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Four Lions
A case study in representing identity in a British Cinema comedy
Notes for teachers by Roy Stafford
Teachers’ Notes
This pack supports a screening of Four Lions (UK 2010) and associated presentations. The event will explore representation issues in the context of the comedy genre and audience expectations and identity issues associated with young British Muslims.
The eventI think that the selected film is very successful and is worthy of textual study and also study in terms of genre and representation. I hope that you will be able to use the screening as the basis for further work. The film is available on DVD with some useful additional features. There is a considerable amount of material on YouTube archiving earlier work by Chris Morris and his collaborators.
Format of presentationsThe first session will be an ‘illustrated lecture’ – the main points of the lectures will be presented on screen in bullet format and video extracts will be used as study texts. (But the main screening will be on film.) All of the broad ideas in the lecture will be found in the notes referenced here, but if you want a copy of the slides as a ‘pdf’ or PowerPoint file, please email <[email protected]>. The afternoon session will be discussion based and I hope that students will be able to participate.
Timings
10.30: Start – Introduction to Representation as a Key Concept and comedy, religious belief and ‘terrorism’ as social issues. 11.15: Short Break11.30: Screening of Four Lions13.10: Lunch14.00: Discussion of Four Lions with student feedback15.00: Close
Background notesI have collated a range of background material to support the event and much of it is online. You can access and print/download what you feel is useful. The general background notes on ‘Representation in British Cinema’ that I have used for several years can be downloaded from: <http://www.inthepicture.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/RepNotes.pdf> (they have been slightly updated this year). The itpworld blog entry at <http://itpworld.wordpress.com/2010/05/14/four-lions-uk-2010/> was written after first seeing the film and I may update after the next few weeks. ‘Omar’s Film Blog’ entry by another film and media teacher can be found at <http://omarsfilmblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/four-lions-dir-chris-morris-2010-uk-is.html>
Roy Stafford, September 2010
All the text in this pack is © 2010, Roy Stafford/itp publications. The images from Four Lions are © Warp Films/Channel 4.
These notes are published by itp publications, http://itpworld.wordpress.com
email [email protected]
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Four Lions (UK 2010)
Directed by Chris MorrisProduced by Mark Herbert and Derrin Schlesinger for Warp Films Written by Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain, Simon Blackwell and Chris MorrisCinematography by Lol CrawleyFilm Editing by Billy SneddonCasting by Des HamiltonProduction Design by Dick LunnArt Direction by Julie Ann HoranSound editing by Darren BanksRuntime: 101 min
Leading players
Riz Ahmed OmarArsher Ali HassanNigel Lindsay BarryKayvan Novak WajAdeel Akhtar FessalBenedict Cumberbatch NegotiatorJulia Davis AliceCraig Parkinson MattPreeya Kalidas Sophia
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Background on film and television comedy
Comedy is the most popular film genre worldwide (discounting the broad category of ‘drama’). Formula comedy dramas are usually profitable being relatively cheap to make and, in many film cultures, comedies that draw strongly on local cultural references top the box office. These local comedies tend not to travel because they require local cultural knowledge. We can immediately distinguish universal comedy modes including physical slapstick and some forms of observational comedy from verbal comedy that doesn’t translate easily through subtitles or dubbing and social comedy/comedy of manners that needs a cultural base.
Comedies that are outside the mainstream may use other modes such as parody or pastiche. Both these modes refer to forms of imitation of existing works or particular styles or genres. Parody is often seen as more aggressive and more exaggerated and pastiche as a gentler or more playful form of commentary on the original. Satire might use parody or pastiche to attack moral or societal values. Alternatively comedic texts might be surrealist in approach so that the ‘normal’ view of the world can be disrupted; this too may signal a critique of contemporary society. Occasionally these modes may be applied to elements of mainstream comedy and of course many other film genres will include comedy elements. Outside of conventional single narratives, films could also comprise recordings of stand-up comedy performances and linked short sketches.
Comedy on television draws on all of the above modes and more since there is much more flexibility in formats and narratives. The sitcom, for instance is a series/serial form unique to broadcast media (now including internet broadcasts) – as is the comedy gameshow and the concept of reality TV (which has in turn led to new documentary modes for film). Perhaps for this reason, television has tended towards more elaborate parodies.
The creators of Four LionsThe creative team members behind Four Lions have a long comedy pedigree which draws on a wide range of comedy modes and formats.
