Cultural codes



Cultural codes

• Narrative

• Characters

• Setting

• Genre

• Representation

• Modality

• Performance

• Authorship, audience and purpose

• Tone and mood

Narrative

The concept of narrative - the order, duration and structure of events (plot) - is common to the study of both films and books. (A story event is a complete action which moves the narrative on.) Reduced to structures or models, as suggested by theorists such as Tzvetan Todorov and Claude Lévi-Strauss, this is certainly the case.

The ways in which narratives are presented to us, however, differ from medium to medium. In films, narrative events can indicated in a number of ways: on the soundtrack, then in the frame, or off-screen but reflected in the face of a character. For example, the menace in 7.35 in the Morning is shown to us primarily through the expression on the woman's face; a smile or look of embarrassment would put the story into a more straightforward romance category.

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7.35 in the Morning

An event in a film might be ambiguously presented, or indeterminate. The actual accident in Accident is never shown, and the details remain unknown. The film isn't about the accident, but its aftermath, and the consequences for how one character sees the world. Reproducing this kind of multi-layered complexity in print is much harder. The power and subtlety of the films on the compilation comes most often from the fact that there is little dialogue used. This means that we are more often shown narrative events than told them, which adds to their subtlety.

Narrative time

A principal distinction between the narrative presentation of print texts and films is that in films narratives happen in time; unlike print texts, but like theatre and music, they have duration, a clearly defined period of time for presentation. Consider the five versions of narrative time summarised by Sarah Kozloff (Price, 1993):

• Scene, where a scene is played out in real time.

• Stretch, where diegetic time is stretched out in real time, like a slow-motion sequence, or by parallel editing in a suspense sequence (this is how James Bond always seems to have five minutes to defuse a bomb that is counting down from one minute!).

• Pause, where diegetic time stops, and for example a voice-over comments on or summarises the action.

• Summary, where the passage of time is shown, as in a montage of changing seasons. Famous examples include the sequence of Hugh Grant walking through Portobello Road market in Notting Hill (Roger Michell, USA/UK, 1999).

• Ellipsis, where intervening time between scenes is cut out.

These concepts might be new to English teachers and students at Key Stages 3 and 4, but are not difficult to grasp. They each enable comparisons to be made in the ways films and print tell their stories. Which story events are cut out (ellipsis) from Accident or Jus' Gaps? What happens that we are not shown? How is time summarised in The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, Two Cars, One Night or The Most Beautiful Man in the World? What difference does it make that 7.35 in the Morning and The First Time It Hits are played out in real ('scene') time? Is The Little Things entirely happening in real time? How much of About a Girl is in real time? What about the inserted flashbacks - what kind of time do they take place in?

How might the passage of time be represented in a written story? The dominant way in which time is managed in film narratives is through editing.

Order

Study of the narratives of texts - both print and film - at a macro level, can be revealing. If a narrative is marked by a peculiar order of story events, then it helps in the study of a text to identify the order of the events which are presented to us. Here again, some finer distinctions would help, between story events which are shown or implied, or we are told about, and between actions which are ongoing, and therefore not 'events'. Take the story events in About a Girl, for example. The central ones implied are that the girl becomes pregnant then has a baby. In order of presentation, we see her dancing and singing alone, with her mother, with her friends, her father - none of these in any true chronological sequence. Then at the end, the 'true' story is revealed.

Think, however, of how else these events might be ordered. The first event in the chronological story is the girl having the baby - but it is only at the end that we realise this was the first thing to happen. Another ordering of these story events, a news report, for example, would start with the baby's discovery, then explain the events leading up to it.

Plot

Another central element of narrative is the notion of plot as the linking together of story events by cause and effect. In this sense, the fiction films in the compilation all variously feature plots - the narrative in Accident is structured around an accident we never see, and its impact on a range of people, but Gary most of all. In The Little Things it's George's birthday that sets the narrative - and George - going. The single cause has multiple repeated effects.

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Groundhog Day

Not all narratives have plots in the sense of story events linked by cause and effect in a forward trajectory. Instead, some narratives are episodic, such as the picaresque novel (Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne is perhaps the most famous example). Other texts might follow abstract narrative patterns, for example based around repetition (like Groundhog Day, Harold Ramis, USA, 1993).

Some of the films in this compilation are virtually plotless: The Most Beautiful Man in the World is about something that might happen, but doesn't; About a Girl concerns the revelation of something that has already happened; The Little Things is about nothing happening - like George's life, it is directionless.

