused on one or the other
on page 15, they summarize: the cinema as window and frame is:
ocular-specular (conditioned by optical access)
transitive (one looks at something)
disembodied (the spectator maintains a distance)
3. Epstein identified and defined ‘photogenie’ as an important and defining feature of cinema
4. Balazs advocated for the centrality of theory– for the development of cinema, itself.
Trinh T Minh-ha is an American filmmaker and writer who, like many of the theorists we have looked at/read this quarter, works in both media production and writingthat is she thinks in both practices. She is also interested in how the very technologies of cinema are produced within and also produce power relations. And how these technologies and practices might be used to critique or subvert hierarchies of looking as well (they might subvert or problematize the ‘male gaze’, the ‘colonial gaze’, the omniscient perspective of much documentary and ethnographic filmmaking)
