Critical Commentary

– You should think of this assessment as an essay. It’s called ‘critical commentary’ to emphasise that it should focus on analysing written texts and critical debates about Hollywood cinema (rather than analysing individual films in detail). It should still follow the usual conventions of essay writing and structure, even though you may find that you are summarising and engaging with written texts perhaps a little more than you might on some film studies modules. 

 – You will need to quote from the texts you are discussing, of course, but try to make sure that you do so selectively and don’t pad the essay out with too many (long) quotations. You should ask yourself: can I paraphrase this instead?  (remember to provide a reference, though, and to make sure that the line between quoting and paraphrasing is clear. If you’ve borrowed even 2 or 3 distinctive words as a phrase, that should be in quotes). What words and phrases are really distinctive and necessary to quote, and what can be summarised? It can often be more effective to explain an idea in your own words and intersperse it with choice words or phrases from the source text.  

Let’s take an example. You may want to use this sentence from Timothy Corrigan: 

"Since the 1970s especially, the auteurist marketing of movies whose titles often proclaim the filmmaker's name, such as Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1981) or Oliver Stone's Nixon (1995), aim to guarantee a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs, as a kind of brand-name vision whose aesthetic meanings and values have already been determined. “

But do we actually need to reproduce the whole thing? Here, I would suggest that you scan the sentence and pick out what you think are the key words or phrases. You should then summarise the rest and just incorporate key nuggets into your sentence – e.g. "a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs” or "brand-name vision whose aesthetic meanings and values have already been determined”. 

Or, even just smaller phrases, like “intentional and authorial agency”. 

So, instead of using the whole sentence, you could write something like: 

As Timothy Corrigan explains, Hollywood’s marketing practices since the 1970s have tended to deploy the name of the director as the guarantor of “a relationship between audience and movie whereby an intentional and authorial agency governs” (1998: 40). For Corrigan, then, auteurism in contemporary Hollywood is best viewed a commercial strategy through which such a “brand name vision” determines the film’s “aesthetic meanings and values” for its audience (ibid).   

– If you have used a long quotation, consider whether it could be shortened and whether you really need all of it to make your point. You will definitely get a low mark if your essay is just a patchwork of extended quotations without much of your own critical intervention.  

– Remember that quotations always need to be set up / introduced in some way – don’t just place them straight into your text without anything to frame them. 

For example, please avoid this:

Contemporary Hollywood auteurs often maintain celebrity status. "The practice of the auteur as a particular brand of social agency appears most clearly and most ironically in the contemporary status of the auteur as celebrity” (Corrigan 1998: 43).  
[Here, the quotation is just plonked in there as a standalone sentence without any introduction or framing. This is almost always wrong!] 

Please do something like this instead: 

Contemporary Hollywood auteurs often maintain celebrity status, as Timothy Corrigan argues: "The practice of the auteur as a particular brand of social agency appears most clearly and most ironically in the contemporary status of the auteur as celebrity” (1998: 43). 
[Here, the quote is introduced – the reader is told that the words come from Corrigan – and connected smoothly to your own point at the start of the sentence]. 

 It is also good practice to see if you can link from the quotation afterwards too – so, the next sentence might draw on the quote here – e.g. You might write, “This notion of an auteur’s 'social agency’ blah blah …. “ or something like that, which uses something from the quote to build up the next point. You don’t always need to do this but it is worth considering, because it helps integrate the quotation into your own text. 

– You may want to develop an argument as part of your essay, but it’s also fine to present the debates relatively objectively – don’t feel you have to decide, for example, which account of post-classical Hollywood is more convincing for you – it’s fine to acknowledge that there are competing ideas about this; your job is to present those concisely and effectively.

– You may feel there’s less room for personal, subjective input or ‘interpretation’ here, and that you are ‘just' repeating the arguments of others, but remember that the skill being practised and tested here is actually quite a challenging one – the ability to summarise and distil complex arguments, compare them, and place them into context

– You might want to mention individual films in passing, of course – e.g. In Q1 the different definitions of New Hollywood will probably require some filmic examples to make it clear. But you don’t need to go into depth or use them as case studies. Please don’t spend too long explaining film plots etc – keep this kind of thing to a minimum.  

– Questions 1, 2 and 4 require you to use a range of texts to answer the question. I’ve picked out two from the core reading in each case, and these must be used at some point, but you don’t have to hew too closely to the arguments offered by those named texts necessarily. I have named them to make it clear how the question connects to the weekly reading, but to answer these questions properly you’ll need to draw on a wider range of reading too. Feel free to use texts that are not in the recommend or further reading if you want to. 

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=hGZ5N8wZKtkC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=functions+of+the+auteur+contemporary+hollywood&source=bl&ots=hE41K4gKX4&sig=OGCoP0T0nIDYXxVZ_3D55NXC1wY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjovpTlmv3PAhVMBcAKHaneA8YQ6AEIUTAH#v=onepage&q=functions%20of%20the%20auteur%20contemporary%20hollywood&f=false

http://www.thomas-elsaesser.com/images/stories/pdf/elsaesser_the_author_a_retrospect.pdf

https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/bitstream/10443/961/1/Hill-Parks10.pdf

http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/819/a-case-study-on-film-authorship-exploring-the-theoretical-and-practical-sides-in-film-production

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JsjfCwAAQBAJ&pg=PT18&lpg=PT18&dq=what+is+the+agency+of+auteur&source=bl&ots=RMuVCsy4Ya&sig=fSrv9CN9qlzE8ZPwfxHMXNSVPN4&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiuyrPagorQAhVlLMAKHbhFD-EQ6AEIJjAC#v=onepage&q=what%20is%20the%20agency%20of%20auteur&f=false

With reference to Corrigan (1998), Elsaesser (2012) and other relevant literature, what are some of the functions of the ‘auteur’ in the contemporary Hollywood film industry?

Plan

Intro

Introduce the auteur explaining their importance in Hollywood in Film authorship, maybe a brief insight into the history. How has their functionality changed in more recent times

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