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