Edusites Film offers a comprehensive collection of outstanding online Film Studies teaching resources to help teachers and students. From Avant Garde Godard to block buster super heroes there is no doubt that we humans love a film. The academic study of film offers students the vision to create their own stories in innovative and novel ways.
The Babadook (a gothic style horror that nods to German Expressionism and is directed by an Australian female director Jennifer Kent) is now live and completes our offer for the Outsiders theme in Section C Ideology for OCR A Level Film.
Jennifer on the film:
"I pitched it as a love story, actually, between a mother and a son. She just has to go through hell to get there. For me, that’s what was really important about this film: those positive, loving aspects. We pitched the light through the dark."
Key to the visual design of The Babadook is its carefully crafted mise-en-scene and Jennifer Kent has discussed how:
“Originally, I wanted to make the film in black and white but decided to limit the colour palette instead. I chose to use blue and burgundy (with touches of blue green) and every shade between black and white. It may not be something that people notice, but when we pull up outside the school, for example, all the cars are black, and Amelia’s car is a very pale blue. There are many other examples. This gives the film a very heightened look without being too crazy. It was extremely difficult to achieve but once we saw the completed film, it was worth it.”
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“All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun.” Jean-Luc Godard. When I first encountered this pithy ‘insight’ from the French filmmaker I thought it was all very cool. I was only 22 years old. What did I know?
The rule of three…watch the same complete film at least three times in addition to your specific focused classroom analysis. These ‘homework’ viewings could include active notetaking if you think they might spend most of the time physically in the room but mentally on Snapchat.
There’s a nice opportunity from the very beginning of this work to encourage and support your students in recognising the connection between their own creative work and particular examples from films that they have studied which can inform their creative choices.
