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Preparing for A level – Study Support Pack – Summer 2020

Subject: Film Studies A-level

The aim of this pack is to help you bridge the gap between GCSE and A level. It is specific to one of the many A level subjects that are taught at The Bedford Sixth Form and we encourage you to work through all the relevant packs for the subjects that you would like to study.

www.bedfordsixthform.ac.uk

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Introduction So you want to study film? This pack is designed to get you familiar with some of the approaches to studying films that we use at A-level. They include:

• Analysis of film form including: o Aesthetic o Narrative • Exploration of a film’s context including: o Social o Political o Cultural o Historical o Institutional To support your work through this booklet, you will need to access the The Fall by Jonathon Glazer (2019). At the time of writing, it is hosted by the BBC on their iPlayer and should be available for another 5 months. It is likely to be freely available via other on-line hosts. Just search for ‘The Fall ’. Before you watch the film, please read this extract from a newspaper article about its unusual release.

The Americas with Simon Reeve is an amiable travelogue in which a dishy documentarian gads about the US. This Sunday night he was in California, examining giant redwoods and Beyoncé’s mansion. At 10pm, the credits rolled and, abruptly, BBC Two plunged us into hell. For five minutes before the start of Live at the Apollo, the channel screened a new short film in which a masked mob hang a man in a forest. He plunges for what feels an eternity (actually 86 seconds) down a well from the wooden gibbet, before the rope stops spooling and the man – miraculously alive – slowly starts to haul his way towards the light. It was broadcast without introduction or credits. There was no clue as to who was responsible. Catherine Shoard, (27/10/19)

Why do you think a film maker would collaborate with a television channel such as the BBC to release a short film in this way? 1) Without warning or listing it in the schedule? 2) Anonymously – until the end credits? 3) Between ‘light’ Sunday evening content? Now watch the film. 4) What is your initial response? Much of the meaning that a film has comes from the person watching it. What do you bring to this film? a. Your hopes, fears and expectations? b. Your experience of other films with elements that you recognise or that seem similar here?

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c. Things that you’ve seen in the news, or read about? Maybe political issues or stories from around the world? d. Nothing… maybe you’ve not ever seen anything like this and are totally baffled by what just happened. It’s OK if this is the case! The Guardian article continues…

In fact, The Fall is the latest film by Jonathan Glazer, the British director behind gangster comedy , chilly reincarnation drama Birth and Under the Skin, in which ’s erotic alien feeds on Glaswegians. All three are brilliant; Under the Skin is a masterpiece, last month named by this paper as the fourth best film of the century so far. The Fall, his first work since Under the Skin, feels entirely of a piece. Long, eerie takes, a score by Mica Levi (there is no dialogue), bright light shining through the pitch black, and everything freighted with exhilarating dread. Catherine Shoard, The Guardian (27/10/19)

5) There are two people mentioned here as being part of the creative team that made this film. Find out a bit more about each of them: a. Jonathan Glazer b. Mica Levi Jonathan Glazer talks about the artistic and political influences on the film as the article continues…

The Fall may be brief, but it turns out to have at least five heavyweight inspirations – the most flippant of which is a snap of Eric and Jr on a big-game hunting jaunt. “The day I saw a picture of the Trump sons grinning with a dead leopard,” he says, was the day he came up with a shot of the mob posing for a selfie with their prey. It’s a moment that hauls a story, whose bare bones recall Reconstruction-era America and even stone-age justice, firmly into the present. The masks mix early man and modern social protest – half Neanderthal, half Vendetta. “I think fear is ever-present,” says Glazer when asked if a lynch-mob mentality is currently being given freer rein. “And that drives people to irrational behaviour. A mob encourages an abdication of personal responsibility. The rise of National Socialism in Germany for instance was like a fever that took hold of people. We can see that happening again.” Aside from The Fall, the feature-length film Glazer has been working on for the past six years is a Holocaust drama set in Auschwitz, apparently based on ’s novel The Zone of Interest, about a Nazi officer who becomes infatuated with the camp commander’s wife. That film, due to shoot next spring, is “very much its own thing,” he says. Yet he has spoken about his fascination with photos of Germans thrilled by the horrors they were witnessing – something seemingly explored in The Fall.

