How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb.

Valuable Lessons that have come from an NUS Literature Education:

HOW TO:

1) Find your way around wikipedia swiftly and effectively-

For auteurs, click on filmography.
For films, click on "plot synopsis"
For year of release/director/producer/performers, go to Imdb movies.com
For quick "insightful details", go to production details

2) Cite references

3) Play with margins/font size/paragraph spacing to fit essay requirements

4) Decipher a 50 page essay in mere minutes

Find essay online
Copy and paste anything in bold/italics/quotations into Microsoft Word
Discard the rest forever

5) "Watch" films without really watching them

Google film
Look at film stills for cinematography
Check out characters/plot on wikipedia
Read a minimum of 1 related theory/genre/period/tendency (eg. satire/parody/meta-narrative/renaissance/post-modernism)

WHAT IS IT ALL REALLY ABOUT:

6) Age of Enlightenment --> Renaissance (big period in art too) --> Romanticism (Gothic Lit, Sublime, etc etc) --> Modernism (stream of consciousness/ T. S Elliot) --> Post-Modernism (Samuel Beckett / Big time for film industry)

7) Literature/ Arts = Self-reflexivity, classic genre-establishing moments, meta-narrative, self-consciousness, and some kind of discourse (political, social, satirical).

HOW TO SURVIVE:

8) Disguise messy essays by slyly coining a snazzy title to thereby signal cohesiveness.

9) READ FAST + scan things that seem important + discard the rest and DON'T EVER LOOK BACK.

10) Personal insights always trump research/regurgitation (Sometimes not reading the notes helps because you're more "original" without the taint of the lecturer's thoughts).

11) "Group discussions" on MSN are key. Save all MSN conversations that have occured pre-essay panic mode. (Read: infamous "construction of the "real" in documentary and CHN / the use of diegetic and exegetic space in parody / the exchange of critical essays in point form / plot summaries)

12) Most importantly, learn to decipher lecture notes that occur in varied modes of stream of consciousness + de-codify the pages dotted with incessant acronyms (Read DT's shameless name-dropping of WA- Woody Allen, OW- Orson Welles, and MB- Mel Brookes)

13) Watch films in fast-forward mode (pertains especially to foreign films with dubbing and silent films with corny captions). Proved very successful with films like Run, Lola Run / The Battleship Potemkin / Shoot the Piano Player / Anything by DW Griffith

PERSONAL LESSONS:

14) Soviet cinema is horrible.

15) Dr. Ryan Bishop is a dead-ringer for David Thewlis (bad guy in Dragonheart)

16) Some rooms boil like saunas and lit lecturers are BAD at anything technical

17) Never, ever , EVER write an essay claiming the uselessness of ekphrasis (especially in a course on ekphrasis)

18) Dr. Strangelove is in black-and-white and is very tedious indeed.

19) Woody Allen is seriously overrated.

20) Scary Movie is clever and underrated.

21) No one who is depressed should EVER read anything by Beckett.

22) Frankenstein is not the creature, it refers to the man who created the creature.

23) If you can't write fast, don't bother writing at all.

24) "Genius" cinema tends to go over our heads (Read: Brazil and Zelig)

25) Open-book exams just means that you can bring in your books, but you're going to leave them at the side of the table never to be touched again anyway because the whole paper's on "personal response".

26) "The cinematic style of Tarantino makes for the desentisation of violence in a comic book-like depiction of gore" does NOT constitute an argument.

27) Studying a few days before the exam is the way to go because you won't remember anything else otherwise.