WHO TO WRITE FILM STUDIES ESSAYS:

HELPFUL TIPS AND PRINCIPLES

General principles and tips to

help make your writing of essays

in film studies easier and better.

BALANCE THEORY AND FILM TEXT WELL

Properly identify the primary text and the secondary texts. This will enable you to explore, critique and analyse the theory.

For example, for an essay for the question or topic “What is Cinema?”

The primary text is film theory and the secondary texts are the film or films.

Another example is in the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” by Laura Mulvey.

First, she develops her account of psychoanalysis and film theory. Then, she tests it against brief examples (von Sternberg). And then, tests it against an account of aspects of a key film.

BALANCING THEORY AND FILM TEXT:

❖ Avoid or limit to minimum giving an account of the film's plot.

❖ Rather, concentrate on framing, editing, actor position and actor performance.

❖ Each time you cite an aspect of the film, relate it to the theoretical account that you have constructed in the first part of the essay.

STRUCTURING AND ARGUING:

AVOID CREATING A PARA-TACTIC STRUCTURE.

❖ It is like merely creating a list wherein you break down the elements of a theory and test each against the film. Doing this is not developing an argument. You can notice that you are going towards this structure if you start to write wordings of the like as “another aspect of genre theory.”

STRUCTURING AND ARGUING:STRUCTURING AND ARGUING:

INSTEAD, CREATE A SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE.INSTEAD, CREATE A SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE.

CREATING A SYNTACTIC STRUCTURE :

ARGUMENT AND INTRODUCTION

See to it that your introduction states your argument clearly. If it does not, just continue writing until you finish the current draft and you will have an overall picture of what argument you are really writing about.

CHECKING YOUR STRUCTURE

❖ Writing or rewriting a diffe-rent version of your introduction after you have written the discussion body (even including the conclusion) will enable you to evaluate whether you have created a cumulative syntactic structure.

To guide you such evaluation, you can try to answer the question “Does one idea lead into the next?”

CHECKING YOUR CONCLUSION

Coming up with a conclusion is not merely making a summary. And with the first, a syntactic structure is very helpful.

A summary restates the points or arguments you have made.

A conclusion re-incorporates and brings together all the threads of the essay. It reflects on how the initial ideas has been refined, challenged or expanded.

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