Narration

Narrative structure is one aspect of narrative; the other is narration, typically addressed as the range and depth of narrative information a text presents to us.

• Narrative range refers to how widely the text ranges in its story - across broad sweeps of time and space (unrestricted range) or confined to narrow time and space (restricted narration). In literature, the Bible would be an example of the former; a Raymond Carver short story, the latter. In the films in this compilation, because they are shorts, the range of narration tends to be restricted: the canal walk of About a Girl; the real time café of 7.35 in the Morning; the day in the life of The Little Things. Killing Time at Home, The First Time It Hits and Two Cars, One Night are all restricted to a single space.

• Depth of narrative information also operates on a continuum, from objective to subjective. A text will typically shuttle between objective and subjective narration throughout its length, at times giving us a more subjective perspective on the action, at others less. The opening of Accident presents an objective position, and we get different viewpoints throughout. But at a point in the middle, when we have a close-up of one of the young guy's faces (David Cooper), we are seeing things from his point of view.

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Accident

7.35 in the Morning moves between two very different narrative positions, creating a dilemma for the audience: with whom do we identify? About a Girl is all from the girl's point of view, her world view breathlessly presented on the voice track, until the final shot when an objective view returns, to devastating effect.

Characters

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Lennie in Of Mice and Men

In audiovisual texts, certain aspects of characters - what they look like, how they speak - are clearly defined. This is sometimes taken as a limitation of film: audiences might complain that their conception of Lennie in Of Mice and Men, for example, has been 'fixed' by John Malkovich in the 1992 film version (Gary Sinise, USA).

However, it is possible to use this 'limitation' creatively:

• Characters from literature when transferred to film merely take on contingent form. Any new version casts them anew. This is why it is important to look at different film versions of novels or plays - and to imagine new versions. Who would you cast as Lennie today?

• Only some aspects of film characters are fixed in this way. Other aspects - motivation, interior life, thoughts, memories, prejudices - can be left indeterminate, particularly where characters don't speak, or say little, like the young guy in Accident, George in The Little Things, the guy in Killing Time at Home, the boy and the girl in The First Time it Hits, or the girl and the man in The Most Beautiful Man in the World.

One area of study common to both film and literature is the nature and process of characterisation, and a pertinent question to start with might be: at what stage does a person in a text come out of the background and become a character? A character, broadly, is a combination of traits which we expect to change over time. You might use this definition to ask how many characters there are in Jus' Gaps or Accident. Which traits define them? Do they change? What is the function of the other 'actors' (or people represented) in the film, those we couldn't really call characters? Similarly, would it be right to call 'our parents' in The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, characters? In The Most Beautiful Man in the World there is a character we never see; we only hear her, speaking on the phone. Viewers often take her to be the girl's mother, but she could also be a childminder, sister or neighbour. Can she properly be called a character?

From the study of English literature it has become natural for us to treat characters as human beings, but another approach leads us to see them as functions of narrative. Thus it is possible to talk about characters as either agents or existents. Agents, as the word suggests, are characters who have the function of acting in a narrative, keeping it moving. A 'quest' narrative, for example, is driven by the journey or search of an agent character for something, or someone lost. Another type of agent may try to block or deny the searcher's quest. In The Little Things George has the function of carrying the narrative in her search for something to do (and more grandly in her search for an identity, a space). Her mother and several other characters have the function of denying her that.

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The Little Things

In print fiction characters are usually individuated by name; indeed in devising narratives it is hard to avoid using names as they are the easiest way of making a person into a distinctive character. Could a written version of The Most Beautiful Man in the World get away with calling its central character 'the girl'? On the other hand, would anything be lost by giving her a name?

In films characters can also be individuated by voice. If we do not see the character who is speaking, such as the narrator of The Man with the Beautiful Eyes or the mother in The Little Things, we become very dependent on voice to imagine character, and in these two cases, this is positively exploited.

Setting

As in novels and short stories, setting includes both the place and the period in which a film is set. And while physical setting in film tends to have a more visually defined dimension than in written texts, both scriptwriters and directors make decisions and choices about where and when a film is set, which locations are used (location scouting is an important job in film production) and how much set detail is included. Students can challenge, question and offer alternatives to these choices when they consider a film and how it works as a text.

Just as in print fiction, setting can have a narrative function. In About a Girl, the narrow canal-side walk sheds light on the constriction of the girl's life, as if she is on tramlines. The 'non-places' of cinema, burger bar and record shop in The Little Things emphasise George's isolation. And the street scenes of Accident contrasts the 'known' public face of London, with the local, mundane reality.