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Another starting point for the short, he says, was a Bertolt Brecht poem written in exile in the 1930s: “In the dark times / Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” These lines, says Glazer, were inscribed on the inside cover of a collection of essays given to him by a friend. Other inspirations include the Goya self-portrait The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, in which the napping artist is plagued by flapping bats, generally interpreted as a critique of Spanish society as ignorant, insane and corrupt. “Also,” says Glazer, “his Disasters of War etchings, urgently titled I Saw It or This Is Worse. Hell on earth, witnessed like a photojournalist such as Robert Capa or Don McCullin. Ferocious, factual, unflinching.” In case it’s not clear, Glazer is an uncompromisingly serious-minded film-maker. Ask him what he’s enjoyed lately and he says Krzystof Kieślowski’s 1979 meta-drama Camera Buff (“a great film about film-making and the nature and ethics of it”). Few directors treat film of all forms with more gravity. Though this may be his first fictional short in 26 years, Glazer built his reputation with astonishing music videos for the likes of (he credits 1996’s as the turning point in his artistic development) and ads such as ’s horses in the surf. “Anthony Minghella said a short film should be like a perfect sentence,” he says, “And I thought that was a really good way of thinking about them.” As for The Fall premiering on TV? Glazer won’t quite pronounce on whether some genres, such as the superhero movies made by Marvel, are – in the words of Martin Scorsese – “not cinema”. “I believe cinema is a frontier. Absolutely. And the films I’m most interested in are the ones with that in mind.” Food for thought. Especially for those who’d only tuned in for Live at the Apollo. Catherine Shoard, The Guardian (27/10/19)

6) The influences on the film include some other visual artists and their work. Find out about each of these. Try using Google images to help you visualise their influence. a. Goya’s self-portrait The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters b. Photojournalists such as Robert Capa or Don McCullin c. Krzystof Kieślowski – find out about A Short Film About Killing Here’s the picture of the Trump boys hunting:

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7) What aspects of this still image do you think have influenced the visual style of The Fall? 8) One of the most disturbing elements of the film, for many spectators, is the use of masks. Shoard comments in the article that: “The masks mix early man and modern social protest – half Neanderthal, half Vendetta.” a. What do you think she means? b. What do you think is the impact and meaning of the masks? 9) Jonathan Glazer has made a few films, advertisement and music videos. Try finding some other short films of his to watch. I recommend the for Rabbit in Your Headlights by UNKLE. Can you see any similarities across his work? In filmmaking, there are a few elements of the process that are controlled by the creative team to help them build meaning into their work. At A-level we look at these separately to explore their importance. Here is a basic list: a) Cinematography – how the cameras to frame the action b) Mise-en-scéne – how all elements of the set and props are arranged c) Editing – how all the shots that make up the film are organised d) Sound – how meaning is created by the sound that is in the story and the sound that is added on top. We’ll take these in turn and think about what Glazer and his team have done. Cinematography 10) In this shot of the rope running into the well, the camera moves very slowly closer to the action. a. Why do you think this is?

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b. What effect might be intended?

11) In this shot, the camera is positioned below the man climbing up the well walls. a. What effect do you think this is supposed to have? b. Is this more effective, do you think, than if we were looking down on him climbing up towards us?

12) Now pick another shot (from the first minute of the film) and think about why it has been framed the way it has, or why the camera moves the way it does. Mise-en-Scéne 13) Look again at the rope. Consider the meaning of these three details: a. It whips about frenetically as the man plunges down the well shaft. b. It starts to cause wisps of smoke to rise from the wooden frame. c. It has not been tied on to anything and just runs into the well shaft following the man. 14) There are no bright colours in the film. The costumes are muted tones of grey, blue and green. Try to think of at least three reasons for using this colour pallet.

