The Extra Credit Assignment (100 points) provides an opportunity for students to increase the total number of points that will be used to determine their respective final letter grade in this course. There will be only ONE such extra credit opportunity per student:
A) Watch the film “First Contact.Links to an external site.” (please note, you need to log in to the FIU Library if you are off campus)
B) Answer questions 1 and 2, separately.
Any text, visual or written, should be approached critically as the product of a series of decisions or choices made by its author(s).
1. Write one or two short paragraphs about the Central Issue or Principal Target of the film. Any film, particularly documentary or non-fiction, has a principal target or central issue that an educated or critical reader/viewer should be able to identify.
2. Write a few paragraphs about the filmmaker(s)’s Argumentation developed in the film about the central issue or principal target. In other words, you need here to summarize the claims made by the filmmaker(s) about the central issue. Keep in mind that the filmmaker is actually expressing himself or herself through the voices of the individuals who are interviewed in the film, or through the choice of newsreel passages that he or she decided to include in the film, in a particular order, and at a specific place. The filmmaker is the one who chooses to include or exclude sections of an interview, he or she decides to sequence various visual and audio fragments in a particular order, all as many means useful to develop his or her argument.
Submit your answers to each one of these two questions in one single Word document by the indicated deadline. Each one of your two answers must be properly numbered.
