Choose ONE prompt and write an essay answering it. Each prompt asks you to focus on a single film. A ...
Choose ONE prompt and write an essay answering it. Each prompt asks you to focus on a single film. All prompts also require you to engage at least one course reading (which I attached below). The best essays will support their claims with evidence drawn from film form and narrative concepts (as outlined in my lecture and the essay “Film Form and Narrative by Rowe”). You should also make time to re-watch the film you write about. here are the 8 different prompts to choose from the movies to choose from are Zoot Suit (Luis Valdez, 1981), El Norte (Gregory Nava, 1983) , The Devil Never Sleeps (Lourdes Portillo, 1994), and Selena (Gregory Nava, 1997) 1. Fregoso argues that Chicana/o films are political films by, for, and about Chicanas and Chicanos. Choose one film that we have screened and, drawing on Fregoso, write an essay answering the question—who is the film for? In other words, who is the film’s presumed audience or audiences? Be sure to cite specific details from the film to support your argument. 2. Drawing on Fregoso, write an essay about the significance of gender difference in Zoot Suit. You may could focus on the relationship between Hank and El Pachucho, but you can also focus on the wider range of male and female characters in the film, including members of Hank’s family and friends. 3. Drawing on Fregoso, write an essay in which you make an argument about what she calls “vernacular aesthetics” in one of the following films: Zoot Suit, Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, or Selena. You may want to focus on dance. What is the significance of dance numbers? Do they drive the narrative or interrupt it and to what effect? What does dancing say about conflicts over race and gender? 4. According to Fregoso, El Norte reproduces conventional gender constructions in the characters of Enrique and Rosa: The burden of cultural reproduction thus resides in the woman, in her spirituality and existence. Rosa symbolizes a "peoples" tradition. This Western (Enlightenment) distinction between men, as agents of their own individual story, and women, as agents of cultural reproduction and tradition, is maintained and emphasized by the parallel structure of the narrative. Whereas the film- makers intended to render a neo-Mayan (alternative) vision of an indigenous worldview, El Norte's representation follows the conventional Western division of Nature/Culture, positing female subjectivity in the unknown, Mystery, Nature, and woman as the ground for cultural reproduction and maintenance. Drawing on Fregoso, write an essay where you make an argument about gender difference in the film. You could focus on the Enrique and Rosa, but you might instead want to examine more minor characters. 5. Fregoso writes that “El Norte presumes an articulation (or connection) between political repression in Guatemala and the plight of undocumented Latino immigrants.” How does the film connect the two situations? What is the significance or point of linking the plight of Guatemalans facing repression and the plight of undocumented immigrants? 6. According to Fregoso, in The Devil Never Sleeps Portillo enters “the realm of the imaginative” (90), which partly means that even though it’s a documentary, it makes creative use of elements of film form, including unusual camera angels, props, music and sound. Analyze two creative uses of film form in The Devil Never Sleeps. 7. In her essay about The Devil Never Sleeps, Fregoso argues writes that “Portillo pursues clues and facts from popular forms of knowledge and experience (including legends, gossip, telenovelas, canciones rancheras (folk songs), myth, (and) proverbial wisdom…Portillo pursues the task of producing truth concerning Tío Oscar’s death by juxtaposing popular with official forms of knowledge, refusing to privilege one from over the other” (93). Discuss the significance of 2 examples of popular forms of knowledge in The Devil Never Sleeps. 8. Drawing on Aparico and Paredez, write an essay about how Selena is remembered in either Selena, Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, or Selena: The Series.
