Choose a director whose work might credibly place him or her as an auteur
Instructions
Your job for this assignment is, first, to choose a director whose work might credibly place him or her as an auteur. According to “auteur theory,” this kind of director tends to call the shots, seeing an artistic vision through to the end and putting his or her stamp on every film. Your essay should include a brief biographical sketch, an analysis of the director’s style (how you can tell a Tarantino movie is a Tarantino movie, for example), and the tracing of that style back to the director’s influences. Finally, you should end the paper with a description of how your director has begun to influence other filmmakers. Thus the paper breaks down into roughly four parts.
Obviously, it’s important to spend time up front researching various directors; ideally, you will want to choose one whose work you enjoy; whose style is clearly evident; who has gone on record citing original influences; and who seems to have inspired imitation from others. As with any kind of college paper, the more details and examples you can provide, the more easily your reader can follow the essay and the more successful you are likely to be.
Whichever director you choose, try to come up with something thought-provoking to say and craft your thesis statement such that the thesis unifies the entire paper. To make the thesis more visible, it might be useful to give the thesis statement a) a modal and b) its own paragraph. (A modal is a word like “should” or “ought.”)
Research is of course essential for this paper. The entire essay must have research as a foundation. For this reason I want a minimum of eight sources, documented according to either the MLA or APA styles. You should likewise aim for about eight pages, typed and double spaced. Email me or come see me if you have any questions about this assignment.
Suggestions for the assignment:
Remember to document every source, regardless of whether you have quoted that source or put the quote into your own words (paraphrased). Non-quote material such as statistics, paraphrases, and summaries are equivalent to quotes in the eyes of academics, so everything should get documented. That means you should make a nod to your source in the text of your essay (the in-text citation) followed by a full bibliographic entry in a Works Cited or equivalent list at the end of the essay. Practice doing this for every paragraph. The end of the paragraph is the “failsafe” position to “save” the paragraph from potential plagiarism, and there have been many instances when I was reading a student’s research paper and thinking “no documentation, no documentation”—only to breathe a sigh of relief when I saw the parenthetical reference at the end of the paragraph. That’s what saves it, provided that all the research evident in that paragraph came from the single source cited at the end.
Start your research early in terms of looking at directors whose work you admire and trying to see if they’re suitable subjects. Remember that this assignment asks you to examine the director’s life, his style, his influences, and those who have been influenced by him. A lack of material in any one of these four categories should be a cause for concern. For this reason, many contemporary directors are problematic, as their work is so new that it’s very difficult to trace those lines of influence out. To use an analogy, the ripples of their impact are just now spreading out and have not yet made it across the pond.
