Читать книгу Short Films in Language Teaching - Группа авторов - Страница 21

The innertextual make-up and the intertextual references account for a complex film, a rich aesthetic learning object. But alas! The characters in this short film remain speechless. No authentic native speaker material here. Also, this film is not set in an English-speaking environment, so there is nothing to learn about country and people, habits and customs. Our film is Swiss, its director is Laszlo Kish, its original title is GÄNSEHAUT (goose bumps). The story is rather archetypal, though, and clearly this 8-minute-film succeeds in packing a lot of meaning into a very small space. It employs well-wrought narrative patterns such as the division into three distinct parts (exposition in front of the cinema, main part in the shelter, coda in the tram), a careful structuring of space (with a street separating the illusionist world of the cinema from the real world of public transportation), and the best of all possible complications: the appearance of a woman1. More importantly, this film makes very effective use of the genuine language of film, which is not verbal but audiovisual: the black and white, the music (off scene) and the laughter (off screen), camera movement, field size, shot length. Last but not least, the meaning of this film draws heavily on intertextual references and ironies: A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, BEN HUR, the film noir. Like in a good poem or short story there is a density of aesthetic means and the kind of over-structuring we know to be the hallmarks of poetic texts.