Chris Morris began his career on radio in a variety of roles in local radio before making his first big splash (with Armando Iannucci, Steve Coogan and other new comedy talents) in 1991 with On The Hour, a parody of News and Current Affairs broadcasting, for Radio 4. This show was reworked for television in 1994 as The Day Today which was able to utilise video effects in its ‘play’ with the pretensions of news broadcasting. These shows were often seen to develop black comedy – i.e. comedy with serious political undertones. Critics recognised the use of absurdist and surrealist touches in the satire. Morris then moved to Channel 4 in 1997 making Brass Eye (six episodes) which caused considerable controversy because of the social issues it targeted and the way in which Morris ‘set up’ interviewees and celebrity presenters who might be tricked into making surreal statements on television. In 2001 a Brass Eye special focused on the ultimate ‘moral panic’ of paedophilia. The show caused a furore, effectively ‘proving’ what it set out to expose – the double standards and complete confusion of the UK’s tabloid press and its populist politicians. In Jam (2000) Morris re-worked earlier radio material in “a series of unsettling
sketches unfolding over an ambient soundtrack” (Wikipedia). Morris became a ‘dangerous’
media figure – and also a hero for his many fans. In 2002 Morris made his first short film with Warp, producers of Four Lions. He has also worked with Charlie Brooker on the TV
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comedy series Nathan Barley (again parodying elements of the contemporary media) and with Graham Linehan on the sitcom The IT Crowd.
The other three writers of Four Lions all have previous connections with Chris Morris. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain are most closely associated with the comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb for whom they have written the Peep Show comedy series amongst other ventures. Simon Blackwell has also worked with the other three on various projects including In the Loop, The Thick of It and Peep Show.
Between them, the four writers are clearly associated with quite a wide range of contemporary UK comedy. Most of it is television-based but there have been moves into film with some of the shows. Most could also be described as slightly outside the mainstream – i.e. more likely to appear on Channel or BBC2/3 rather than ITV – and always having a degree of satirical edge. Armstrong and Bain might be more likely to supply the ‘observational’ humour apparent in Peep Show. It would appear that the idea from the film came primarily from Chris Morris who researched the world of terrorist activities quite carefully and that the ‘humanising’ of the characters might be the result of the input of the other three writers.
Comedy and representationComedy films are slightly problematic for a representation study since the essence of comedy could be seen as challenging taste and ‘correct’ moral behaviour. Most ‘jokes’ are concerned with important issues: sex, death and money. We laugh often out of fear, relieved perhaps that what happens to others doesn’t happen to us. Slapstick provides laughs out of situations in which characters are humiliated or experience pain or discomfort. Comedy which breaks social taboos is by definition offensive to someone. There is almost a challenge to comedians and comedy writers/performers to push the boundaries of ‘acceptability’ as far as possible.
A slightly different approach to comedy might consider its political status. We might argue that in a healthy democracy with ‘liberal values’ almost any kind of comedy would be acceptable – yet many comedians (and audiences) are extremely cautious of making jokes about ethnicity and religion, both of which do in fact have the capacity to prompt forms of legal action. By contrast, under autocratic regimes, comedy must operate under the cloak of absurdity or surrealism in order to make its satirical points. The Czech New Wave in the 1960s was a good example of a film movement using forms of social comedy to undermine respect for the regime and its Soviet masters. Similar ideas might be found in contemporary Iranian Cinema (see Stafford 2010).
Media theorists have often argued that the most damaging representations in a society are those that circulate repeatedly in popular media and present groups of people as fixed social types. These social types are often constructed around power relationships where the weaker agent in the relationship is ‘fixed’ in a negative social type. This has been the case with successive generations of working-class young people, especially young men and boys demonised as ‘other’ and dangerous. This typing can be traced back to the thugs and hooligans of the nineteenth century (the words derive from Indian and Irish contexts), the ‘teddy boys’, ‘mods and rockers’ of the 1950s and 1960s and then the Black youths of the 1970s and 1980s and now the Muslim youth of the 2000s. The negative typing has shifted from social class to race to religion, yet in a sense, young Muslim men, especially in
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the North of England, are associated with all three prejudicial views (youth ethnicity and religion). In making a film which effectively lampoons such a heavily demonised group, Chris Morris and his collaborators face a daunting challenge. We might argue that there are three possible outcomes in terms of how audiences react:
1. Outrage that something as serious as terrorist attacks and characters as ‘evil’ as the terrorists should be the subject of comedy.
2. Concern that the Muslim youth in the film will be misrepresented and that the film will be unhelpful for all the parties concerned.
3. Appreciation of a comedy which exposes many of the attitudes and beliefs surrounding our understanding of Muslim identity, terrorist threats and UK society’s view of itself.
