I've recently been adding to the content on film on www.alevelfrench.com and have revisited La Haine with a vengeance. I've always had mixed feelings about the film but have grown to admire the production of it and the performances of the principal actors. I wrote a guide to it with language exercises including a summary, contextualised grammar exercises and an essay plan three years or so ago. (You can order from the site http://www.alevelfrench.com/home/mod/book/view.php?id=5) I decided however to produce a more detailed set of resources which would hopefully help teachers tackle the content of the film with more confidence.
Version of the film: The French language collectors' edition of the film with Kassovitz's walk through and the making of et is now available for around 12 euros + PP This provides lots of extra listening practice to back up language work around the film.
The script:- I sent off for a couple of versions of the script, one from the 90's with photos of the making of and a German edition of the scenario. Both these were the same and actually don't correspond very closely at all to what appears in the dialogue of the film. One of the first lessons then is to compare these two versions linguistically. I spent about a week transcribing the film on and off from the French version with the help of subtitles in French for the sourds et malentendants. What gets missed in subtitling is both detail and the sheer repetition; if Saïd says something once he says it three times; hardly a sentence doesn't finish with là; words which are misheard are often familiar words pronounced in verlan-therefore inverted as in oinj -joint. I've tried to capture the full conversation with its repetitions which gives a true reflection of how annoying Saïd and Vinz can be.
Getting down to detail: Analysing the film and saying why a scene is filmed using a particular combination of shots with particular sound and effects is pretty straight forward if you introduce students to the language of cinema using a site such as Hors Cadre http://www.horscadre.eu/enpratique/limage-et-ses-codes/ or Centre Images http://www.centreimages.fr/vocabulaire/index.html
The detail around the language used is however dependent on having a good accurate transcription of the film. There is more subtlety around Saïd than you would think; close examination of what he says reveals a boy who is frightened of what his parents will do to him if he gets into real trouble and who is logical about his physical limitations: "Je cours pas plus vite que les balles" Having been hopeless at learning quotations myself (too lazy?), I've found that setting quotations up in Quizlet gives a good platform for learning which can be either printed off, practise on a laptop or PC or through a free download app on a mobile phone or tablet.
Essays: My contention is that you can't write an essay if you can't write a paragraph and you can't write a paragraph if you can't write a sentence. Hence I have produced tools for sentence, paragraph and full essay planning. The sentence tool takes a phrase and plays with it increasing the complexity until your complex sentence is at least half a paragraph. The essay tool takes one piece of evidence and shows it incorporated using similar words in paragraphs which are responding to three different essay titles. Finally the content free essay planning tool is designed to print off in A3 (preferably) to get students planning their work in a non-sequential manner (spider diagramming, brainstorming-whatever you want to call it).
Sample essay plans and essays produced from them are provided for each examination board along with a guide to writing the essay to ensure students know where the marks go. This should be used in conjunction with examiners' reports.
Director background: I have produced a powerpoint for each producer tracing their childhood and early career linking through to youtube or dailymotion versions of their work. This is extremely informative for Kassovitz whose preceding works tee him up amazingly well for La haine. His spiky character comes across well in the interview made around the time of release of the film. It is interesting to contrast this with his more recent reaction to the reception of L'ordre et la morale.
Another film by the same director: Métisse with its cast of characters overlapping closely with La haine seemed a really interesting film to study alongside. The feeling of deja vu with certain images and scenes demonstrates the way a director gets certain ideas into his/her head that form part of their psyche almost. The police harassment that forms the back bone of La haine is already present in a milder way in the earlier film. The Jewishness which represents a third of the cultural influence of La haine is a dominant feature of Métisse.
The summary of the film I provide is several pages long and the verbs are gapped with the infinitive form to provide the necessary practice of verb forms.
Useful weblinks: New materials appear occasionally and when I hear of them I add them to the course to provide extra depth to the course offering.
I am going to be adding materials around analysing scenes and themes over the course of the next few weeks. This set of materials is £15. If you're interested, let me know and I'll invoice you by paypal or with a school invoice. The photocopy master, I wrote and published by linguascope, is also available for £15 from the URL above.
Wednesday 28 August 2013
Saturday 13 April 2013
Vipère au poing-Hervé Bazin
I picked up Vipére au poing a few months ago and initially found the first couple of chapters a bit tedious and put it down. Having a train journey infront of me I thought I'd get into it with no distractions and have to say that it turned into the most fascinating of reads.
Having spent so long on L'étranger (see materials at www.letranger.co.uk) and its underlying notion that not loving one's mother is good enough to send you to the guillotine, the narrative of Vipère came as quite a shock.