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Accident

The mode in which setting is presented to us in film is distinctive. In print fiction, descriptions of settings are usually set in generalised time (in what Sarah Kozloff calls a 'pause'). In film, settings are usually given to us in the 'real time' of the film (diegetic time), simultaneously with the action starting (often in the title credit sequence) because a pause is harder to pull off in film. Try imagining how you would film the equivalent of a generic opening to a fairy story: 'Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful princess. Her father and mother doted on her, as they had longed for a child for many years. They all lived in a beautiful palace.' A film version would have to narrate this information in voice-over, or use a scrolling text: it is not possible to enact it as film action without having a lengthy and inefficient series of scenes where the longing and repeated disappointment of the parents is shown. The equivalent shot to 'beautiful palace' demonstrates the respective modes of operation of film and print: just the phrase itself conjures up images for a reader while in a film a set would have to be built, with all of the consequent time and expense, to signify the same image.

Sound is a key element in revealing setting to us in films. The sounds in the opening credit sequence of 7.35 in the Morning establish the interior of the café with sufficient information on their own. Play the sounds to students without the images and find out what 'scene' they can hear. Choices about how settings are introduced can also be explored by asking students to write the 'opening sentence' of a film as if it were a short story.

Genre

When films or other texts operate in settings, or with characters or narratives, that we recognise, it is possible to talk about the genres or categories they might be placed in. However, a note of caution: approaching the study of genre as a checklist of expected components (Spooky house? Creepy music? Creaking stairs? It's a horror film!) can be a fruitless exercise. This is because:

• All texts can be put in more than one generic 'box'.

• Many texts actively resist being pigeonholed at all.

• The value of genre in terms of learning is in enabling students to think laterally about ways of categorising texts; it has great potential for developing 'meta-cognitive' activity.

Take 7.35 in the Morning : the setting, the 'boy longs for girl' narrative, the extraordinary lengths he goes to in order to impress her make this a romantic comedy. But the whole thing is performed as a song - with inept dance routine and sight gags included - so does this make it a musical? Or a musical comedy? The man's attentions aren't welcomed by the young woman - does this make it a stalker film? What about tragedy? Did he really blow himself up?

Beyond genre, the film is more than a romantic tragic-comic musical political thriller - with a twist. The Latin surreal feel puts it in the realm of Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodovar. Following each of these 'family resemblances' a little further would shed more light on how the film works, and a useful way to illustrate how family resemblances work is to create a Venn diagram. For each category, draw an overlapping circle to exemplify the range of overlapping categories that it is at the heart of a film text. Something like this for 7.35 in the Morning is shown below.

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Sometimes a text's attempt to resist a particular generic pigeonhole can mark it just as strongly as if it were a genre piece, and the short film follows conventions of its own - a single location, time, and action; few characters; a single resonant event - just like a short story. Short films also share features with poetry: both tend to be elliptical, allusive, resonant, symbolic. The Most Beautiful Man in the World and The Man with the Beautiful Eyes are emblematic of this.

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The Most Beautiful Man in the World

Representation

Representation is a concept that comes from Media Studies, rather than English or Film Studies, but it is useful in addressing some ideas and techniques. Considering representation enables us to think about the distance between a text, or media product, and the world it purports to present to us. Useful questions to ask about this connection include:

• How partial - 'only a part' - a view of its subject does this text offer us? In About a Girl we are only offered the events of the girl's life that she thinks are important - her dreams and ambitions - until they are devastatingly undercut by the final shot.

• How partial are the representations? This second meaning of partial refers to an author or artist having a particular perspective about people, or the world, or their country or culture that they want to represent, whether this is conscious or not. So, Accident in some ways draws on, and reframes, common ideas about London (the tourist city but also its local ethnically diverse populations); people (those culturally diverse groups and the assumptions and prejudices commonly held about them); white working class Londoners and their attitudes to other cultural groups. The strength of the film is to subtly question attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes, not by aggressively asserting their opposites, but by registering the changing perceptions about them in the face of one character.

• How representative of the world is this, or is this meant to be?

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The Man with the Beautiful Eyes

The man with the beautiful eyes is a counter-typical character: parents view him with fear and resentment, while to the children he is brave and beautiful. The narration thus presents a very different account of social attitudes.

