Sample Short Answer Questions: Focus on specific scenes and specific characters, and specific dialogue. Also explain the significance of your observations. You must compare 2 films in each answer.
1. Unlike the other the texts and films for this course, "The Wedding Banquet" foregrounds homoerotic desire. Explain how this foregrounding impacts the message of interracial romance in the film as opposed to another film where it is not foregrounded. Discuss the film's style, its diegetic structure, and how that impacts the racial message of the film.
2. "The Wedding Banquet," "Jungle Fever" and "West Side Story" put race on display for the audience-one as a musical, another as a "postmodern" film directed by an African American director, and finally as a classic realist narrative directed by a transnational Chinese American director. What are some of the visual techniques the film uses? How do they impact "visual pleasure"? How do they reflect the director's "oppositional gaze"?
3. "Dirty, Pretty Things" explores the "underworld" of London. What is the significance of the setting? Compare this setting to the setting of one of the other films. How does the interracial romance relate to the larger theme of globalization, the relationship between core and periphery? How is this similar to or different from one of the other film's representation of the context and setting of interracial romance?
4. Compare and contrast the role of women in 2 of these films: "Dirty, Pretty Things," "The Wedding Banquet," "West Side Story" and "Jungle Fever." Pay particular attention to how race and gender intersect. How do these characters illustrate important points about performativity, the oppositional gaze, visual pleasure, globalization, etc. and their relationship to gender?