The narrator, the middle of three sons suffers at the hand of a cold, calculating and cruel mother who only returns from China with her husband to the family mansion after the children's grandmother dies. The children's life is turned upside down and I would hate to spoil your enjoyment of the sadistic method's "Folcoche" the mother employs to torture her offspring as well as the staff.
The hen-pecked father who is passionate about insects and aims to get a species named after the family provides light relief from the relentless determination of the mother to beat down her children.
As Brasse-Bouillon, the narrator, gets older he becomes every more rebellious and is horrified to realized that he is so like his mother in many ways that he can anticipate her malevolent actions and counter them to good effect.
As a coming of age novel Vipère au poing is quite unusual and there are two sequels about the Vezeau family which I'm keen to read now. However the sheer determination and relentless desire of "Folcoche" to get one over on her own kids tempts me to call her the "Muminator".
Anyone shocked at the methods employed by the head at Fond de l'Etang in Les Choristes will think twice on seeing the damage a mother can inflict with a table fork!
Whilst there is a recent film to accompany the book nothing can reach the levels of intense mutual hatred between sons and mother in this strangely enjoyable work. Will we cover the novel on alevelfrench.com: I'd like to think so but would like to find out if anyone is studying it first.
Here's the first part of the film for the curious.
Having spent so long on L'étranger (see materials at www.letranger.co.uk) and its underlying notion that not loving one's mother is good enough to send you to the guillotine, the narrative of Vipère came as quite a shock.
The narrator, the middle of three sons suffers at the hand of a cold, calculating and cruel mother who only returns from China with her husband to the family mansion after the children's grandmother dies. The children's life is turned upside down and I would hate to spoil your enjoyment of the sadistic method's "Folcoche" the mother employs to torture her offspring as well as the staff.
The hen-pecked father who is passionate about insects and aims to get a species named after the family provides light relief from the relentless determination of the mother to beat down her children.
As Brasse-Bouillon, the narrator, gets older he becomes every more rebellious and is horrified to realized that he is so like his mother in many ways that he can anticipate her malevolent actions and counter them to good effect.
As a coming of age novel Vipère au poing is quite unusual and there are two sequels about the Vezeau family which I'm keen to read now. However the sheer determination and relentless desire of "Folcoche" to get one over on her own kids tempts me to call her the "Muminator".
Anyone shocked at the methods employed by the head at Fond de l'Etang in Les Choristes will think twice on seeing the damage a mother can inflict with a table fork!
Whilst there is a recent film to accompany the book nothing can reach the levels of intense mutual hatred between sons and mother in this strangely enjoyable work. Will we cover the novel on alevelfrench.com: I'd like to think so but would like to find out if anyone is studying it first.
Here's the first part of the film for the curious.
Tuesday 22 January 2013
Thérèse Desqueyroux
One of the things I like about L'étranger (www.letranger.co.uk) is the interesting "loose ends" within it. On the one hand Meursault at one point cuts out an advert he finds amusing from a newspaper and sticks it into a scrapbook he uses so that he can read them again; later on in the book he is bemused by a woman who meticulously checks off what she is going to listen to on the radio that week...not really such a huge difference-clearly the same species of being! Later on of course she appears at the trial, representing that type of person although she plays no part in the precedings.
Thérèse Desqueyroux feels a little bit like that with lots of aspects of the novel not really tied up; much of the time we are not sure whom the omniscient narrator is addressing. Do we ever really find out why Thérèse decided to poison her husband-she enquires whether ferns and the prussic acid they contain are poisonous before she marries so there is a tantalising trail of intent running through the novel.
There are contradictions which also make the reader wonder why Thérèse is so dissatisfied; in Bernard she has got the best of the bunch as far as blokes go. She indulges in business and political conversation alongside the men and obviously gives as good as she gets. It's no use really speculating what she could have done with her life if she hadn't followed the course she did as the point of the novel was to get inside the skin of a woman not achieving her potential at a time when the female suffrage was still nearly twenty years away...
An extremely interesting novel to read and so much to think about, not least the narrative structure. After the opening sequence and one or two travel details further in we don't get back to the present day in the novel's terms until two thirds of the way through the book.
Going back to Meursault someone with whom we seek to compare our own moral compass, do we like or respect him..I don't know- and does it matter what we think? It's a bit like that with Thérèse through whose motivation most of the plot is driven-she seems rather unpleasant; from the word goes she gives up trying to empathise with Bernard with whom she was really keen to get married; she is very unpleasant towards her friend Anne-it goes on. All in all though, especially with a good film version of the book coming out, worth studying, again maybe studying the region also.
More on the alevelfrench.com content here http://www.alevelfrench.com/home/mod/book/view.php?id=962&chapterid=434
Thérèse Desqueyroux feels a little bit like that with lots of aspects of the novel not really tied up; much of the time we are not sure whom the omniscient narrator is addressing. Do we ever really find out why Thérèse decided to poison her husband-she enquires whether ferns and the prussic acid they contain are poisonous before she marries so there is a tantalising trail of intent running through the novel.
