Have you ever written an essay on film?

I am in my concluding days of university. I attend my last lectures next week, and my final assignments are in for May. I have written a lot on film during my time in education but I was wondering if you guys have ever written extensively about film and if so what have you written about?

P.S. I am interested in staying at University to embark on a Masters course. However, I may wait a few years to figure out exactly what I want from life.

I have. I was a film minor in college (the only reason I wasn't a double major is because I didn't want to pay for an extra semester of theater classes that would qualify me as a major). Writing was a pretty big party of the curriculum.

I wrote these three (the last one was for a history class) while there:

Underworld Colonialism

The Voice of Crime


The Purpose of Paranoia: The Influence of Conspiracy on American Cinema

And the last one I did this past year just for fun.

The M Effect: How Fritz Lang’s M is the original Godfather.

I've also written a few reviews on here.

Congrats on graduating and good luck at graduate school!

I would like to read some of your stuff!

I've written extensively about Doctor Who, in the form of reviews. At college the essays I wrote were about many different things, including advertising, but I did look at Nosferatu, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Alien over the period.

Thank you, dude! I will be sure to read your work when I get some more free time!

I also plan to post some of my 'better' content once I have graduated.

I almost did my final film analysis paper on Freddy Got Fingered (2001), and how it's ahead of its time comedicly; but I lacked the stones to do so.

I took practically every film course offered at my University. The classes covered a variety of topics, from the technical aspects of film in general, to the representation of specific disciplines in film. The only ones I didn't take were a French film class because it was actually taught in French, and two Russian film classes that, despite being taught in English, strangely required credit hours in Russian language courses or the permission of the head of the Russian Department.

One day I might go through my old laptop and see what I can scavenge from it. I'm not sure if it'll be fun to read through those old papers, or if I'll cringe haha.

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To be honest, the possibilities of cringe after reading my old work is probably the main reasoning for why I don't want to go back and read them. Hence why I specified my 'better' work.

Yes, I was writing an essay on the topic - the history of cinema of the 50s. This was my best essay because I reviewed a bunch of great films!

Na - reminds me too much of school... I just wing it, free associate, do reviews my way.

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I had to write one every week and then a big final one for History of American Film 1925-1950 at University Of Souther California.
The weekly ones were on individual films but I got to choose my topic for the final one and wrote an essay I wish so badly I still had (this is back when everything was on actual paper) called The Death Of Screwball.

I wrote a few analyses of individual films in the past (Eraserhead, A Clockwork Orange, Andrei Rublev), if that counts. I like some of them more than others, but my essay on Andrei Rublev is my favorite one I've written. I published it to this forum some time ago. I should edit it someday though as there are a couple things I'd like to change in it.

I haven't taken any film classes, so I haven't written any college essays on film.

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Yes.

In college, I wrote something on Natural Born Killers and how it's basically if a studio gave a film student a Hollywood budget.

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Suspect's Reviews

I did one essay at school, and it was quite an eye opener.
Not because of the movie, but because of the reaction of the kids in my class.
Bearing in mind the kids at my school were highly xenophobic, I guess I should have know what was going to happen.

We were given an assignment in school in Social Class to write an essay on Mississippi Burning (1988).
The essay was kind of a dual paper, about the movie itself and how it successfully or unsuccessfully portrays racism, and the ramifications of racism in real life.

Initially we were going to watch the movie in class, then write the essay at home.
Then the day came when we sat in class with the movie on, and the idiots in my year, including the girls, were hooting and hollering and cheering at the violence toward black people.
They were actually rooting for the racist characters.

The teacher turned the movie off and had everyone except me and one other student called Daniel removed from the class permanently.
So it was just me and the other kid and the teacher in class on the next lesson about a week later.

You might think kids don't think or care about their behaviour... this was in 1997, we were all 15-16 years old.

I remember I got an A+ on my essay though.

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Jesus Christ, where did you go to school?!

Not gonna say where, but let's just say you needed to be both white, and born in that country.
If you were born there, but weren't white, you were targeted for abuse.
If you were white, but not born there, you were targeted for abuse.

No such thing as Black or Asian where I grew up. Any that did move into the area, didn't hang around long.
I saw a gang of kids no older than 12, bricking a house's windows and setting fire to a car because the people who had moved in were of Indian descent.

Not even joking.

I had a rough time due to my heritage but I learned fast to fight back.
I had my leg broken once for no reason other than my ancestry.

Did you have any future famous people as classmates? Or was that a course for non-film majors?

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None that I can remember.
That course was open to anyone as it was seen as a first-year course. Great experience though. The classroom was a theater about the size of The Prytania or maybe a little larger. Saw Night Of The Hunter, Duck Soup, It Happened One Night, My Darling Clementine, The Wind, and many other great movies in that theater. Aside from that and some other classes, they also used that theater to show weekend movies, including Apocalypse Now, Singing In The Rain, and a bunch of other classics. Occasionally it was used for Hollywood movies to utilize us as a test audience for upcoming films. Saw Mel Gibson's Hamlet a while before it was released as a test-audience. They frequently used the big theater for those purposes though.
I was friends with a bunch of people from both the Film School and the Drama School. People who were studying screen-writing or editing or acting or whatever. One of them did go on to be on TV in a children's show for a while. One of them had the keys to the Film School so some weekends we would go there and watch movies in one of the smaller theaters. We watched E.T. one time.