You will write a sequence analysis of a short (5-minute approximately) sequence from one of the films with The Blue Angel(1930)，suspense(1913)， To Be a Woman (1951).
1. A key aspect of the exercise is to balance your own voice – your own reading of the film – with back-up from the scholarly sources with which you have been engaging. I want to know what YOU think about the sequence, and about what YOU want to say about it – but I also want to know that you have been reading around the subject, and that you can engage explicitly with those sources, reference them properly, and incorporate them into your discussion. That is how scholarship progresses.
2. You should organise your essay around a question or angle you plan to explore. Why did you identify this sequence as worthy of discussion? For example, is it typical of the rest of the film, or typical of a specific style or feature of the period? Conversely, is it atypical? Is it a turning point in the film? Is it an interesting sequence in other respects? Is it an example of pure spectacle? What do you want to do with the sequence you have chosen?
3. You will want to show how this sequence works in terms of narrative and cinematic form [cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, sound, etc.]—and what is the relationship between this sequence’s narrative and cinematic workings and the rest of the film? In other words, you should ideally provide a detailed descriiption of the way the sequence works and then show, analytically, how aspects of the sequence work together and with the rest of the film.
4. Try not to dwell on what anyone involved with the film may have intended. In most cases, we cannot know what the director, or anyone else, intended to achieve (there are some exceptions, where interviews with the director have been published – but even then, how would we know that s/he was providing a reliable account?). The director’s (or screenwriter’s, or sound designer’s) intention is largely irrelevant to this exercise – the point is to analyse the film in the form that we have it.
5. It may be appropriate to allude to cultural, technological or even political contexts in order to make the points that you want to make about the film. However, these excursions to contextual sources must be properly referenced, and motivated in your discussion.