• If we look at the gender, race, sexuality, religion, age or class of particular characters we can ask, what light do the characters shed on these categories? Viewers might justifiably feel that the alienation of George in The Little Things is 'typical' (or stereotypical?) of adolescence; others might point out that motherhood in The Little Things, About a Girl and The Most Beautiful Man in the World is portrayed stereotypically as either brutal or feckless. A comparison of mothers across these films will bring out subtle differences in representation.

Each of these questions reveals how films may represent characters in more or less complex ways, often drawing on our expectations, then undermining them, as if to remind us not to jump to judgement too quickly.

Modality

Modality can be thought of as a subsection of representation, focused around the question 'How realistic is this text trying to be, and how do we know?' Modality is 'read' by audiences or readers from a series of markers. In literature the phrase 'Once upon a time' signals to us that we are not about to hear a piece of realist writing. Of the films in this selection, the exaggerated colours and presentation of The Man with the Beautiful Eyes have a similar effect.

You can begin to address this question by getting students to rank a selection of texts in an order they think is from 'high' modality (those texts which are meant to be realistic) to 'low' modality, along a continuum or 'modality line'. Of the films in this compilation, the live action films would seem to have the highest modality, although in Two Cars, One Night black and white film stock can be read as being more distant from reality than colour film. Students could discuss why black and white film might have been chosen for this film. Similarly, animated films have more layers of mediation between viewer and maker. But The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, although animated and therefore 'not real', conveys to us something of the real and universal feelings that human beings experience.

The modality in a text may fluctuate. The First Time It Hits, for example, cuts between live action shots and graphic inserts which comment on the action.

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The First Time It Hits

Do these inserts somehow enhance the reality of the film, in that they let us know what the characters are thinking, or do they undermine it in some way?

Performance

Voice

One thing that distinguishes the films in this pack is the range of performances that exploit the dramatic potential of the human voice. Popular films from previous shorts resources - El Caminante, The Lucky Dip, Father and Daughter, The Sandman - were all made exceptional partly because they didn't rely on dialogue at all, an unusual feature in film-making which is typically dialogue heavy (or rich).

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Father and Daughter

Many of the films in this selection feature extraordinary and challenging vocal performances. From the New Zealand-accented exchanges of teenagers in Two Cars, One Night and The Little Things, the urban 'slang' in Jus' Gaps, to the bravura monologue of About a Girl, to the louche voice-over of The Man with the Beautiful Eyes, and the sung love letter of 7.35 in the Morning, it would be perverse not to focus first of all on this dimension of dramatic performance. See Drama for ways of exploring these points.

Starting with the acoustic dimensions of voice, it is possible to describe the sounds human beings make in technical terms - the voice's timbre (or resonance) its pitch, volume and modulation (degree of variation) - and in the cultural aspects of how we 'read' those sounds as speech - aspects like accent and persona.

Acoustics

There is quite a range of acoustic properties in the voices featured in the films. There is a flat lack of resonance in the unmodulated timbre of George's voice in The Little Things and in the off-screen voice of the babysitter in The Most Beautiful Man in the World, as if their respective personalities have been squeezed out of their voices by the circumstances that surround them. Romeo in Two Cars, One Night, on the other hand, almost 'performs' his vocal self - a mix of bravado and genuine engagement with the girl which is undercut by his bro's flat denials and deadpan refusals to endorse Romeo's flights of fancy. The male characters in Jus' Gaps come across as very laid-back, talking in a melodic urban slang in different sonorous voices, while Lucy chatters away non-stop in a rather high-pitched voice, which gets slightly annoying as she hardly seems to stop to think or breathe.

[pic]

Jus' Gaps

Where a film is narrated in voice-over, options for vocal characterisation become more limited. But the first-person narrator of The Man with the Beautiful Eyes deploys a sonorous richness in his recollected story which fits the imitated voice and persona of the 'Man'. The identification of narrator with Man is signalled by the match in voice - and the distance of narrator from parents and wider social mores is signalled by the fact that the parents don't speak at all, even through the narrator.

The voice of the girl in About a Girl is similarly complex: on the one hand, she deploys a flat, nasal, unmodulated vocal range for her reports of everyday life, and for how unshockable she thinks she is, and yet she sings throughout as well: two voices for two dimensions of her life - the reality and the aspiration.

Speech

There is a category of voice that comes under 'speech' - the live performance of language, rather than its technical aspects. In this category one can look at accent, rhythm, lexis and mode of address, and at the things speech tells us about a character - the contribution it makes to persona.