Representations of young British Muslims and of terrorist activities(Please see the downloadable Representation Notes for material on undertaking representation studies.)
One of the problems in undertaking this study is that most of the images of young British Muslims are circulated within news and current affairs programming or press coverage. There are relatively few fictions which create more personalised representations via films and television series. This means that simplified, stereotypical characters are likely to circulate based on real or alleged terrorist activity or other forms of social disorder (e.g. the Bradford riots/’uprisings’ of 2001). In one sense any images that personalise/’humanise’ young Muslims, whatever the context are to be welcomed. This is one of the important aspects of Four Lions and will be one of the crucial discussion questions. Does laughing at the idiocies of some of the actions of the would be terrorists mean that young Muslims are being demeaned – or does it mean that they are being ‘normalised’ and made less ‘other’?
Do young Muslims in the audience feel threatened by the lampooning or do they enjoy being represented on screen alongside the other social types and groups? One of the issues here is that much of the comedy focuses on aspects of Islam that most people in the UK don’t understand – e.g. the promise of an afterlife for the suicide bombers. Any critique of Islam as religion also opens up the representation of the range of interpretations of Islamic teaching, whereas the stereootype circulated in much of the UK tabloid press attempts to oversimplify and present a monolithic religious culture.
Recent British Cinema (and television)We won’t be able to use all the following clips/films but they are all accessible if you wish to extend your study. There are several YouTube clips of earlier material by Chris Morris and his collaborators and also interviews with the cast and crew of Four Lions. We will see one or two of the following:
Yasmin (UK 2004)This story about a young Muslim woman in a Northern mill town was written by Simon Beaufoy (The Full Monty, Slumdog Millionaire) after numerous workshops with young Muslims in Lancashire and Yorkshire. It was shot mainly in the Lawkholme district of Keighley by the Scots director Kenny Glanaan and then broadcast twice on Channel 4 to generally favourable reviews. In the story, Yasmin leads a dual life. A traditional Pakistani daughter at home with her father and younger brother, she changes clothes on the way to work and emerges as a modern British young woman employed in a local council office.
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Her life changes dramatically after 9/11 when she is treated very differently by her work colleagues and when her father forces her to accept a husband from Pakistan as a family obligation. She resents the husband but her overall attitude changes when he is arrested by the security police. Her younger brother, meanwhile, is recruited by a radical Imam who leads him away from drug-dealing and going with white girls towards thinking about going to a training camp for fighters in Afghanistan.
Yasmin used local actors as far as possible (but Yasmin herself was played by Archie Panjabi, one of the best-known British Asian actors) and was filmed in a social-realist mode in an appropriate location. Keighley has a significant South Asian population, primarily from Mirpur in Pakistan. (The whole of Yasmin is available, in parts, on YouTube.)
The Road to Guantanamo (UK 2006)This ‘dramatic reconstruction’ was directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross. It tells the story of the ‘Tipton Three’, young British Muslim men from the West Midlands who went to Pakistan for a wedding and decided to take a trip to Afghanistan. When the fighting in Afghanistan threatens their safety in Kabul, they decide to return to Pakistan but get lost and are eventually picked up by the Northern Alliance and handed over to the Americans. The men find themselves sent to the notorious prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba where they are detained and interrogated (claiming torture) for three years before being released and returning to the UK.
The three men are played by first-time actors (though Riz Ahmed has gone on to have a distinguished career, including Four Lions). The narrative is augmented by reflections from the Tipton Three themselves in individual interviews intercut with the reconstruction. The film is in Winterbottom’s usual ‘guerilla style’ with location shooting in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Cuban scenes are ironically shot in Iran.
Bradford Riots (UK 2006)This film was made for television and broadcast on Channel 4 (the whole film is available on YouTube in parts) and was written and directed by Neil Biswas, not a Bradford Muslim but from the Bangladeshi community in Whitechapel, East London. The film follows what happens to one Bradford family during the street protests of 2001. It was criticised by some media commentators because the central character, Karim, is a university graduate and therefore not ‘typical’ of those arrested during the disturbances. However, its depiction of the events (although staged partly in Liverpool because filming in Bradford was not allowed for certain scenes) is generally realistic in terms of what actually happened, even though the family and detailed storyline is fictitious. Karim represents an important element in Bradford’s South Asian community that deserves recognition, however it is interesting to note that both the London writers who have scripted Bradford stories (the other is Hanif Kureshi with My Son the Fanatic (UK 1997)) have chosen ‘good students’ as central characters. It is also worth noting that both Archie Panjabi in Yasmin and Sacha Dhawan in Bradford Riots were chosen because they are well-respected British Asian actors and not because they ‘know the local West Yorkshire Muslim community. Is this a question to raise about the writer and performers of Four Lions? It is a contrast with the work of a director like Ken Loach, who often tries for local casting in lead roles (e.g. in Ae Fond Kiss (2004 set in Glasgow’s South Asian Muslim community).
