Comp Lit 312--Spring 2003
Take-Home Final

Due: June 12, 2002

Choose ten items from the following list. Write a concise paragraph (approximately one page, double spaced) explaining and discussing each item you choose. You may cite and make use of material from the textbook and from the classroom lectures, in addition to looking closely at the films in question. This exam should be an opportunity for you to think through, and synthesize, the history of film from 1960 to 1980, as we have looked at it this quarter.

  1. Jean-Luc Godard's stylistic innovations in his films of the 1960s
  2. Youth and gender roles in Francois Truffaut's Jules and Jim
  3. The surrealism of Luis Bunuel: disruptions of narrative and meaning
  4. Silence and speech in Ingmar Bergman's Persona
  5. The significance of Bonnie and Clyde in the history of American film
  6. The significance of Easy Rider in the history of American film
  7. Terence Malick on celebrity, criminality, and the American dream
  8. Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid as a revision of the traditional Western
  9. Robert Altman's cinematic style and vision
  10. Performance and improvisation in the films of John Cassavetes
  11. Form and structure in the films of Stanley Kubrick
  12. Alienation and anomie in the films of Michaelangelo Antonioni
  13. Shifting viewpoints in Pier Paolo Pasolini's Arabian Nights
  14. Last Tango in Paris: sex, death, and Marlon Brando
  15. Sexuality and transgression in Realm of the Senses
  16. Paranoia and conspiracy in American films of the 1970s
  17. Style and narrative in The Parallax View
  18. Warren Beatty in the 1960s and 1970s
  19. Innovations in film sound in the 1970s
  20. Francis Ford Coppola as auteur
  21. Martin Scorsese as auteur
  22. The Vietnam War in films of the 1970s
  23. The evolution of the horror film in the 1970s
  24. Blaxploitation films
  25. R. W. Fassbinder and melodrama
  26. Time and vision in Andrei Tarkovsky's films
  27. Tarkovsky's Solaris and Kubrick's 2001