DISSERTATION: Briefing

Draft: 23rd March

Deadline: 11th May

Writing
Production

Formalism - the elements that make up and structure the films 'form'

Editing - continuity (axis of action, shot reverse shot, classical hollywood - Alfred Hitchcock) Discontinuity (soviet montage), art house cinema (Jean Luc Goddard), Avant Garde / Experimental (Stan Brakhage)
Set design
Cinematography

Realism and Social Realism
- documentary modes
- poetic realism
- neo-realism
- british realist
- social realism
- sociology of urban spaces, class systems etc

Auteurship
- Francois Truffaut (auteur policy, 400 blows)
- Andrew Sarris (three concentric circles of: technique, personal style and interior meaning versus metteur-en-scene)
- Roland Barthes (death of the auteur)
- Auteur structuralism (Wollen - author as unconsciously channelling social conventions)
- Post-auteur

Genre Theory

Formal elements:
- iconography
- tone
- narrative elements
- plot
- themes
- archetypes

- Rick Altman: Semantics
- Thomas Schatz: Social Order
- Steve Neal: Difference and repetition of formulas, familiarly and innovation

- Categories
- Sub genres and hybridity
- Canon formation, revisionism and cycles
- allegory and metaphor
- industry and audience

National Cinemas, Art Movements, Transitional Cinema
- British New Wave
- French Impressionism and Surrealism
- Soviet montage
- Italian Neorealism
- German Expressionism
- French new wave
- new german cinema
- new mexican cinema
- new hollywood and independent american cinema
- hong kong cinema
- iranian new wave

Spectatorship

Psychoanalysis
- Male Gaze in Vertigo (Laura Mulvey theory)
- Phallic symbolism in Slasher films (Carol Clover theory)

Feminism
- Male Gaze in Vertigo
- Postfeminist and Consumer choice of branding, beautification and neoliberal exploration in New Femininities: Post feminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity
- Androcentrism - Simon de Beaviour, Mary Ann Doane, Film and the masquerade 

Representation
- Class
- Sexuality
- Gender
- Masculinity

Post colonialism, multiculturalism, race and ethnicity
- orientalism - Edward Said
- Third cinema versus Eurocentrism
- Racial Gaze
- Positive and negative stereotypes

Digital cinema
- manipulation of spaces and early effects
- perceptual realism and photorealism
- persuasion tactics and paratexts
- remediation
- motion capture and performance
- humanness and technology
- codes and contestable mapping
- transmediality
- participatory culture and citizen journalism
- convergence and spreadable media

Animation
- early animation
...

Industry, production, distribution:
- commercialism, globalisation, marketing, ratings, franchises, money and spectacle

Hollywood Studio System: 1920s-1960

Art and Fashion in Film and TV
- art history
- surrealism
- dadaism
- situationism
- mannerism
- cubism
- abstract modernism
- deconstructionist
- precisionist
- renaissance linear perspective
- rococo
- punk, mods, grunge, indie

Stars and Stardom
- star system
- studio system
- celebrity studies
- star personae

Audience reception
- codes of behaviour
- sources
- hypodermic needle model
- Stuart Hall - encoding / decoding 1980

Politics and political economics
- globalisation, neoliberalism, free markets
- Marxism and the Frankfurt School - ideology, base and superstructures, the hypodermic needle model, hegemony (gramsci), carnivalesque (bakhtin)

Structuralism and post structuralism
- semiotics - signifier and signified
- mythology (levi strauss)
- deconsturtcuon
- post modernism

Phenomenology and embodied spectatorship
- haptic visuality
- carnal senses

Film and TV history, cultures, criticism, festivals...

The proposal is an outline of the approach and the shape that you long dissertation will take - get to grips with the subject

Introduction - set up and prepare the reader, introduce and explain the main focus and aim/ question
Clarify areas of research in your dissertation

The main body (chapter 1,2,3) - explores

Chapter One - the beginning
Definition of terms used in the intro

Chapter two - the middle
Utilises and builds on information from chapter one
Application of theories, current discussions / context
Any information and ideas that need to be discussed before the question cane fully answered or the aim fully achieved in the final chapter

Chapter Three - the end
- Where the question is fully answered or aim fully realised

Conclusion - End on very last, final response on the discussion
- Reiterate the aim of your dissertation, reminding the reader of any questions you were intending to answer

For the three chapters, think about how your proposal will outline the organi.....

Start from a clear, focused and research informed question or statement of intent
Needs to be theoretically informed
Offer several opportunities for analysing view points

Avoid question being something you thought up from thin air or where you already know the answer

Break down the Q
- appropriate questioning term e.g. what (define), and to what extent (gauge)

A dissertation question can then be broken down between chapters

Progress through the chapters

The evidence must be relevant to the specific discussion point of the paragraph

Critically evaluation / analysing the evidence involves thinking about the evidence and coming to your own conclusions regarding the significance of it, this is important when using to illustrate or support a discussion point

Prepare a synopsis and provisional bibliography for first tutorial 

Ideas:
- Friends - set design, acting, production

- Cinematography : The Great Gatsby, The Grand Budapest Hotel

- Diversity in films - white males

How cinematography is used in Baz Luhrman's films to create...

Suggestions: Formalism, auteurship