There are strong regionally accented voices in these films, and regional voices always attract a set of presumptions or even prejudices. Undermining these presumptions is one way of developing humour in a film, but is also arguably one of the responsibilities of the teacher. In Accident characters respond in a reflex way to accents and voices - the young guy's "speak fucking English" to the Iraqi victim's friend - but characters also wrong-foot each other, like the Pakistani lady who turns out not only not to be Iraqi, but to be a model of English Received Pronunciation.

The girl in About a Girl represents a somewhat stereotyped version of the northern urban teenager, and students might consider whether this does a disservice to teenage girls, and Mancunian teenage girls in particular.

There are two examples of regional accents from different countries that may present problems to younger viewers - the characters in The Little Things and Two Cars, One Night speak in accents thick enough to connote the fact that 'no one understands them', and this might be a useful point of connection for teenage students saying the same thing. Isn't it a common feeling among teenagers that no one understands them?

One other aspect of vocal performance is in rhythm and pace. Much of what might be called contemporary 'realist' or 'naturalistic' acting is premised on an unconscious mirroring of the flat 'unperformed' nature of everyday speech. One might argue that the place where drama adds value to (or turns a lamp onto rather than holding a mirror to) everyday speech is in the work of writers, directors and actors who are able to highlight its distinctive patterns and rhythms without taking it too far from its habitat - dramatists such as Harold Pinter, Alan Bennett and Dennis Potter, who all write or wrote as much for screen as stage.

In these films there are distinctively heightened versions of the rhythms of everyday speech, for example in the girl's monologue in About a Girl (the timing of "bless", "not so fucking lucky now" and the exchange with her father: "You can't run away; where will you go?" "That's the point.") Rhythm in speech is managed in dramatic turns by 'beats' and 'turn-taking' in dialogue. Mark up the beats or pauses in the exchanges between Romeo and the girl in Two Cars, One Night (click here for the dialogue) as you chart the shifts in power between the pair - and note the timing of Romeo's brother Ed's interventions.

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Two Cars, One Night

There is one example of dialogue where speech is abstracted from its natural home, or rather partially abstracted from it. In 7.35 in the Morning what could easily be performed as a naturalistic monologue is staged as a clunky song, with all the ragged edges and clumsy phraseology of speech intact. It foregrounds and heightens the absurdity of 'performing' dialogue and 'staging' a conversation, and maintains a tricky balancing act throughout - is it satire, burlesque, farce, romance or tragedy?

Finally, there are aspects of speech that attend to its content: the word choice, or lexis, and the ways in which the speech is directed to listener or interlocutor - its mode of address.

You may have noticed that a number of the films feature what has euphemistically been called 'language', and in order that these are carefully introduced to students it is necessary to consider the uses that foul or abusive language, or just expletives, are put to in texts. In the opening exchanges of Accident the two skinhead characters swear profusely, first in banter with each other, then more poisonously at a young man obviously in distress but not able to speak English. Here is an example of the difference between an expletive used unconsciously, and one used abusively, to disempower and humiliate. Same word, two very different functions and effects. Similarly, the girl in About a Girl swears a number of times, as an expression of her independence, and for comic effect. And when Lucy in Jus' Gaps swears - to accentuate her feistiness, and also for comic effect - she is immediately told off by the guys. Do men and women swear for different reasons and with different effects?

There are examples of culturally specific lexes in the New Zealand films as well as words which stick out because they are at the beginning of being assimilated into a discourse group. (Romeo in Two Cars, One Night says to his brother, "Hey Ed, you're one of those gays, aren't you?" and George in The Little Things repeats the phrase "the world doesn't revolve around you" after it is used to her by her mother on her birthday.) In The Man with the Beautiful Eyes the parents' world is a linguistic one, a simplified world of 'love' and 'hate', while the Man himself speaks a kind of baroque speak: "Hey, little gentlemen, having a good time, I hope?" as well as the demotic ("you god damned whore") their parents would expect.

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The Man with the Beautiful Eyes

There is a dimension to speech to do with the interlocutor - the responder or listener actually present, or implied, by the address of the speaker. Who speaks, and to whom, in The Little Things? Who listens to George and who ignores her? Who issues instructions and prohibitions and what are George's reactions? What about the other modes of communication, or acts of communication, we are shown? (The little boy's gift, the card from her dad, their answerphone message).

Proxemics

...or how people behave in relation to space. The definition of proxemics we are working with here comes from .

