Despite the fact that some of our, so far, six screenings have yet to receive the same treatment online, I truly appreciate the kind of forum discussion that has already been taking place, clear indications of how seriously some of you have been thinking about the films we've seen in class.
Aside from continuing with forum threads for the other films, I want you to start thinking about the online component of your class participation, specifically the development of pages for the COM117.4 site.
According to my index cards (and if you don't have one at this point, you're in trouble), there are 33 students in this class. The Filmography page, where the "action" will take place, lists the 18 films to be screened this semester. What I want is for each student to work on developing at least two films and/or pages, integrating whatever relevant resource is in the Course Repository with their own insights about the chosen films.
To be honest, however, this isn't really about choosing films but choosing themes. If you pay attention to the screening schedule on our syllabus, you will see how each pair of class meetings complement each other thematically, the sole exception being our 17th meeting. Choosing one film will thus already allow you to make a comparison and/or contrast with its "partner" film, so you will have to choose another theme for your second time.
I'm not sure how clear I'm being, so here's an example:
You can't choose both Persona and Mulholland Drive, because they complement each other according to our schedule. If you decide to work on the Persona page, I suspect you will end up talking about Mulholland Drive anyway (or vice versa) after all. So you can choose, say, Peeping Tom for your second page, and doing so will most likely get you talking about 8 1/2.
Is that any clearer? Any questions so far?
I do have some myself, to be honest:
I'm trying to work out the limitations to ensure that no single film/page gets swamped by commentary at the expense of others, but I can't seem to figure this out yet. Needless to say, the result that I want is for each movie to be subjected to a conversation between two or three students with interesting insights supported by online resources they will link to. Can someone help me figure out the arithmetic that will make that possible?