This
advice is aimed at students just beginning their undergraduate
degrees in Film Studies. Though many of the points might seem rather
obvious, these have been the most common issues that I’ve come
across having marked many undergrad essays over the last few years.
The advice is designed purely as that; this is in no way a guaranteed
recipe for academic success, but rather a few comments based upon the
recurring problems I see in the work I mark, and more or less how I
approached this kind of work when I was an undergrad (and, all things
considered, I did alright). I'm going to use an example essay question entitled ‘Describe Some
Of The Functions Of Editing In The Films Of Jan Svankmajer’. I’ve
done this in the hope that there isn’t a real essay question out
there that I'm going to be giving answers away to. If you don’t
know who Jan Svankmajer is, don’t worry, I'm only going to refer to
this fictional essay question as demonstration.
Structuring
Let’s
assume you have an essay of 2500 words. My personal advice is to be
simplistic and anal about breaking it down into even chunks. Let’s
say 500 words can form both your introduction and conclusion (in
themselves, they are basically summaries that read along the lines of
‘this is what I'm going to look at and why it’s important’ and
‘this is what I have looked at, and it proves my point nicely’).
This leaves you 2000 words to break down into 4 points. Some essay
word counts will be shorter, some will be longer – but the key
here is to try and divide the essay into a few points (generally 3 to
5 is enough) of more or less equal length. You don’t need to be so
rigid when you actually write it –some points will warrant more
words, others less. It’s a guide to make sure you don’t fall too
short of the word count or go massively over. I can assure you in no
uncertain terms that, even if you say you’ve written the correct
word count, we can tell by looking if it’s not (we have some 30
other essays on our desk that we can compare yours with, after all).
Try
to think about each of your points as a sub-question and take 500
words to try and answer it. This way, all your points have a purpose
in the overall argument. In our Svankmajer example, for instance, we
could structure it in one of two ways; either by looking at four
films and discussing the editing in each, or by looking at different
approaches to editing exploring how his films fit into these
categories. I'm going to go with the latter. So my first section will
look at continuity editing, perhaps asking something along the lines
of ‘does Svankmajer use much continuity editing in his films, and
if so, to what end?’ The sub-questions don’t need to be
ground-breaking, they’re purely for you to help you focus your
attention; you won’t keep them in the text of the finished essay.
So, I will then identify moments of continuity editing in his films
and discuss the relevance – for instance, Picnic
With
Weissman
uses establishing shots in order to link the otherwise disparate
events going on. This creates a sense of unity between the different
areas of action even though they rarely overlap with each other
directly. I might then look at the possible influence of Soviet
Montage on the films’ editing (Svanmajer made films in Communist
Czechoslovakia so the influence is quite probable). I can then
discuss moments when two images are edited together to create
particular mental association that are unrelated to the
spatio-temporal unity of continuity editing. I might then talk about
the rhythm of Svankmajer’s editing, its relationship to the music
score, or maybe the fact that as stop-motion animation, his films are
edited on a micro-level of the frame-by-frame process. The actual
specifics are unimportant. What is important is that each point
builds upon the last, that I don’t simply repeat myself as I work
through these different editing modes.
Description
And
Analysis
Undergraduate
essays have a tendency to conflate these two concepts and it is
important that you understand the difference between the two - and what
their relationship is. Description is a necessary part of the
process; you always need to be sure that whoever is reading the piece
knows what specific sequence you are looking at. But description is
only the ground floor. You describe all of the pertinent details that
you need to in order to make sure that the reader is on the same page
as you, but then you move on to analysing
them. Your description of the framing of a sequence should be in
service of analysing the purpose and function of the framing in the
particular sequence (who’s in the frame, who isn’t, how does this
steer our understanding of the shot?). But likewise, analysis doesn’t
work without description. Many an essay has been written that leaps
straight into analysis without providing any kind of context – the
person marking the essay will most likely have seen the film you’re
writing about, but they won’t know what moment you’re discussing
unless you tell them.
