Assignments: Batch Two

You need to choose your second assignment from this list having already completed your first one - chosen from the first batch. Click on each title for a reading list and guidelines. Most of the second batch require you to do some small-scale research of your own. Please note that many students throw away marks by not paying close attention to the guidelines. You are very welcome to formulate your own assignment topics if you have a particular interest that you would like to pursue, but you must get my approval at least three weeks before the deadline.

For your assignment deadlines see the department's deadlines page.

• Find a suitably ambiguous television advertisement and record how at least 20 people respond to the question: 'What is going on in this ad?' Report on the key differences and similarities between their responses.
• Investigate how a sample of men and women interpret these two versions of a TAT card. Report on the key differences and similarities between their responses, with extracts from the responses and a commentary of your own.
• Offer a detailed critical reflection on the ways in which The Matrix (Wachowski Bros., 1999) can be seen as enacting Plato's 'allegory of the cave'.
• Looking is socially regulated: there are social codes of looking (including taboos on certain kinds of looking). Outline, illustrate and critically discuss everyday codes of looking in the UK and consider in detail the ways in which these are gender-differentiated.
• The Gestalt psychologists reported a universal human tendency to separate a salient figure from what the viewer relegates to the ground. Outline, illustrate and critically discuss this issue.
• Analyse the processes of inference required in order to make sense of a particular television commercial.
• What is 'the beholder's share' in making sense of roadsigns? Illustrate and discuss the different kinds of knowledge upon which we draw in doing so.
• Bill Nichols & Susan J Lederman write that 'virtually every... account of the perception of movement in film texts [is] wrong. The impression of movement is not due to persistence of vision. The very persistence with which this "explanation" has been recited says more about the hermetic and impressionistic world of some film scholarship than it does about the actual mechanisms involved'. Offer a critical exploration of this issue.