MES 153 Final Exam Essay
1st Instruction: Read short preface below entitled, “What is Film to Me”
This is a “test” that I, as the instructor, took in order to see if the
exam works. I looked at the second quote below and wrote my version
of a first paragraph below. It is just here for reference. You are not to
copy it; just read it for reference and guidance for when you write
your essay.
Film is a reflection of society, both present and past. I think film and its innovations sometimes
have to catch up to society but sometimes the roles are reversed, and film leads society. It
informs us through visual images strewn together to form a story about people, emotions, and
desires. After all, movies are stories; movies are about people, made by people, who want to
share or say something significant to hopefully move society. Film is a form of communication
and that communication, those stories, comes from societies- not just where society is presently
and what it’s doing now- but where society has been, and the possibilities beyond. It’s been that
way for as long as movies have been around! Film has various meanings for a varying population
throughout the world, and this is what makes film exciting and more than just an entertainment
model to release your tension (although it can do that effectively). To some, films mean
escapism, the ability to remove oneself from the mundane drudgery of the world, and within this
escapism, one can move to just be entertained, or enlightened, or moved to action. It’s your
experience; you decide.
2nd Instruction: Think about your film/movie experiences, and ask yourself, what cinema
has done for you. What deeper meaning can you extract from watching
Star Wars, or Black Panther for example? How does this medium affect
your life as a whole?
3rd Instruction: Choose ONE quote below and write a 3-5-paragraph essay responding to
it. Read the prompt carefully and decide on which one you connect with
the most. After your selection, ask the question: SO WHAT?
Below you will find the quotes mentioned above. Remember: chose ONE quote and
respond to it in a 3-5 paragraph essay.
MES 153 Final Exam Essay
“Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater”.
– Roman Polanski
A film is – or should be – more like music than like fiction. It should be a progression of moods
and feelings. The theme, what’s behind the emotion, the meaning, all that comes later.
— Stanley Kubrick
“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes
directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”
― Ingmar Bergman
“A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with
slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in
another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere
in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something
that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be
stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance or the joy in just a good
line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a
mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully
alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in
this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future,
who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have,
these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The
romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the
adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet
them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than
about what you love in bad movies.”
― Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies
“We love films because they make us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never
small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into the eyes that are impossibly
beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also, they tell us to remember; they remind us
of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken.”
― Nina LaCour, Everything Leads to You