Movie Options: Tampopo, Seven Samurai, Pather Panchali, Tokyo Story, Enter the D

Movie Options: Tampopo, Seven Samurai, Pather Panchali, Tokyo Story, Enter the Dragon, Sholay
Primary Guidelines
1. 7-8 pages long, double-spaced, size 12 font.
2. Assume that you are writing the paper for an imaginary reader who saw the film 15 years ago. Thus provide a critical synopsis of the film to refamiliarize them. A critical synopsis should be dictated by the topic of the paper. Thus, if you are writing about gender and race in Enter the Dragon, that should dominate the synopsis rather than the fighting. If your paper is a psychological exploration of the complicated Kikochiyu, Mifune’s character should dominate your synopsis of The Seven Samurai.
4. Illustrate your thesis with close, cinematic readings of two symptomatic scenes. Please remember, you are writing about a film, not just a plot. Bring in cinematic elements, music score, aspects of editing, etc.
5. You can write a paper on either 1 or 2 films.
 
Possible Paper Options
1.     Tradition versus modernity
2.     Country/village versus the big city
3.     Agrarian feudalism versus industrial capitalism.
4.     Caste and class
5.     Transformation of gender roles and changing family structures from extended family/clan to nuclear families.
6.     Traditional time consciousness versus clockwork industrial time.
7.     Nature
8.     Traditional storytelling versus cinematic time (are some of these films ‘slow’?)
9.     Genre transformations (Seven Samurai or Sholay as western, Enter the Dragon as spy film).
10.  Cinematic techniques (Ozu’s shot taking for example), melodrama, indigenous theatrical traditions, editing, performance, music etc. What can be an ‘Asian’ cinematic contra Hollywood? How do these films fare in a test of ‘realism’?
11.  Historical contexts. India of the 1920s or postwar Japan. The present/absent state. (The village without a policeman in Sholay).  
12.  Mythic or epic styles of presentation.
I can send the pdf files for citations after you choose the 1-2 movies to write about.