provide a bibliography (which will not count towards the word count). You should also make sure your essay is structured appropriately with an introduction, a clearly set out argument and a conclusionAnswer ONE question from the list below.
1. ‘Maria’s rise in The Marriage of Maria Braun is analogous to the rise of West Germany during the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and offers a negative commentary on it.’ Discuss.
2. Milicent Marcus describes ‘the garden mentality’ in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis as one that ‘acknowledges neither time, nor change, nor the encroachments that history may make on its privileged domain. Accordingly, it stands as a metaphor for the Finzi-Continis’ passivity in the face of the anti-Semitic threat.’ Discuss the film in the light of this quotation.
3. Masumura Yasuzō’s Giants and Toys is ‘a pessimistic allegory of Japan’s incipient high-growth economy’. Discuss.
4. ‘The movie is both a revelation, and a weapon in a painful domestic battle of the French with their past…’ Discuss Marcel Ophüls’s The Sorrow and the Pity in the light of this comment, made by the historian Stanley Hoffmann in 1972.
5. Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises ‘offers a philosophical investigation into the human tendency to go along and thereby collaborate with peer-groups, social norms and authority without questioning the aims’. Explore the representation of the film’s protagonist Jiro Horikoshi in light of this quotation.
6. ‘Lene might be destroyed by the patriarchal world she inhabits but she is also complicit in her own destruction.’ Discuss Germany, Pale Mother in the light of this quotation.
7. ‘By framing its narrative as a child’s vision, further refracted as a bedtime story told by the adult Cecilia to her own child, the film elevates – and distances – the events it represents to the realm of timeless myth.’ Discuss this judgement of Paolo and Vittorio Taviani’s The Night of San Lorenzo.
8. How much difference does it make to our understanding of Louis Malle’s Au revoir les enfants to know that it narrates an episode in the film director’s own childhood?