Incorporating
Other
Peoples’
Work
First
year degree students tend to slip into two camps when it comes to
using references; either, you quickly find a bunch of quotes that
agree with what you’re saying and stick them in, or, you
intentionally set out to disprove or disagree with an existing
position. While both of these approaches are perfectly valid in terms
of the overall academic practice of essay/article writing, it’s not
the best way to start out with your first few essays. The former
approach can look simplistic and give the impression that all you’ve
done is scour books for quotes, rather than actually reading
anything. The latter is unadvised on the basis that, as an undergrad,
you’re highly unlikely to be able to mount a particularly
convincing argument – you end up looking arrogant if you criticise
a well respected academic with a poorly conceived criticism. The best
approach is to summarise and incorporate: read an article or chapter,
make sure you’ve understood the position and argument of the piece,
then put forward that argument in a succinct paragraph. This
paragraph then becomes a linking point in your overall argument. For
instance, we can look in the Peter Hames edited collection Dark
Alchemy: The Films Of Jan Svankmajer
and read articles by Michael O'Pray and Roger Cardinal. Summarise the
gist of what each author is claiming and spend no more than a couple
of sentences on each.
Do they agree or disagree with each other in any significant way?
Where does your own claim sit in relation to their ideas? The point
here is to demonstrate that you get
what
they're saying, but don't spend any more time on them than necessary.
The fear for most students is that this approach will get them in
trouble with plagiarism. As long as you make it quite clear which
ideas are yours and which ideas are taken from another source, then
you shouldn’t have any problems.
An
Essay
Is
Not
A
Review
Though
it might pain many of you to accept it, the fact is that we really
don’t care much about your opinion of a film. Unless the question
is very specifically asking you to evaluate a film (which is rare),
you should always avoid telling us what you personally thought about
it. There are a great many platforms from which to voice your
personal opinion about a film; from blogs, message boards, youtube
videos, or just ranting with your mates down the pub. An academic
essay, however, is not the place for it. Of course, the way you
personally perceive a film will affect the way you approach the
particular question, a certain degree of subjectivity is unavoidable.
But what you need to make sure to avoid is the attitude of ‘I loved
it, so it must be good’, or the more common and infinitely worse ‘I
hated it, so it must be bad’.
What
makes a film student different from a film fan or film critic is that
you need to have a wide and varied appreciation of all modes of film;
outside of your own comfort zone of the films you happen to enjoy
watching. For many film students, this is the major learning curve of
the degree. You are not being asked to evaluate a film, you are being
asked to identify certain pertinent details about a film, extract
them and interrogate them in order to enhance our understanding of
the film. Indeed, you (or your parents, or the government on the
understanding that you’ll pay them back) are paying a huge amount
of money to come to University and study film; there’s precious
little benefit in just coming and doing exactly what you’d do
coming out of the cinema on a Saturday night. You can hate Citizen
Kane
with the fiery passion of Hell, which is perfectly fine from the
point of view that every person is free to their personal preference.
But a film like Citizen
Kane
doesn’t achieve its status by accident. People didn’t sit around
a table, randomly pulling film titles out of a hat in order to decide
which are the most important cinematic works. Even though you might
hate it, as a film student, you need to be able to identify the
film’s achievements – if you can’t see them, you’re probably
taking the wrong degree.
Finally,
it is important to always be clear on what
the essay question is asking you to do. Our example here is a pretty
straightforward and open one, but other questions can be quite
specific in what they're after. If the question is 'How is Psycho
a
prime example of Classical Hollywood Storytelling?' don't
spend your time talking about Hitchcock's other films or the avant
garde
film movement of the 1920s. Demonstrate your knowledge of Psycho
and the narrative devices of the Classical Hollywood period. It might
seem painfully obvious, but there are always students that just don't
seem to pay any attention to what is being asked of them. Don't be
one of them!
- P. S.
