Assignment

Write an english essay about The Godfather and one other movie that falls under the catogory of crime and gangster movie. I'd rather have some one who watched the Godfather before, so DO NOT send me message if you haven't watched The Godfather.

The Genre in Film Analysis

4-5 Pages

Description:

The class will choose a specific film genre and determine the leading conventions of this genre--the intended audience, tone, standard types of score and storyline, etc. We will watch a leading example of the genre and outline examples from the film.

You will view 2 or 3 films within the chosen genre and take brief notes on each film. You will then select one film on which to focus your paper. Re-watch the film, annotating how it adheres to genre conventions and where it breaks them. Compare and contrast it to the film the class watched. From your comparison, you should come up with some sort of assertion about the film upon which to base your paper. Examples include: analyzing how the way the film breaks conventions makes it better or worse (how having females leads instead of the usual male leads in the buddy-cop film The Heat adds a discussion of feminism, making it more meaningful than most buddy-cop flicks); an assertion that the film doesn't belong in the genre in which it's currently categorized in (that Clueless is a coming-of-age vs. a romcom); a claim that the movie you chose is, in fact, the cornerstone of the genre and is a better example than the films we chose as a class (Nosferatu is better at establishing conventions than Psycho for reasons x, y, and z or American Gangster, bc it's set in more modern times, is a better reflection of where gangster films currently stand than The Godfather).

Your paper will be a 4-5 page analytical essay. In it, you will utilize comparison and contrast, as well as analysis. You must explain the genre conventions that you've chosen to focus on, compare/contrast how the film does/doesn't adhere to these conventions and how it measures up to the film viewed in class, and analyze how the rhetorical choices made by the director affected the film overall. Be specific in your paper--cite specific scenes from the films, explain whether or not the film reached its intended audience and how it did or didn't do so, ask whether or not the film had a message and answer whether it delivered it successfully, and explain the reasoning behind your assessments.

Purpose:

The purpose of this assignment is to compare and contrast a text and how it holds up to its specific genre. In academic jargon, this raises your "rhetorical awareness" skills, but that's just a sophisticated term for the ability to critically analyze a written and/or visual document. Rhetorically analyzing other people's texts will help you to become more inquisitive and informed readers and will take your own writing practices to a whole new dimension.

Requirements:

1. A 4-5 page, double-spaced, 1 inch margin, 12 Times New Roman font paper that analyzes a film.
2. A completed outline for the paper.
3. Notes from 2 or 3 possible film choices.
4. You must turn in all drafts in order to pass this paper. Each draft should be a significant revision of the one before it.