Essay Deadlines and Submissions:

Short Essay 1: 5pm Thursday, Term 1, Week 7

Short Essay 2: 5pm Thursday, Term 2, Week 3

Short Essay 3: 5pm Thursday, Term 2 Week 8

Everyone has to submit a hard copy of the essay on time. These should be placed in the tray outside H328.

Where an extension has not been granted, assessed essays handed in late will be subject to a penalty of 5% per working day.

A mark of zero will be recorded for the non-submission of any long or short assessed essay.

For all deadlines and procedures, see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/assessment/submission/

Also:

Please ensure that you complete a short essay coversheet available from: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/essaysubmission/coversheet_-__non_assessed_final.pdf

All short essays should be submitted on-line at the following webpage:

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/history/students/essaysubmission/

Titles:

Define and discuss the concepts of historiography, 'historiophoty' and film history.

Evaluate traditional interpretations of “film history” within the disciplines of History and Film Studies. Where do they overlap?

Is a filmic writing of American history possible?

What is genre’s relationship to history in classical Hollywood cinema?

What technological, stylistic, and historical changes affected American historical cinema after 1927?

What effect has Frederick Jackson Turner’s work had on the development of the Western?

'The Western is a predominantly masculine genre'. Discuss.

Analyze the construction of women's subjectivity and history in either Gone with the Wind (1939) or Bonnie and Clyde (1967).

Define the 'Cold War' western, its ideology and whether certain filmmakers successfully challenged it.

Many historians have claimed that Hollywood cinema reflects rather than interprets American history. Discuss the viability of such assumption based on what you have learned about the production of either Citizen Kane (1941) or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Compare Hollywood filmmakers’ perceptions of race, gender, and ethnicity in American historical films to contemporaneous discourses in popular and professional historiography.

The subjects of Hollywood's historical films are still dead, white and male--even in the 21st century. Discuss the validity of this statement, and whether Hollywood has ever been able to successfully document the experience of American women.

Discuss the transformation in American historiography following the Great War and its possible impact on historical filmmaking.

Why is Carl Becker such a significant figure in the history of American historical writing?

What is the significance of the mixed race American in Hollywood cinema?

Discuss the Hollywood screenwriter's role as a popular historian.

Contrast the revisionism of 1930s historiography with the consensus history of the postwar era, and discuss whether this transformation had an impact on the historical discourses of American film.

Discuss Hollywood's representation of an Italian-American past from 1930-1987.

Analyze the development of the biopic and its transformation in either The Public Enemy (1931) or Dillinger (1973).

Discuss Eastwood's construction of the past in The Changeling (2007).

Why is the work of documentary photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange important to filmmakers John Milius and Arthur Penn?

Contrast The Godfather and The Godfather Part II’s construction of twentieth-century American history.

Argue for or against Jameson’s view of the nostalgia film.

Filmed history is predominantly biography. Discuss.

What effect has postmodernism had on American historiography and historical cinema?

Discuss the stylistic and narrative devices through which film noir and neo noir convey a sense of the past.

How did Los Angeles remake its image in the postwar era and what role does LA Confidential (1997) play in unraveling this myth?