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What is Film?

Film is one of the most versatile subjects in the arts and humanities, appearing in courses ranging from media studies and communication to sociology, psychology, and cultural criticism. What makes it academically compelling is its dual nature: film functions simultaneously as an art form with distinct technical and aesthetic conventions and as a cultural artifact that reflects the values, tensions, and relationships of the society that produces it. Students are asked to analyze specific works such as Mean Girls, Tough Guise, Sarafina, Wit, Menace II Society, and True Grit precisely because these films open up larger conversations about identity, violence, gender, race, and human behavior.

The papers archived here approach film from several directions. Some focus on technical and production elements, examining terminology, cinematography, and the conventions of silent film. Others take a sociological or psychological angle, using specific movies to explore addiction, domestic violence, and human behavior. Comparative essays place films side by side to highlight contrasting storytelling choices, while genre analysis papers examine why a film like The Hangover operates as comedy. Reflective and reaction-based writing also appears frequently, asking students to connect a film's scenes and story to real-world experience.

A strong film essay anchors its argument in specific scenes, dialogue, or cinematic techniques rather than plot summary. A well-scoped thesis makes a clear interpretive claim about what a film communicates and how it achieves that effect. Evidence drawn from the viewer's experience of particular moments carries more weight than general impressions. The most common pitfall is treating a film purely as a story to retell rather than as a constructed text where every choice — sound, framing, character relationship — contributes to meaning.

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Paper Undergraduate

Christopher Nolan's The Prestige: cinema, stage magic, and reality

¶ … Prestige: Where theatrical conventions meet the real life of cinema in Tesla's laboratory

Paper Undergraduate

Team communication breakdown in the Apollo 13 re-entry scene

The scene concerns the re-entry point of Apollo 13. The team appears to experience some difficulty at the re-entry position, and are attempting to resolve these by talking about it.

Paper Doctorate

Bazin's ontology of cinema and the gap between film and reality

When photography appears in historical development, its indexicality adds the appeal of endurance through time to the impression of likeness in painted perspective. Crucially, ?likeness' is not given epistemological or cognitive value in itself, but rather is being invoked as a sup- port for fundamental needs of the subject vis-a-vis time. And cinema adds duration to the embalming of a single temporal instant in still photography. As Bazin puts it in ?The Myth of Total Cinema,? this makes cinema the realization of a perennial compulsion, a virtually ageless dream of perfect realism, which would have to include duration. But, as with any wish fulfillment, such preservation of the real object is protectively converted into the preservation of the subject. Always, for Bazin, cinema achieves its specificity through the relations of the subject.

Paper Undergraduate

Fast food companies' ethical responsibility for obesity and health problems

There are those who contend that fast food companies are indeed ethically responsible for the health problems that result from their high caloric, sodium-rich and basically unhealthy food.

Paper Undergraduate

Thirteen Days: leadership and decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis

¶ … ceases to amaze me that a handful of individuals and their very striking and definite personalities can have such a huge effect on the course of history. The film Thirteen Days illustrates this general principle…

Paper Undergraduate

The correlation between violent video games and childhood aggression

Computer Game Violence and Individual Aggression

Case Study Doctorate

The evolution of sound technology in cinema from silent films to digital era

This paper has described the history and development of sound technologies and sound design in film. The important segments of film making industry include films, documentaries, sound, music, television, and theater. The film making industry has grown over the years at a phenomenal rate and it is acknowledged that United States in particular has contributed in global expansion of the industry, despite the fact that Europeans played a significant role in industry improvements. The notable advantage of U.S. can be denoted as their universal appeal and film makings in English language. The influential role of audio appeal can be estimated through analysis of the above stated factor. The United States film industry has turned films into a global perspective. The Hollywood industry is identified as one of the major shareholders and driving force behind notable developments after the maturity of basic innovations.

Literal and figurative sight in John Berger's Ways of Seeing

There is an inherent duality that is part of visual perception, which John Berger alludes to within his book Ways of Seeing. This duality functions on both the literal and figurative levels of perception, and involves both looking and being seen. Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Rashomon clarify these concepts within the media of film.

Paper Undergraduate

Gender roles and stereotypes in Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot

Billy Wilder's 1959 film Some Like it Hot playfully explores gender, sexuality, and gender bending. Marilyn Monroe plays Sugar Cane, a stereotypically dumb-witted blonde with no real aspirations beyond finding a man to…

New York City as character in Gangs of New York

Gangs of New York is unusual in the way in which it focuses on New York City's history, framing the city and its criminal underworld during the Civil War as a character unto itself.

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