You are required to submit a proposal for your final paper on one of the following films (After Yang, Parallel Mothers, Ad Astra ): one short paragraph. The proposal should summarize the argument you plan to make in your paper and include an indication of how many times your element occurs in the film. List the element you chose to work on in the title of your proposal. Think of your proposal as an introductory paragraph of your paper.
Your section instructors will provide you with feedback on your proposal, and you will be expected to revise it in response to this feedback as you move forward on the final paper. This will be a great way for you to make sure you are on the right track in your work on the paper assignment, so do not submit a hastily composed proposal.
Here are some sample proposal statements:
In His Girl Friday, the dynamics of dialogue (relative speed and overlap) serve characterization by highlighting the affiliations and distinctions among the characters. Over the course of the film, Hildy’s dialogue gradually becomes more frantic, contributing to the impression that she is better suited to the fast-talking Walter than the drawling Bruce. Early in the film, in the scene at the bar, Walter talks circles around Bruce, while Hildy’s speech is relatively slow, to suggest her attempt to fit in with the lifestyle that Bruce represents. Additionally, on at least one occasion Hildy calls our attention to Walter’s quick speech patterns by likening them to an auctioneer. By the end of the film, Hildy, who has essentially rejoined Walter in following the case, talks frantically and furiously on several phones, to Walter, and even to Bruce. The increasing speed of Hildy’s dialogue over the course of the film emphasizes Hildy and Walter’s closer affiliation as co-workers and then finally (and again) as husband and wife.
The canted angles in The Third Man form an important motif. Throughout the film canted angles appear in framings of all the characters regardless as to their relationship to Harry Lime, thus indicating that they are not associated with or characterize these characters. The motif intensifies twice in the film. The first time it happens when we actually see Lime for the first time: an extreme canted angle frames him. Towards the end of the film, the motif gets another development. When Holly Martins meets Lime on a Ferris wheel and finds out that Harry is no longer the friend he used to know, the conversation between the two is not only framed with canted angles but the angles get doubled-up: they are tilted both to the right and to the left. The canted-angle motif thus serves to link the events of the story to Lime even before we know that he is alive and to support the story idea that Lime may not be what many of the characters think he is. The final intensification of the motif’s patterning emphasizes the moment where we and Martins find out the truth about Harry. In the final scene of the film, when Martins helps the police to hunt Lime down, the canted angles are absent.
Note that these statements are more than one sentence long. You should need more than one sentence to provide an overview of the device you’ll be focusing on, how its use develops over the course of the film in a patterned way, and the functions that are served by that patterned usage of the device. If you can summarize all of this in just one sentence, you are probably either oversimplifying or you have focused on something too banal to be of interest.
Proposals that fail to demonstrate that you have thought carefully about the assignment will not receive credit.
