Film Question

For this assignment, you will choose one of the six readings in the attached and apply one of its central ideas to a film of your choice that you have watched during this semester. Base it off the film Stand and deliver 1988

You can choose any of the readings, but you should be able to develop a clear idea of how and why a particular idea from the reading makes something about your chosen film more apparent or accessible. Ultimately, you do not have to agree with the theoretical reading that you do, but I find it helps greatly if you at least find the analysis interesting. This assignment should be 700-1000 words long.

You may not use generative AI in creating ideas for this assignment or for producing writing to submit as part or all of this assignment. I strongly discourage using assistive AI in proofreading, as it produces prose that is indistinguishable from an AI violation, and creates very bad humanities writing, which requires a human perspective. If you would like assistance with your writing, please make use of the wonderful peer tutors at the YC Writing Center!

Introduction

Your analysis should briefly identify the movie you are discussing (including its director and year of release), and some of the aspects of the film that will be relevant to your analysis. Then introduce the text from the readings packet you are using to analyze the film (including its full title and the name of the author), and the idea from the text that you are using in your analysis. This paragraph should end with a statement of what ideas emerged from your subsequent analysis. (That is, this sentence should be the last thing you write before submitting your assignment.)

Body Paragraphs

After the introduction, the first one or two paragraphs should be focused on the reading you chose. Each of these paragraphs should focus on a quotation from the reading that contains an idea that is important to your analysis. Begin each paragraph by contextualizing the quotation (what role does the sentence you quote have in the reading as a whole? how does it fit into the general argument?). Then introduce the content of the quotation (what is it saying?). Then quote and cite the quotation (using the format “Here is the quotation” (45). –in which the number is a page number.) Then explicate the quotation by showing what about it is particularly insightful or surprising and relevant to your analysis. Then relate to your thesis by showing how this quotation contributes to an idea about film that you will apply to the film you chose.

After the paragraph(s) about the reading, you should be ready to move into analyzing the film you chose. The paragraphs for analyzing the film are similar in structure, but if the evidence you are using from the film is not a quotation from the dialogue, you might instead be describing a visual, story, acting, or camera element from the film. Still, the paragraph would contextualize the evidence you have chosen, introduce its content, describe the evidence, explicate how you are applying the ideas from the reading to the evidence from the film, and relate to your thesis by showing what the reading reveals about the film. Three or four paragraphs about evidence from the film should be sufficient.

Conclusion

A conclusion is best written as an invitation to consider where one might look next. How could the ideas you’ve written about be applied to other movies? Having considered this reading more carefully, do you feel like the ideas in it are outdated, incomplete, or incorrect? If you were to expand your analysis to a whole genre or more films by that director, etc., what do you think you might find?

WRITE MY PAPER

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