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Editing 15) Glazer disturbs us by subverting our expectations of traditional continuity and temporal editing. In other words, he deliberately makes it difficult for us to make full sense of the time and space in which the narrative takes place. Time how long the man appears to fall down the well shaft for and how long the rope is shown to be falling. a. Is this realistic? If not, why does Glazer make the decision to exaggerate? 16) We don’t see the man dropped down the well. We don’t see the man stop himself falling. We have to make assumptions about these events having taken place. a. What do you think is the reason that doesn’t Glazer show us everything? Sound 17) You’ve already done some research into Mica Levi as a musician and composer. She works mainly with acoustic instruments which she records and then electronically manipulates. a. How far is this film like a music video? 18) Think about the decision to write and shoot this film without any dialogue. This is pretty unusual in modern film making as we are used to stories being told through what people say about themselves, each other and the events going on around them. In this respect, The Fall is more like the films of silent cinema where musicians would accompany the screening of a film with a live soundtrack to add emotional depth and underscore significant narrative moments. a. Why do you think Glazer made this decision? b. How far do you think Levi is responsible for the impact of the film? Narrative 19) Ok, so what do you think the story actually is? Who are these people? What are they doing? Why? There may be many possibilities, so try to jot down three or four different interpretations of the events. 20) In the interview with The Guardian, the tone seems quite political; there is mention of Nazis, Brexit, America. Allegory is a type of story apparently about

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one thing but actually about another. Many myths, legends and fairy tales are allegorical. a. What might this story actually represent? b. The world presented in the film isn’t quite like our own, so how might we make meaning of it in our own world? c. How does it ‘translate’ as a story about you and your community? The chief film writer for The Guardian also commented on the release of the film.

In some mysterious or post-apocalyptic forest, a group of masked figures surround their human victim, whom they have shaken down from a tree. With a noose around his neck, attached to a very long rope, he is forced to pose for a “hunt trophy” selfie and then dropped into a deep well or shaft. His tormentors gaze down into the abyss, and then saunter and dance away, apparently satisfied that he is dead. But the man has managed to brace his legs against the side of the pit and halt his fall before the rope is pulled taut around his neck, and he has survived. Now he has to climb out of there: is it a moment of desperate hope? Or another turn of the screw, another stage in the enigmatic ordeal? Any new work from Jonathan Glazer is exciting news, and this intriguing short film – screened unannounced on the BBC – shows that he is experimenting with new modes of distribution, release and engagement. It also shows his flair for the startling and disquieting image: the sinister impassive faces; the tree shaking; and the long implacable, inhuman whine of the pulley mechanism as the body is dropped. It is all assisted by the coercively sinister score by Mica Levi. The Fall may be a taste of a longer feature to come, or perhaps it is intended as a standalone piece: a haiku of horror in which the centrepiece is that grisly selfie – the snapshot is starkly presented – like the horrendous photos taken of grinning whites around deep south lynchings in the Jim Crow era, given a new banality-of-evil effect in the age of Instagram. Is this the way the world ends, humanity ends? In a spasm of real-world bullying and paranoia to match the pile-ons and the polarised of social media? Is this our fall? If it is, it is hardly a fall from grace. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (27/10/19)

Here’s another review, this time from the online webzine IndiWire:

The strangers in your dreams never have faces. If what you see in your sleep is a molten stew of memories that your mind is pooling together however it can, it would stand to reason that the unconscious brain doesn’t have the ability to create new people. It’s more a feverish act of consolidation than anything else; imagine an editor trying to make sense of a million random dailies on a 10-second deadline and doing their best to string together a semi-coherent narrative from the mess of raw footage that’s been dumped in their lap.

