A. Analytical (20 points)
- Identify and describe the cinematic techniques utilized in the following scene, and from there discuss how the visual language reinforces the broader themes developed in the film. *Note: Discuss what you see directly in the segment and do not give background information. [One short clip will be selected from clips seen and discussed in class, almost all of which can be found on the Review Page.]
B. Conceptual I (60 points)
Answer questions 1, and 2 or 3.
- What are the fundamental principles of neorealism that appear in Zavattini’s article “Some Ideas on the Cinema” that are discernible in Bicycle Thieves? Use Bicycle Thieves to illustrate Zavattini’s vision of neorealist cinema.
- In “Cinema, Instrument of Poetry,” Buñuel asserts that, “The cinema is a magnificent and perilous weapon when yielded by a free spirit” (46). Which film assigned for this unit of the course best exemplifies, in your judgement, this statement with the most distinction? Why?
- In “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” Zavattini asserts that, “Of course, reality can be analysed by ways of fiction. Fictions can be expressive and natural; but neorealism, if it wants to be worthwhile, must sustain the moral impulse that characterised its beginnings, in an analytical documentary way. No other medium of expression has the cinema’s original and innate capacity for showing things that we believe worth showing, as they happen day by day – in what we might call their ‘dailiness,’ their longest and truest duration” (53). Which film assigned for this unit of the course, in your judgement, fulfills this aspiration with the most distinction? Why?
C. Conceptual II (20 points)
*This section will contain a question similar to B.2 or B.3 (above) but in relation to a specific film. One or more of the following quotations will be used:
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (Martin Luther King, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” 1968)
“For the measure of our compassion lies not in our service of those on the margins but in our willingness to see ourselves in kinship with them and mutuality. …. No us and them, just us” (Father Greg Boyle, Tedx Talk, 2012).
“But I do all this not with the intention of creating heroes, because I think that hero is not ‘certain men’ but ‘every man.’ Wanting to give everyone a sense of equality is not levelling him down, but exalting his solidarity. Lack of solidarity is always born from presuming to be different, from a But. …. The But must disappear, and we must be able to say: ‘That man is bearing what I myself should bear in the same circumstances’” (Zavattini, 60).
“Although I have just now indicated very briefly the capital importance which I attach to the film which treats the fundamental problems of a modern man, I do not consider man in isolation, as a particular case, but in relationship to other men” (Buñuel, 48)
“…today, when we have thought out a scene, we feel the need to ‘remain’ in it, because the single scene itself can contain so many echoes and reverberations, can even contain all the situations we may need” (Zavattini, 52).
“Becaue it acts in a direct manner upon the spectator in presenting to him concrete people and objects, because it isolates him by virtue of the silence and darkness from what might be called his ‘psychic habitat’, the cinema is capable of putting him into a state of ecstasy more effectively than any other mode of human expression. But more effectively than any other, it is capable of brutalising him” (Buñuel, 45)
“The keenest necessity of our time is ‘social attention.’ Attention, though, to what is there, directly: not through an apologue, however well conceived. A starving man, a humiliated man, must be shown by name and surname; no fable for a starving man, because that is something else, less effective and less moral. The true function of the cinema is not to tell fables, and to a true function we must recall it” (Zavattini, 53).
“…if the spectator shares the joys, the sorrows, the anxieties of a personage on the screen, this can be only because he sees reflected in it the joys, sorrows, anxieties of a whole society, and therefore his own. Strikes, social insecurity, fear of war, etc., are the things which affect everyone today, and also affect the spectator…” (Buñuel, “Cinema, Instrument of Poetry” 46)
“I put myself among the rich, not only because I have some money (which is only the most apparent and immediate aspect of wealth), but because I am also in a position to create oppression and injustice. That is the moral (or immoral) position of the so-called rich man” (Zavattini, 52).
“If I were not afraid of being thought irreverent, I should say that Christ, had He a camera in His hand, would not shoot fables, however wonderful, but would show us the good ones and the bad ones of this world – in actuality, giving us close-ups of those who make their neighbours’ bread too bitter, and of their victims, if the censor allowed it” (Zavattini, 56).
“The cinema should never turn back. It should accept, unconditionally, what is contemporary. Today, today, today. It must tell reality as if it were a story; there must be no gap between life and what is on the screen …. The fact creates its own fiction” (Zavattini, 57).
“I am against ‘exceptional’ personages. The time has come to tell the audience that they are the true protagonists of life. The result will be a constant appeal to the responsibility and dignity of every human being. Otherwise the frequent habit of identifying oneself with fictional characters will become very dangerous. We must identify ourselves with what we are. The world is composed of millions of people thinking of myths” (Zavattini, 58).