Objective. The objective of the assignment is to research a theme in film. Although this is similar to your previous assignment, film criticism is a bit more difficult to research, and you'll be learning some very specific methods to find what you're looking for. In many cases, you will have to find individual resources about films and individual resources about themes, and will need to make the connection between the two.
Note: You will be researching THEMES (alienation, class) rather than GENRES (science fiction, westerns). You may notice that some themes and genres go hand in hand, but you will be researching themes similar to those that you explored for your first critical analysis paper.
GETTING STARTED & BACKGROUND INFORMATION - BOOKS AND WEBSITES.
- American Culture/American Cinema Series (on reserve at the circulation desk). Each edition of these books focuses on a particular decade from the 1930s to the 1990s, and contain chapters on specific themes that reference representative films. Some examples:
- New Deal in the1930s
- national identity in the 1940s
- "American Dream" in the 1950s
- civil rights in the 1960s
- political scandals in the 1970s
- conservatism in the 1980s
- gangster films in the1990s
- Magill's Survey of Cinema (on reserve at the circulation desk) and History of the American CInema (REF PN1993.5.U5 H55; 10 vols.) These reference books provide scholarly analysis of films and film culture through the early 1980s. Magill's is similar to the "Critical Survey of Short Fiction" series you used for the first assignment, while the History books provide more broad coverage of the film industry. Both are good resources when looking up a specific film.
- American Film and Society Since 1945 and Contemporary American Cinema are both online books available through ebrary, a library database of nearly 20,000 e-books. Both focus on the 1960s through the 1990s.
- The library has dozens of circulating books on film. Some focus on specific directors (Woody Allen, The Coen Brothers); some on specific films (Chinatown, The Third Man), some on specific genres (romantic comedies, crime films), and some on specific subjects (sex, religion). All are good sources for finding information on an individual film.
- Filmsite.org contains in-depth analysis of many well-known films and excellent analysis of films by decade.
IN-DEPTH RESEARCH THROUGH DATABASES. The library databases may provide you with scholarly analysis of individual films or themes in cinema. The library's two main databases -- ProQuest and EBSCO -- contain articles from such scholarly film journals as Camera
Obscura, Cineaste, Cinema Journal, Film & History, Film Comment, Film
Criticism and Film Quarterly. The document below lists some tips to help you use the databases to find what you're looking for.
The Literature Resource Center - the same
database you used for your first critical analysis paper - also has
some scholarly film criticism in it as well. The best way to use this
database is to search by film.
RESOURCES ABOUT HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
- American Decades (REF E160.12.A419; 10 vols.) and American Pop: Popular Culture By Decade (REF
E169.1.A4475; 4 vols.) provide overviews of the main themes and events
in American culture. These reference materials help you connect events to film, so you can gain an understanding of how outside events influenced the themes present in a particular film.
Each volume is for a specific decade, and has a
chapter on "entertainment" or "the arts" that discusses some films as
well.
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film_crit.pdf - on May 11, 2009 3:40 PM by Frank Brasile (version 1)
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