Here are a few closing thoughts on the course.  I’ll try not to make it sound too much like a course evaluation form…

I like the way this course has probed into things that we take for granted in most classes, like the intricate processes of viewer comprehension.   At the same time it has clarified a number of distinctions that I was surprised not to have learned by my fourth year in the major—like the distinctions between classical Hollywood, art cinema, and parametric modes of narration (we discussed classical Hollywood cinema to death in film history, but I had never heard of “parametric” in the context of film studies).  Because of this, I feel like this would make a good course outside of the senior seminar format if the work load was scaled back a bit.

I liked most of the reading, but particularly enjoyed the J.J. Murphy book.  I think he offers interesting insight on a variety of kind of non-traditional movies, and the book inspired me to watch most of the movies in it that we didn’t see in class (I skipped Safe, for obvious reasons).  Murphy does a great job of explaining how narration operates in each of the films he discusses, but it left me wanting some more general theory of narration in independent film… I guess what I’m getting at is that Bordwell is a little to general, and Murphy is a bit too specific, so something in the middle would be a nice addition.

Rarely do I enjoy screenings as consistently as I enjoyed what we watched in this class.  Though the double features that lasted into the eleven o’clock hour sometimes tested my attention span, the movies and TV shows were great.  Even The Singing Detective, which didn’t pay off as I hoped it might (and which I’d consider my least favorite text of the semester) had enough humor and suspense to basically keep my interest.  Annie Hall and The Prestige are among my favorite films, and Arrested Development is probably my favorite TV show, so my Wednesday evenings tended to be pretty enjoyable.

I can’t think of much more to say (I think my brain turns to mush as soon as I get home…), so I guess this is the end.

Thanks, everyone, for a great course.  Have an excellent break.

My final paper was about DVD bonus features and I did a lot of research about paratexts, but I ended up summarizing it without a whole lot of discussion in the paper.  So, I thought I’d raise a question here:  where is the line between text and paratext for movies?  This question comes from a specific list of paratexts for books offered by Jonathan Gray, summarizing Gerard Genette that includes covers, title pages, typesetting, paper, and goes on to name many, many more.  What is the cinematic equivalent for these elements within a movie? The cover and title page neatly correspond with the title sequence or perhaps the movie poster, but typesetting and paper are very much within the book.  The cinematic equivalents that I’m coming up with—film stock or maybe color palate—cannot be paratexts, these are formal choices.  I guess typesetting is sort of a formal choice for a writer, but it affects the meaning of the words as a paratext, whereas the look of a film is all the film itself.  This relates back to issues we discussed with regard to Mittell’s article in the Cambridge Companion book, about how visual media must fix things in ways that books do not, so written texts are experienced more variably.  I don’t have an answer to my own question, I’m just wondering…

Last night was my first time seeing Run Lola Run, and I really liked it.  After hearing that it somehow resembled or related to videogames, I was apprehensive—it doesn’t get much more boring than watching someone else play a videogame, so I was not looking forward to a film that mimicked that experience.  Luckily my blind assumptions turned out to be way off.

The most striking thing about Run Lola Run is how satisfying the story is, even though it operates within this game-like structure of “replaying” a period of time in a consistent space.  In large part, I attribute this to its traditional structure.  I think four acts work best for breaking it down—the opening segment (I guess you could call that a prologue…) and initial phone call set up the problem, Lola’s first run through the story world is complicating action as we get a sense of the obstacles to solving this problem, the second time through has more development as the film shows us how things can change based on Lola’s action, and the last try includes a resolution of the problem that leaves Lola and Manni better off than they were at the beginning.  The happy ending is especially satisfying after seeing the same situation end badly every other time.

The spatial treatment of Run Lola Run is the most significant video game parallel I noticed when watching the movie.  All of the sequences that showed Lola running, particularly the ones shot from her side, reminded me of classic scroll games like Jenkins describes—think Mario Brothers on gameboy.  As Lola repeatedly navigates the same space with a few different variations, the shot composition emphasizes the consistency of the world.  Lola always runs around the same corner in a shot framed the same way, by the same buildings, and among the same characters—the people become elements of the landscape to navigate rather than characters with which to interact.  The third time through the world the spatial and compositional rules set up before are slightly more flexible, with Manni chasing the bum and Lola riding in the ambulance, but there is enough similarity to make it a satisfying variation on a theme.