Assessment (C2D)

Assessment Objectives 

AO1 Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of elements of film. 

AO2 Apply knowledge and understanding of elements of film to: 

• analyse and compare films, including through the use of critical approaches

• evaluate the significance of critical approaches

• analyse and evaluate own work in relation to other professionally produced work

An example question:

Explore how far your chosen film or films are experimental in challenging conventional approaches to narrative. [20] 

What is the examiner looking for?

• a knowledge and understanding of the specific experimental characteristics of the chosen film’s narrative - which will reflect the movement relevant to the chosen film 

• a consideration of, for example, narrative discontinuity, fragmentation, episodic narratives, playful narratives, multiple narrative strands, simultaneous narratives (depending on the film chosen) 

• an understanding of how these characteristics differ from more conventional approaches to film narrative  some consideration of the rationale for narrative experimentation. 

• Band 5 responses may recognise that experimental narratives frequently embody ideological challenge. 

• By the 1990s the postmodern is fully developed, especially in films that are now seen as cult classics: Pulp Fiction, most famously. 

• The film explores and manifest the sense of lost self, of style and surface over any more solid sense of reality. 

• The film, like the German expressionist films, marries formal experiment and aesthetic excess to the framework of genre cinema, specifically the gangster genre and its hit-man sub-genre. 

• The film has very strong auteur signatures: Tarantino among the most celebrated exponent of a postmodern cinema. 

• This section is called “experimental film” and a film like Pulp Fiction may cause some concern in this context – is it so experimental? In fact, as already stated, the focus on the study of experimental narrative in this section, considering the films’ distinctive methods of telling their stories. Beyond the obvious and quite radical dislocation of plot and story in Pulp Fiction, perhaps it is most useful to concentrate on the approach to the ‘depthless’ character, to character as a pure surface effect of cinema 

• the slick combination of elements that makes for Pulp Fiction as a perfect embodiment of the performance of postmodern style.