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Love + Hate (2006)Another example of an attempt by a writer-director from the South to make a ‘local film’, this sees Dominic Savage creating a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ tale about a young white man (from a racist family) falling for a young woman from the South Asian Muslim community in Blackburn. Although it got a minimal cinema release, this was used on previous itp events and was generally well-received by students. It offers a different view of family life in a Northern town. The film was released on DVD.
This extract is not from British Cinema, but serves as commentary on the issue of terrorism and specifically suicide-bombing.
Paradise Now (Palestine/Ger/Fra/Neth/Israel, 2005)This film by Hany Abu-Assad deals with a pair of Palestinians who agree to be suicide bombers during the second intifada in 2001. They are garage mechanics who are suddenly told that they will be sent to Tel Aviv within the next 36 hours. The two men have different personalities and different motivations for accepting the mission. This is a ‘serious’ film and in many ways a character study and an exploration of what it means to live under occupation. As one of the characters says “living under occupation, I feel dead already”. The film isn’t a thriller as such, though there are genre elements. Will the men be caught? Do they have the nerve to carry through their mission?
The clip we will see is relevant to Four Lions because it does include comic moments that work in similar ways to scenes in Four Lions. Also, for many British Muslims, the continued Israeli occupation of Palestine is perhaps cause of the single biggest grievance against the US and other western powers who support Israel. Here is how one reviewer described the scene in the extract:
For all the undoubted gravity of the dramatic situation, the director still allows himself moments of unexpected humour. In one scene, Khaled records his last will and testament, AK-47 and chequered kuffiyah held aloft in iconic revolutionary mode, only to have the gravity of the moment repeatedly interrupted by a malfunctioning video camera, his own desire to tell his mother where to buy cheap water filters and assembled militants noisily eating sandwiches in the background. Messy reality collides with the solemn business of myth-making. Ali Jafaar, Sight and Sound, May 2006
Living With The Infidels (UK 2009, Internet series)These 5 minute episodes of a short comedy series on the internet offer a broad comedy about would-be jihadists, supposedly in Bradford, who are easily distracted by the voluptuous young woman upstairs. It was made (very professionally and with high production values) by Aasaf Ainapore, a commercials producer in London, and written with his partner Kira-Anne Pelican. It can be accessed via this website: <http://carloz.newsvine.com/_news/2009/08/20/3175413-living-with-the-infidels-terrorist-sitcom-sparks-fury-can-a-comedy-about-terrorism-ever-be-funny> which lists some of the negative feedback on the show. The show’s own website is: <http://www.livingwiththeinfidels.com/> Clearly this was broadcast before Four Lions was released – but Morris had been researching his material well before he would have known about the series.
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Possible discussion questions for the afternoon session
1. Is Four Lions funny? If so, what kinds of comedy does it explore? If it isn’t funny, what stops you laughing?
2. Were you offended by any aspects of the film – do you think that anyone who has suffered from the consequences of terrorist activity would be offended?
3. Besides the would-be terrorists themselves and their beliefs, what else is satirised in the film (i.e. groups of people, aspects of British life etc.)?
4. Many commentators have focused on one scene in the film – that in which Omar talks to his wife and his son after the accident with Fessal. We’ll look at this scene again – how difficult is it to watch? Do you think that the scene is a ‘mistake’ by Morris or is it key to ‘humanising’ the characters? What does it make the audience think about?
5. One of the important questions in any representation study is about how the filmmakers ‘re-present’ the real world, the one that we live in. What is the approach taken by the director, Chris Morris? Does he try to show believable characters in a ‘real’ location?
6. Are the characters in the film all ‘social types’ or ‘stereotypes’?7. There may be several different reactions to the film in this audience – certainly there will
be across the UK. How do you think that audiences might read the film differently.8. When you look back over your ideas about the film, how would you answer the simple
question: “What is the film about?”
ReferencesStafford, Roy (2010) ‘Getting serious about the comedy film’ in MediaMagazine, April Walters, Ben (2010) Four Lions review in Sight and Sound, June 2010
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