The term 'proxemics' was coined by a researcher E T Hall in 1963 when he investigated man's use of personal space in contrast with 'fixed' and 'semi-fixed' feature space. Fixed feature space is characterised by unmovable boundaries (divisions within an office building) while semi-fixed feature space is defined by fixed boundaries such as furniture. Informal space is characterised by a personal zone or 'bubble' that varies for individuals and circumstances. While the use of each of these spatial relationships can impede or promote the act of communication, the area that humans control and use most often is their informal space.

The concept of proxemics is a useful one when studying dramatic performance, and especially so when looking at the films in this resource. Look at the ways in which the teenage characters in the films define and move within their 'informal space': Romeo gets out of his car to connect more closely with the girl, but is still constrained by the 'semi-fixed feature' of the car; the girl in About a Girl sits in various separated relations to her family - across the café table from her father, or at the end of a park bench - and there's the distance between her and camera - not quite close enough for confidential talk. In The Little Things, George drifts through 'fixed' and 'semi-fixed' feature space without connecting with it at any point: these are spaces not to be engaged with; not humanised or social, but alienating 'non-places', factory-produced from templates that supply cinemas, burger bars and retail outlets the world over.

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The Little Things

It is interesting to look at the proxemics of Jus' Gaps: although many would perceive a hairdresser as a 'semi-fixed' space, where customers are confined to a chair, this barber shop is a very informal space where communication flows as easily as the characters who move in and out of the space to

socialise and connect, rather than to get their hair cut. Lucy's behaviour there and in the shoe shop is juxtaposed with the interviewing situation in a 'fixed' feature space, where she is 'caught' in the boundaries of the office space where the interview takes place.

The proxemics of the Spanish café in 7.35 in the Morning are fascinating: appropriately close for café furniture, where one is used to being cheek by jowl, but hardly appropriate for a musical performance, especially one where the performers are under duress.

Working proxemics into drama study can be done through re-enacting Two Cars, One Night or by acting dialogue from the films and changing the proxemics: what if Romeo and the girl in Two Cars, One Night were sitting next to each other in a park, at the cinema or in a classroom on the first day of a new school? How would the performance, gesture and voice change in each setting?

What if the performance of 7.35 in the Morning were set in a classroom? How would this alter the staging and relationships between characters? What would happen, if the guy in Killing Time at Home would leave his flat? How would The First Time It Hits change if it was set in a field in the country? Could the action of The Most Beautiful Man in the World have happened in a different space, such as a busy playground?

Authorship, audience and purpose

English teaching has for some time placed a strong emphasis on audience and purpose in its study of texts. Coupled with this, there has been a long tradition of inferring author intentions as the source of meaning in literary texts, although this has recently been attenuated in a newer attention to the 'author's craft'. So how can these three related concepts illuminate the short films in this pack?

The first thing to note, is that these films are not made for specific audiences, as is common in mass-media production. Short films featuring children were probably not made for audiences of children, and the films in this collection featuring teenagers are no exception. In fact, in their allusive and elliptical form, their emphasis on 'literary' modes such as characterisation, mood and theme, their resistance to simple moral reductions, their ambiguous narratives and culturally arcane representations, they are the antithesis of stories produced for mass readership and consumption. They are much more typical of texts produced for the readers of this resource!

The one set of certainties we have about who these films are made for can be gleaned from the interviews with directors offered here as supplementary material. Short films are seen as stepping stones, or ladder rungs, to higher profiles in the film industry. An impressive reel of two or three shorts, garlanded with awards, will catch the attention of funders and producers. This means that shorts have to be stylish, or at least stylised; tell unusual stories elegantly and economically; wear their influences on their sleeve (though this is common anyway in apprentice artists); and very often feature shocking or disturbing material.

Tone and mood

A final crossover area between literary texts and film is in the establishing, managing and manipulating of tone, mood and atmosphere. The creation of mood in both media can be most fruitfully explored by 'writing between' the media: taking moments in the film where a mood is established, or changed, and asking students to rewrite it. Suitable points might be the scenes of lassitude at the opening of The Most Beautiful Man in the World, the moment when the girl in About a Girl slows down at the end and says, "I've got quite good at hiding things lately", the complex layers of tone at the start of Accident where the young guy moves from matey banter to verbal aggression to sudden shock at the scene of the accident, and any one of the vertiginous switches in mood in 7.35 in the Morning.

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About a Girl

A way of plotting and recording switches in mood or tone is to use a timeline. See, for example, lesson suggestions for The First Time It Hits.

Sight & Sound

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March issue: Indiewood and the Fratpack

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Last Updated: 06 Feb 2008

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