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Sometimes your brain knows exactly who to cast in the story it’s projecting back at you, but when the ensemble grows too large — when you’re lost in a crowd, or being chased by a mob — the scene is fleshed out with a horde of anonymous extras. Those dreams are usually nightmares. But it wasn’t until I watched “The Fall,” a new short film by “Under the Skin” director Jonathan Glazer, that it made some kind of sense to me: Those dreams aren’t filled with faceless people because they’re nightmares, they’re nightmares because they’re filled with faceless people. A grim caricature of fascism that recalls the austere music videos that Glazer made for Radiohead (and might also be thought of as an appetizer for his forthcoming movie about Auschwitz), “The Fall” is simple enough to feel like a gag, but haunting enough to land like a warning. A tree shakes on a still night. High among its branches, a terrified man clings to the trunk for dear life. The actor playing him is wearing a skin-colored mask that combines the eerie fixedness of Michael Myers with the soft despair of a scared child; the straps of the mask are clearly visible. The 10 people trying to rattle the man loose from the base of the tree are all wearing the same version of a similar mask that only differs from the protagonist’s in its mouth-breathing arrogance, its hungry eyes, and its bared teeth. The mob eventually knocks the man down, forces him to pose for a picture that Glazer says was inspired by a photo of Eric and Donald Trump Jr gloating beside the carcass of a defenseless animal, and then throws him down a bottomless well. He falls for 86 seconds, and then… The whole thing is over in less than seven minutes (it runs a quick 5:49 without credits), but it leaves one hell of an impression. And while Glazer may have been inspired by current events, the abstraction of his storytelling and the range of his other reference points allows “The Fall” to become unmoored from any particular moment in time. Churning with the oblique menace that has carried so much of his work (and layered with the same tortured hope for transcendence), Glazer’s first proper short uses dream logic to crystallize an elemental feeling that can always be found in the collective unconscious. The filmmaker has cited Goya’s self-portrait “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” as another touchstone, and it’s one that seeps well below the surface; like a live-action Goya painting, “The Fall” vividly traces the thoughtless violence that hides behind the faces we see in waking life. The world turns on the premise that people can recognize themselves in each other, but the masks in “The Fall” work to fog that mirror. Their unmoving expressions can’t be reasoned with. The man in the tree can’t understand why people are shaking its trunk, the mob on the ground doesn’t need a good reason, and the dull shimmer of Mica Levi’s characteristically nerve-jangling score — the sound of liquid metal hardening into shape — makes it clear that we’re seeing an unstoppable alchemy in motion. Maybe the victim used to be another face in the crowd. Maybe the mob turned on him right before the action started. Maybe, like most dreams, there was nothing before the beginning and there will be nothing after the end. The only thing Glazer’s

9 riveting cold sweat of a short film suggests for certain is that we climb in our dreams, we fall in our nightmares, and our only hope is to wake up in time before we hit the ground. David Ehrlich, IndiWire (25/11/19)

21) Read again the penultimate paragraph. Here Ehrlich offers his interpretation of the film’s meaning. He says ‘the man in the tree can’t understand’. Do you agree? 22) Now that you’ve explored a very short film, how about trying to write something yourself? Here are some titles that might get you thinking: a. Rise b. Crossing the Sea c. Heaven in her handbag d. Arrival at night 23) Write a pitch – a 30 second presentation to sell the idea of a film. 24) Plan a storyboard for your idea. This is a bit like a comic strip; a series of pictures to show each main shot of the film. 25) Write a screenplay for your idea. To make this work, you will need an idea that uses dialogue. You might need to research what a screenplay looks like if you are not already familiar with their very specific layout. You can use cloud based screenplay writing software if you create a free account with Writer Duet. https://writerduet.com/

Hopefully you have enjoyed studying a short film and thinking about what you are seeing and hearing in new ways. There are lots of resources on the internet to help extend your appreciation of film. 26) Have a look at some of these: http://www.filmeducation.org/ This has lots of resources for teachers at different levels. You can explore the website for more learning activities. https://www.bfi.org.uk/ The British Film Institute have many pages of interesting articles to read and an incredible archive of British and World cinema to explore. https://www.bbfc.co.uk/ The British Board of Film Classification have some very interesting case studies to read, looking at the decisions behind the age ratings given to films. They also host an intriguing pod-cast that is well worth listening to.

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