Crucial note: It is very important for you to remember that you are under no obligation to discuss everything about the film or story.

Media analysis (review, editorial/ commentary essaying). In this module, you will watch a film from a curated list and produce a brief review of a video essay, and then you will produce a draft, have a peer review and submit the final analysis paper. The Children’s Hour (William Wyler, 1961) – Lesbianism, children lying After watching your film, you will develop a cultural anxiety theory about one of the characters, or the overall. This will be a formal essay, with a strong thesis and structured body paragraphs. Your thesis will be an original argument about: 1) What causes the cultural anxieties for a character, OR 2) What the result of cultural anxieties is for a character, OR 3) Who has the biggest or most interesting cultural anxieties or most easily missed-by-the-audience cultural anxieties, OR 4) Exactly what someone’s cultural anxieties are or are not, OR 5) How the film frames cultural anxieties for the audience (this is the option to choose if you want to talk about the messaging of the film, rather than the characters/internal events). You will put your skills of criticism to work theorizing. You will follow the academic structure that we have covered in class. Watch your chosen movie again (even if you saw it before this class and watched it last week as well), and take notes. Like any good piece of writing, you will focus on particular scenes, moments, and lines that prove your point. You will especially need to re-watch the parts of the movie you want to land on in your paper. Notes will also make it easier for you to name actors, directors, and to quote key lines accurately, and accuracy is important in college writing! The paper will close with a concluding portion that wraps up your paper’s overall argument and points, and talks about why this all occurred to you and matters to you, and therefore is valuable to your readers. This is not a free-form essay by any means! Please take this description of the essay’s structure very seriously, and look for examples in the lectures. Crucial note: It is very important for you to remember that you are under no obligation to discuss everything about the film or story: you are only beholden to your own thesis, and to supporting that one idea. Keep in mind that as you write your paper the following areas are potentially rich in supportive evidence for your body paragraphs, since they are the places your idea about your thesis came from: Themes of movie (issues or ideas that the film is exploring—possibly psychological, political, moral) Premise Opening/starting point Plot Cinematography/Filming quality and techniques (sudden cuts, close-ups, etc.) Lighting, costuming and makeup, sets, and scenery Character actions Character speech/dialogue Character appearance Ending/final scene or words

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