Final-ly

Finals are in full swing. Nearing completion actually.

Script and Narrative Analysis, for which I turned in a 37-page, first act of my screenplay, is submitted and done. I posted a bit more on this subject here.

For my Film History and Film Sense midterm, I wrote a paper on the editing in Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai. For my final, I’m putting the final touches on an analyzation of the James Bond film, Goldfinger, with an emphasis on focalization, the male gaze, female objectification and voyeuristic scopophelia. I figured I’d choose a “fun” film instead of a “serious” film, and it’s been a joy to write. After all, patriarchal objectification of women in James Bond practically writes itself.

For Film History and Historiography, I’m following up my midterm, which focused on propaganda films and the myth of nationalism in cinema with a longer paper that uses that as a starting point to jump off into how countries take history—which has proven to be far more malleable than anyone ever dreamed possible—and reshape it after the fact, often decades or centuries after the fact. As frightening a premise as it may be, many people understand history through the lens of their entertainment. And that entertainment has the ability to alter the past, or, more specifically, our perception of that past. Given enough time, how will it be possible to separate the fact from the fiction?

My last class is this Tuesday and by Friday, all my papers will be in. Then comes a Christmas holiday of..well, I don’t know what, actually. That’s both an uncomfortable and sublime prospect.