SECTION ONE:

Answer All Four Questions in a few paragraphs

1) Explain Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura (and the decay of aura). Why does Benjamin – unlike conservative critics who bemoan this decay – think this is a positive development? How is film linked to this process?

2) In the collectively authored analysis of John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), the editors of Cahiers du Cinema attempted a “rescanning” of the film to show how the film is marked by certain contradictions that undermine the closure of the ideological project of the film. Discuss at least four of these “ruptures” that work against the assumed intention of the film to support “the reformulation of the historical figure of Lincoln on the level of the myth and the eternal” and the election of a Republican president.

3) The concept of “fetishism” has inspired writers across academic disciplines – some have used it in relation to questions of sexuality, others to designate a specifi, ambiguous mode of thinking and “believing”. How do Sigmund Freud, Laura Mulvey and Christian Metz use the concept? Explain and discuss the notion and role of fetishism in their theories.

4) Laura Mulvey in her “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun” is tackling a question that she had omitted in her earlier essay: the female spectator in classical Hollywood/mainstream cinema. Mulvey writes:

Although a boy might know quite well that it is most unlikely that he will go out into the world, make his fortune through prowess or the assistance of helpers, and marry a princess, the stories describe the male phantasy of ambition, reflecting something of an experience and expectation of dominance (the active). For a girl, on the other hand, the cultural and social overlap is more confusing. Freud’s argument that a young girl’s day-dreams concentrate on the erotic ignores his own position on her early masculinity and the active daydreams necessarily associated with this phase. In fact, all too often, the erotic function of the woman is represented by the passive, the waiting (Andromeda again), acting above all as a formal closure to the narrative structure. Three elements can thus be drawn together; Freud’s concept of “masculinity” in women, the identification triggered by the logic of a narrative grammar, and the ego’s desire to phantasize itself in a certain, active, manner. All three suggest that, as desire is given cultural materiality in a text, for women (from childhood onwards) trans-sex identification is a habit that very easily becomes second Nature. However, this Nature does not sit easily and shifts restlessly in its borrowed transvestite clothes.

Unpack, interpret and discuss this quote in the context of Mulvey’s thought. Explain how Mulvey is setting up her argument. How is she shifting her perspective from her previous essay “Visual Please and Narrative Cinema”? On what influences and arguments is she drawing this time, and what is she saying about the possibility of female spectatorship in a patriarchal culture?

SECTION TWO:
Answer One Of The Three Questions in a longer, multiple-page essay

1) Jane Gaines in her influential essay on “White Privilege and Looking Relations” paved the way for critical reflections on how “white”, middle-classed feminist theory was unable to theorize race in relation to gender (and to the gendered looking relations in cinema). According to Gaines, the film Mahogany at first sight invites Mulveyan reading (that would be based on the alternation narrative and woman-as-spectacle). Nevertheless, upon closer inspection such an interpretation would miss the point. How could one read the film along the lines of Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”? How does “race” as a category complicate such an interpretation? What filmic and socio-historical aspects does Gaines take into account to go beyond Mulvey? Are there other film theoretical positions on race, representation and identification that might help to think about Mahogany? Is Gaines’ analysis going far enough in your eyes and are there perhaps aspects of the film which you would read differently.

2) One of the most transformative moments in recent film history was the introduction of computer generated images (CGI). Digital image making has not only changed film making, it also has philosophical (and “ontological”) repercussions that film theory is slowly beginning to grasp. In class, we have read two quite different takes on the topic that attempt to situate digital cinema in relation to the question of realism and in relation to early cinema and 19th century pre-cinematic/visual culture. In your essay, unpack and discuss the arguments by Stephen Prince and Lev Manovich and relate them, where possible, to the film Hugo (2011).

3) Apparatus Theory of the 1970s has pointed to the ways in which cinema as a perceptual apparatus “places” the subject in a certain position and critiqued this position as “ideological.” How have individual apparatus theorists developed this argument, using art/media historical and psychoanalytical concepts. How have scholars interested in gender or race both drawn on ideas related to apparatus theory and attempted to g beyond it or fill its blindspots? Are there other questions that one could raise when evaluating or critiquing apparatus theory almost 50 years later?