BRITISH FILM 1940s: MAGICAL REALISM AND TINSEL

GoogleMeet class for Wednesday 29 April 2020

Today we continue looking at media from a Film Studies perspective, this time taking the 1940s, to follow on from Monday's session.

•  A Matter of Life and Death  dir. by Michael Powell and Emric Pressburger 1946. Watch Mark Kermode's review here, in which he call the film one of the greatest ever made. The trailer is here. 

  For the film makers among you, see also Ten Golden Frames  a whacky, fast-paced ten-minute presentation in which 10 key frames are analysed.

• Went The Day Well?  dir. by Alberto Cavalcanti 1942. Classic wartime propaganda film 
  

  A wartime conspiracy thriller, a black-comic nightmare and a surrealist masterpiece in which stoutly English-seeming army types reveal themselves to be Nazis.
  The movie's influence shows up in Dad's Army, in Village of the Damned, and maybe even, with a twist, in Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. In the sleepy English village of Bramley End, dozens of soldiers turn up, needing a billet. They are a fifth-columnist troop of Nazi agents, a revelation made more glitteringly disturbing by the fact that Cavalcanti never reveals how this infiltration has been achieved. The film shows the Germans being capable of violence and beastliness towards civilians.
  
  Opening narration video here 
  Trailer here 
  Excerpt here
  
  

   

  

BRITISH FILM 1930s: THE AGE OF THE DREAM PALACE

GoogleMeet class for Monday 27 April 2020

Today we are looking at media from a Film Studies perspective, something that I know a lot of you will enjoy, and an area that was kept rigorously apart from Media Studies in your specification. When I did my Masters, British Film History was one of my favourite courses, so I thought that I could share some of it with you. 

We start in the 1930s and will take three films, the first in full length and the other two in snippets. If you see this blog post before this afternoon's class, get started on viewing:

• The Stars Look Down dir. Carol Reed 1940, based on A.J.Cronin's novel 
• The Private Life of Henry VIII  dir. Alexander Korda 1933 (YouTube full movie)
• Sing As We Go dir. Basil Dean, musical featuring Gracie Fields

SUMMER TERM 2020

Welcome back to the Summer Term! 
I will be at my desk during lesson time today. The best times to email me today for rapid response are 

• 10:30 to 11:00 this morning
• 12:30 to 1.00 this morning

FIRST You students have completed your NEAs (non-examined assessments) with me - your blogs, productions and creative critical reflections.

• If you have any NEA work to do that I have outlined in emails, please complete it as evidence of your achievements.
• If I have emailed that your Mock mark was not representative of your normal standard, please complete the Mock paper that I sent you.
• If you feel that you did really badly on your Mock and would like to do the alternative questions at home, email me for the paper and supporting notes today.

NOW for class time together. Let us start with the following story by Rudyard Kipling called The Elephant's Child. Read it out to yourself pretending that you are Jack Nicholson with his low, slow drawl. The story is about insatiable curiosity:

You have - I am confident - insatiable curiosity and we are certainly in high and far-off times, so I would like to point you towards developing further media skills.
 
I would like to use our time together productively but without any pressure on you. I would like you to enrol now for a two-week course on script writing. 

I will upload different lessons later in the week as alternatives, but at least try this one first.

• FutureLearn delivers high quality material with videos, tutorials, online chat
• It is free and can be joined now
• Do it at home as much as you like, when you like
• You'll have a new skill to show for your time
• Sign up here https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/screenwriting/16/todo/67236https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/screenwriting/16/todo/67236