below you will find the two handouts from yesterday's class:
1. Out of Class Essay Assignment #1
2. Viewing a Documentary Film
English 5, Spring 2015
Instructor: C. Fraga
Out of Class Essay Assignment #1--200 points possible
Assigned: Wednesday,
February 11
Rough Draft Due (optional) no
later than: Wednesday, February 18 (typed, MLA format)
Final Draft Due: Friday, February
27
REMINDER: IF YOU CHOOSE TO SUBMIT
A ROUGH DRAFT, THEN YOU MAY REVISE THE ESSAY ONCE YOU RECEIVE YOUR GRADE, AS
MANY TIMES AS YOU WISH.
Reminders:
·
Please underline your thesis statement.
·
Please attach your rough draft to the back of your final draft when submitting.
·
This essay must follow MLA format for the set-up of your essay. No Works Cited
page is required since you will not be conducting any outside research for this
essay.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF HOME
Essay Prompt: This essay asks you to employ your narrative, descriptive and
analytical writing skills.
Consider your childhood and write
about a place where you felt most comfortable, safe, happy and content. This
place COULD be your actual house, or a room in your house, but it could be
ANYWHERE. (your grandparents’ home; the school yard; the playground at a
neighborhood park; Little League games; dance class; the tree house your dad
built for you, etc.)
Your essay must include a
detailed description of this place and the story of this place—what happened
here? Why did this place bring a sense of comfort and safety and enjoyment to
you? What did you do when you were at this place? And finally, why do you think
it was so significant and memorable for you? Looking back, does this place in
any way reflect or symbolize or help define who you are today? Why or why not?
Be specific.
Your goal is for the reader to
actually SEE this place and UNDERSTAND its importance and effect on you as a
young child. Perhaps the reader will also get a sense of your personality,
sensibility and passions.
FOR THE PURPOSE OF THIS ESSAY
ONLY, I AM ASKING YOU TO ORGANIZE IT IN A CERTAIN WAY—NARRATIVE FOLLOWED BY
ANALYSIS. We will discuss this at length
IN CLASS today. You will want to take notes during the discussion.
REQUIRED LENGTH:
I do not believe in giving my
students a specific page length or word count requirement. Part of being a
successful writer is knowing how to address a prompt accurately and fully and
knowing when to stop writing. I WILL suggest that it would be challenging to
complete this assignment in less than at least three pages. Not impossible, but
challenging.
***
English
5
Prof.
Fraga
In preparation
for viewing and analyzing Daughter from
Danang
Purpose:
Just
as reading fiction, non-fiction and poetry can aid in the development of a
discriminatory, critical mind—and lead to critical writing and analysis in ANY
area or topic—the viewing of films
can elicit the same result.
A documentary film is a form that
purports to report on the world as it exists. The documentary filmmaker uses various well-known techniques
taken from the world of news reporting:
- reporting events as
they happen,
- recording interviews
with participants, and
- utilizing photographs
and testimony of historical figures to portray past events.
Sometimes,
the distinction between narrative and
documentary has to be carefully drawn.
For
example, occasionally actors are used to portray characters in historical
documentaries such as Ken Burns’ Jazz,
usually in voice-over. On the
other hand, narrative films will often borrow various documentary
techniques: Steve Soderberg in Traffic used hand-held cameras and a
complicated interweaving of different stories to mimic a documentary
“feel.” Nevertheless, it is clear
that Traffic is a narrative film, and
Jazz is a documentary.
It
is generally assumed that documentaries will not deliberately falsify a view of
reality…however, it is true that inevitably the documentary will reflect the
filmmaker’s point of view, resulting in some manipulation of the absolute
truth. The main way documentaries
shape the story is through
- choosing the interview
subjects,
- selecting certain shots
and framing devices,
- and most importantly by
editing the material to support their vision as filmmakers.
To
be sure, the director of a documentary may often attempt to show a balanced
point of view by posing questions regarding a problem or by advancing various
solutions.
But
often a documentary will abandon such an attempt and use powerful evidence to
advance a certain ideological argument, as in the classic Harlan County, USA, about a miners’ strike in Harlan County,
Kentucky, in 1973. Here, the
miners’ side in the strike is presented through emotional interviews, songs,
meetings, and events on the picket line, while what little we see of the
owners’ point of view is presented in a negative light. This kind of documentary that presents
an argument is called a rhetorical form
of documentary.
In
evaluating a documentary it is important to understand what kind we are judging
and thus what the filmmaker’s objectives are:
- Is the filmmaker trying
to put forth his or her own point of view or attempting to show a balanced
point of view?
- What techniques are
being used to reveal the point of view?
- What methods are used
to gather data?
- What are the criteria
for choosing the people to be interviewed?
- What kind of shots are
used to portray the subjects, and how does editing contribute to the
ideological and emotional effect of the film?
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