Please answer to the following questions, one page (per question), typed, single space, line spacing at least 0,
font #12, Times New Roman, tight/narrow margins all around. You are more than welcome to use first person in
this exam. Remember a total of two-page answer to both questions is required. Please read the questions
carefully and try to review the chapters and the films (if possible to refresh your memory) before writing your
answers. Do not use quotes in your midterm. Your own well-framed reflection is sufficient.
1) A Short History of the Movies (p. 172-3) argues: “Most unnatural of all, the world of Caligari is a
world without sunlight: shadows of light and dark, shafts where the sun would normally cast its shadow, have been
painted on the sets. Herman Warm, the principal designer, belonged to a group that believed “films should be
drawing brought to life,” and Caligari lives up to that demand: it is an inhabited graphic world, and Expressionist
visual conception that moves.”
Do a detail visual examination of one or two scene in the movie that depicts what Herman Warm refers to as
“drawing brought to life.” No story telling please; only visual analysis. (50 points)
2) A Short History of the Movies (p. 115) explains the cinematic character of Charles Chaplin as: “If
there was a single quality that most struck this generation of admirers, it was Chaplin’s tremendous range, his
paradoxical combinations of diametrically opposed human sentiments and reaction. Charlie was a terrific cynic and
a romantic, selfish and generous, combative and cowardly, crude and delicate, vain and unself-conscious, pathetic
and heroic. He was a total outsider to bourgeois middle-class propriety and its institutions, both above it in his
gentlemanly disdain and below it in his destitute station. But Charlie understood the comforts and bases of those
institutions as well as their constrictions. They simply weren’t for the likes of him, who belonged everywhere and
nowhere at all on earth.”
Relate the above statement to one specific sequence in Chaplin’s “The Kid.” You do not need to cover the
entire film. Only analysis of one specific sequence that can be considered as the manifestation of the above
statement. No story telling please; only a formal analysis (aesthetics such as: photography, editing, directing,
mise-en-scene, sound, framing, etc. in relation to the content; remember how Juno’s clinic scene was
analyzed). (50 points)
