Problems List
- How do I present unique ideas in my paper and avoid merely stitching other people’s research together?
- How do I most clearly organize my paper? Do I introduce Bergman and then the existentialists, and then discuss their relationship? Do I introduce the historical context, and dive into Bergman and existentialism through that?
- I don’t have very much background in screen studies, so I’m missing a lot of basic knowledge about how to analyze a film.
- If there are multiple different analyses of a single scene from Persona, should I discuss them all? How do I know which one to give the most weight to, since my background in film is so limited?
- At what point does analysis of a scene become a stretch of the imagination? I’ve read a few sources that seem to take very extreme interpretations of a scene and then make heavy claims about the veracity of their interpretations, and I was unsure of how much credence to give these sorts of arguments.
- How do I take my paper out of the realm of pure comparison, and turn that into something more valuable than “Sartre said this, and Bergman does this, so again here is how they are similar.”
- A lot of existential concepts—anxiety, nausea, etc.—are also universal aspects of human existence. When do I know that Bergman’s use of these themes is because of his readings in existentialism, and when is he merely employing natural elements of everyday life?