There are contradictions which also make the reader wonder why Thérèse is so dissatisfied; in Bernard she has got the best of the bunch as far as blokes go. She indulges in business and political conversation alongside the men and obviously gives as good as she gets. It's no use really speculating what she could have done with her life if she hadn't followed the course she did as the point of the novel was to get inside the skin of a woman not achieving her potential at a time when the female suffrage was still nearly twenty years away...
An extremely interesting novel to read and so much to think about, not least the narrative structure. After the opening sequence and one or two travel details further in we don't get back to the present day in the novel's terms until two thirds of the way through the book.
Going back to Meursault someone with whom we seek to compare our own moral compass, do we like or respect him..I don't know- and does it matter what we think? It's a bit like that with Thérèse through whose motivation most of the plot is driven-she seems rather unpleasant; from the word goes she gives up trying to empathise with Bernard with whom she was really keen to get married; she is very unpleasant towards her friend Anne-it goes on. All in all though, especially with a good film version of the book coming out, worth studying, again maybe studying the region also.
More on the alevelfrench.com content here http://www.alevelfrench.com/home/mod/book/view.php?id=962&chapterid=434
Sporting novels in French
In the French context, sport is a more open concept than in the UK I guess. At www.alevelfrench.com/home we are only covering one title currently which covers climbing, "La neige en deuil", a short very characterful novel by Henri Troyat where two brothers living in the Alps undertake a very different kind of mountaineering expedition as the focal point of the story.
The novel pits the brothers against the worst conditions nature could throw at them as well as opposing good and evil. Set against a period when it was becoming more and more difficult for a younger person to consider the peasant lifestyle as acceptable we look at the period with nostalgia as before long the hippy generation would be looking to emulate the "idyllic" circumstances of the mountain hamlet. Self-sufficiency in abundance.
With the younger brother wanting to get out and start a new life down in the town, the older brother formerly a top mountain guide who has flashbacks to a fatal accident in which he was involved holds a torch for the old ways. This clash, central to the novel is beautifully written especially as it is also brings in a foretaste of globalisation in the shape of the aeroplane crash which catapults the modern world into the brothers' environment. And this in an age when the whole village huddles around a radio to listen to the news.
It is hard to believe that a novel with such pedigree is not more widely read. It would certainly be very interesting to study alongside a geographical study of the Alps, surely a worthy area to investigate. To find out more about the alevelfrench.com resources on this novel go to http://www.alevelfrench.com/home/mod/book/view.php?id=962&chapterid=341
The other novel of this kind which relates to climbing is Premier de Cordée by Frison-Roche which also traces a mountain expedition. Written in Vichy France it involves a guide escorting an American climber up the mountain. It was intended to pit a traditional eternal French life style with the metronomic, time is money approach of the American.
The other novel which I've not read recently but need to revisit is 325 000 francs by Roger Vailland, a communist writer. It traces the efforts of a racing cyclist to earn enough money racing to pay the deposit on a café. This is an interest ambition for the period when it was written as it equates to the kind of reward levels of professional footballers of the day.
The novel pits the brothers against the worst conditions nature could throw at them as well as opposing good and evil. Set against a period when it was becoming more and more difficult for a younger person to consider the peasant lifestyle as acceptable we look at the period with nostalgia as before long the hippy generation would be looking to emulate the "idyllic" circumstances of the mountain hamlet. Self-sufficiency in abundance.
With the younger brother wanting to get out and start a new life down in the town, the older brother formerly a top mountain guide who has flashbacks to a fatal accident in which he was involved holds a torch for the old ways. This clash, central to the novel is beautifully written especially as it is also brings in a foretaste of globalisation in the shape of the aeroplane crash which catapults the modern world into the brothers' environment. And this in an age when the whole village huddles around a radio to listen to the news.
It is hard to believe that a novel with such pedigree is not more widely read. It would certainly be very interesting to study alongside a geographical study of the Alps, surely a worthy area to investigate. To find out more about the alevelfrench.com resources on this novel go to http://www.alevelfrench.com/home/mod/book/view.php?id=962&chapterid=341
The other novel of this kind which relates to climbing is Premier de Cordée by Frison-Roche which also traces a mountain expedition. Written in Vichy France it involves a guide escorting an American climber up the mountain. It was intended to pit a traditional eternal French life style with the metronomic, time is money approach of the American.
The other novel which I've not read recently but need to revisit is 325 000 francs by Roger Vailland, a communist writer. It traces the efforts of a racing cyclist to earn enough money racing to pay the deposit on a café. This is an interest ambition for the period when it was written as it equates to the kind of reward levels of professional footballers of the day.
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