John Stenzel
English 180, Fall 2005
Course home

Journal Exercise 5--Film Fun

Due Saturday Dec 10, noon; e-mailed to me, jastenzel@ucdavis.edu, with your house name in the subject line. You may also print it out and slide it under my office door, 379 Voorhies, by Friday at 5 PM. As usual, under no circumstances may you submit it to English Department staff downstairs.

I encourage you to do the "research" for this exercise as soon as possible, and get it done sooner rather than later. [The only exception would be those folks who choose to wait for the Narnia movie to be released. More on that to be announced in a future class.]

I want you to procure a film version of one of the works we read this fall--it can be anything from a Disney fairy tale to Jim Carrey's Lemony Snicket compilation--and watch it, keeping track of your reactions to the filmed version. In particular, you should do the following:

• identify the film itself--date and director / studio at least (there are multiple versions of Secret Garden for example);
• briefly review what the filmed version did to the text (what was kept, what was added, what was omitted), and analyze the significance of these decisions;
• discuss the character portrayals (were they what you expected from reading? did you read the work after seeing the film and then have yet another perspective seeing the film again? were you disappointed? why?);
• consider some of the thematic or imagistic or symbolic elements of the books that we have been discussing, and comment on how the film version did or did not bring out or illuminate these aspects
• in the process of doing this last bit, or possibly in a separate place, comment on the ways the work we have done this quarter (reading and class discussion and writing) has changed the way you experience a film like this, and explain why. Try to stay concrete and specific all through.

As with other writing, use the present tense to describe what happens in these films [for example, "Mary is not sallow-faced at the start, nor does she change much in the course of her stay at Misselthwaite"], and don't get too tangled up in minutiae of comparison between the written version and the filmed version--you can make some specific points that illustrate your generalization, and then take your analysis to the next level. No whining allowed, even if you hate what happened. Also: as I mentioned in class, if you have access to a child of appropriate age, consider watching the video with the child, and quizzing him / her about it as well.

Have some fun with this--but please read your journal entry through aloud before sending it. This doesn't have to be super-polished prose, but elsewhere in the "exercises" section of the website you'll find sentence guidelines and some editing demos that might help you improve the effectiveness of everything you write.