FI328: The Practice of Film Criticism
Outline
Autumn 2015
Module Tutor: José Arroyo
Schedule:
Tuesday: 3-6 Introduction and screening
Wednesdays 9-1: Workshop Room
Room A.026
Office Hour: Monday 3:00 (if you can’t make that time, contact me to make an
appointment)
E-mail: j.arroyo@warwick.ac.uk
Office: A1.17 Milburn House
This module is about film criticism as a range of practices, both written and filmic.
The primary aim is to enable students to produce different types of film criticism to a
high standard. In order to do so, we will be looking at and discussing a range of films,
critics, and various types of criticism, written and audio-visual. But the accent will
actually be on students’ own work; on the process, the various ways of doing, and on
the production itself; what has in fact been written or otherwise produced by
students. The module should be seen as akin to a creative writing module, but one
which will also encompasses audio-visual forms of criticism in general, and the video
essay in particular.
Students will see a different choice of film each week as well as selections of
criticism of different lengths and kinds (for example: a blurb, a review, a journalistic
long essay, an academic essay, a narrative video essay, an experimental film
interrogating viewing). Students will then write something on what they see each
week and begin adding to what will become a portfolio of different kinds of film
criticism.
In seminars, students (and it will be all seminar led; no lectures) will come
prepared to critique the works they have read and/or seen for class and also a
selection of their colleagues’ work (this will be distributed fairly, perhaps half the
class doing it every other week, depending on the number of students that enroll,
and the work itself will remain formally un-assessed at this stage), comment on the
work, discuss how it could be improved, and select which one they think best.
This will then go up weekly on a website, which I will set up but which
students will run themselves. In other words a student-led blog will be set-up in
week two, after students have chosen a title for it, to showcase the work done on
this module in the Autumn term, one which will hopefully continue even after the
module is over.
The author of what students determine is the best essay of the week will edit
the blog that week. I will edit two of the blog posts, the mid-term assessed 1500
word essay, and the final blog posts under my supervision, selections of the best of
the 3500 word essays or video essays at the end. The blog will be disseminated in
various ways, including through the department’s web portal and through the
departmental twitter account.
This work will be done on a weekly basis even as the types of criticism being
done and discussed shifts from review article to review essay to video essay. I expect
all of this will be demanding but also great fun and not only enhance our skills in
doing film criticism but also enrich us with a whole range of practical skills, from
interpersonal communication to blogging to marketing.
A rough outline for the module is as follows (this is the first time this is taught so
this will be fleshed out as we do it):
Week 1: Introduction: Phantom Lady, selection of title for blog, and delineation of
process
I have decided not to announce the titles of the films students will be seeing so that
from week 2-5, inclusive, each choice will be a surprise and students will be expected
to describe and evaluate without previous knowledge of the film as exercises to
develop their practice.
Week 2: On Wednesday 14th from 2-4:00 there will be a round-table discussion on
The Future of Criticism. It’s not quite within our allotted class time but I’d really like
you to attend.
Week 3-4: The Review (I’d like to start you writing at approximately 500 words the
first two weeks but move on to 1000 by week 3-4, in training for the 1500 review
submission.
Week 5, 7,8 The Essay (which will include embedding image capture and clips in an
online format)
-17 November. Andres Di Tella will be on campus on 17 Nov, Room 0.28, 3pm to
offer a film-making/documentary focused workshop for students.
From week 7, I will list the works we will be viewing as they do require prior research
particularly if you considering doing your long essay or video essay on them and they
are as follows:
Week 7: Game of Thrones (I’ll be showing episodes six and seven but I’m sure most
of you have already seen the latest series; and if not, do. I have copies I can lend)
Week 8: La mala educación/ Bad Education ( Pedro Almodóvar, Spain, 1999)
Week 9 The Heist Film (I’ll be showing Il soliti ignoti/ Big Deal on Madonna Street but
try and see as many as you can Rififi, The Ocean’s 11 films, Topkapi, The Italian Job,
etc. )
Week 10 Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance, USA, 2010): I’m showing this as
representative of a series of films that have as their theme America in a new
Depression. Other titles could include Winter’s Bone, The Place Beyond the Pines,
Nebraska, The Hunger Games, Killing Them Softly; any or all of the Jeff Nichols films
(Shotgun Stories to Mud) any othe films of Week 9-10 The video essay proper (with
students who choose not to one of these continuing their engagement with a larger
essay form)
Assessment:
1 review x 1500 words (40%) due Monday, Week 6
+
1 longer essay 3,500 words
OR
1 video essay under 5 minutes (60%) due at the end of term.
Due Monday 18th of January (to be returned 15th of February)
Suggested Reading:
I want the focus of this module to be on the production rather than the analysis of
criticism thus I want to leave reading as suggested. There is no exam and you won’t
be tested on reading. However, there is no question but that reading great criticism
is essential to producing it and thus I greatly encourage you to dip into the collected
criticisms of writers such as Robert Warshaw, Manny Farber, Pauline Kael, Susan
Sontag, Richard Dyer, David Thomson, J. Hoberman, James Wolcott and others. Matt
Soller Zeit’s work, which I greatly admire, is almost entire available online. If you
have not already read Noel Carroll’s On Criticism: Thinking in Action, I urge you to do
so. Lucking Out: Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York Y James
Wolcott, is a portrait of a critic as a young man, and is a book I asked you to read
over the Summer. I’d also like you to dip into the writing of David Foster Wallace and
particularly recommend his essay on David Lynch. Lastly, Film Studies For Free has a
range of resources on the video essay in its various dimensions, including the making
of them, that can be further explored here:
http://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-essays-and-scholarly-remixfilm.html.
Another reason, I haven’t wanted to have set reading is that writing invariably
involves research, either into the form of viewing and re-viewing or in the form of
history, context, background into the director other of the filmmakers involved or
into the particular contexts of the film. Thus, I want to leave this open though we will
be discussing these problems on a weekly basis.
I will be circulating selections of writing on a weekly basis and will collect your emails in the first class in order to enable that.
Workshop: I have slotted the 9-1 slot as a workshop; by this I mean that I expect you
to be there and ready to work. The slot will be used in different way on different
ways and you can’t arrange the rest of your schedule in the light of it except by
blocking the whole thing off. There will be a few rare weeks when I will use some of
it for viewing either re-viewing or contextual viewing. But most of it will be spent on
doing, either writing yourself, reading your coleagues work, advising, critiquing. It is
essential that you be there; and if you can’t make this commitment; it’s not too late
to pick something else.