Social context: World cinema

L.O: By the end of the lesson you will understand and be able to start to discuss the social issues which underpin the three films we have watched.

To be able to discuss how the understanding of social context is relevant to understanding the films you have studied.

Exam section World cinema

Specialist Study: Urban Stories - Power, Poverty and Conflict

World cinema Specialist Study: Urban Stories - Power, Poverty and Conflict

• Key idea

• An urban story can be any film in which the city is a defining presence – in which characters’ lives are defined by existence within the urban environment. We will be looking at films that focus on youth cultures within the urban environment.

Starter task • What do the following words mean?

• IDEOLOGY• CULTURE • POWER• REPRESENTATION • URBAN CONFLICT• POVERTY

• How do you think they are relevant to the films you have seen? (pick one film) FILM IDEOLOLOGY CULUTRE POWER REPRESENTATION URBAN

CONFLICT POVERTY

LA HAINE

COG

TSOTSI

10 minutes

•IDEOLOGY – a person’s or a society’s set of beliefs and values, or overall way of looking at the world.

•CULTURE – The way in which forms of human activity and interaction are socially transmitted/The way of life of a particular human community living in a specific place. (gang culture, youth culture)

•POWER – The various forms of control some individuals and groups within society have over other individuals and groups.

•REPRESENTATION – The variety of ways in which individuals and groups are displayed to audiences within the media and other cultural texts.

•URBAN :An urban area is characterised by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. This means that we are looking at poverty in a built up and modern area. In the case of the films, it may be that their environments are trapping them within a cycle of events and behaviours.

•CONFLICT: to fight or contend; do battle.

•POVERTY : The state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor

Past questions

Your answer should be based on a minimum of two films.Compare the attitudes to poverty conveyed in the films you have studied for this topic. [35]Or,Explore how stylistic choices contribute to the representation of the urban experience in the films you have studied for this topic.

What is the importance of cinematography and/or editing in communicating issues of power, poverty and conflict in the films you have studied for this topic? [35]Or, How far do the films you have studied for this topic challenge the audience, generating debate about the worlds they represent? [35]

How far does the impact of the films you have studied for this topic depend on distinctive uses of film techniques? [35]orHow far do the films you have studied for this topic offer an analysis of the social issues they present?

To what extent do you think the films you have studied present either clear or ambiguous messages about the worlds they represent? [35]orWhat is the importance of mise-en-scène and/or sound in creating meaning and generating response in the films you have studied? [35]

Why do we need to know this? Please review your mark schemes! This means that when we

are researching today, we need to show understanding of how the social contexts we

discover are linked to the ideas and themes in the films. You should start to be able to

talk with confidence about them and link them in with

examples from the film.

• For the last two lessons you have made notes on the key areas whilst watching the films: these ideas link into the social context

Today you are going to research the social context of one of the films that you have seen. Split into 3 groups.

You will need to prepare a presentation on the social context of the country the film is from. The aim is to teach the other students in the

class about the social background to the films. We will be having feedback today and then presenting our overall

findings next week.

You will need to use your sheets to help you from the film screenings.

Sam, charlotte, shannon

City of god Favela

Brazil- Rio Poverty Crime

Raph, Amy

Tsotsi The AparthiedSouth Africa

townshipsPovertyCrime HIV

Aisling, Adam

La Haine BanlieuesParis riotsPoverty Crime

You will be using your sheets from the film screening to help you.

Below are some key words

What shall I include • The idea is to create a power point presentation/ or work sheet that can be used to help

other students understand the social context of the films that we have seen.

• What can you include? • Images • You tube videos/ links • Facts about the countries • The key theme areas on the sheets we used this week.

• L.O: FROM YOUR SHEET STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE FILM.

• (if they were to write about the film’s social context- would they show understanding of it like the mark scheme suggests?)

Your ideal outcome: To be able to discuss how the social context is relevant to understanding the key ideas

in the film To be able to identify the idea that social context is the reason that these films are

made- as a social comment on society. To start to be able to discuss key parts of the film and how they link in with the social context.

What shall I include • The idea is to create a power point presentation/ or work sheet that can be used to help

other students understand the social context of the films that we have seen.

• What can you include? • Images • You tube videos/ links • Facts about the countries • The key theme areas on the sheets we used this week.

• L.O: FROM YOUR SHEET STUDENTS SHOULD BE ABLE TO UNDERSTAND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT OF THE FILM.

• (if they were to write about the film’s social context- would they show understanding of it like the mark scheme suggests?)

Your ideal outcome: To be able to discuss how the social context is relevant to understanding the key ideas

in the film To be able to identify the idea that social context is the reason that these films are

made- as a social comment on society. To start to be able to discuss key parts of the film and how they link in with the social context.

Example • http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=e

n-GB&v=k-1Z3DfPcXw

Analysis of the setting and housing situation- ideas of social

status

Awareness of crime and police Poverty statistics

Differences between

wealth and poverty

Plenary

• What have you found out from the research into social context?

• How is this relevant to the film that you have studied?

• What do you each need to do to complete the objective and these sheets to use next week in the lesson?

• Home learning: Ensure that your sheet/ power point hand out is complete to be used next Wednesday to discuss social context of the films we have studied.

Each group will be providing detailed

feedback to the other members in the class- Please have your hand outs printed before the

lesson

• Student led feedback on the social context of the world cinema films

City of God La Haine

TSOTSI

City of God

• Ross Kemp brazil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga5KAsW0m3c

• South africa: • Apartheid: http://

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOA66AOG52M• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlrTtc50PR0 2006 • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGOPVhQ5rhs –

louis theroux south africa

• France

• http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/642-la-haine-and-after-arts-politics-and-the-banlieue

Extra information

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWLeAQ8gnU4

• Ross kemp south africa• http://

www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=k-1Z3DfPcXw

• Brazil drugs • PDF on tsotsi

• City of God depicts the growth of organised crime in the Cidade de Deus (City of God) suburb of Rio de Janeiro, between the end of the '60s and the beginning of the '80s

• Social conditions in Rio:

•Brazil continues to be one of the most economically unequal countries in the world with the top 10 percent of the population earning 50 percent of the national income, while about 34 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.•More than 6,000 people where murdered in Rio in 2007•Census data released in December 2011 by the IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) shows that in 2010, about (6%) of the population lived in slums in Brazil.•The wealthy middle class live in gated communities with security and are the binary opposition of the shanty towns shown in city of god. •The police see it as their job to protect the status quo through control of the underprivileged•Research done in Brazil back in the late 1990s showed that one person dies every half an hour from a gun shot. •Drug trafficking in the city employs over 100,000 people, the same number the city has on its payroll.•Drugs and guns have become an engrained part of Rio’s culture, as has violence to tourists. There are frequent stories in the news about holidaymakers being robbed and beaten.•The rural poor have migrated to the cities but expensive land has meant that they have been forced in the Favelas.

•A Favela is the generally used term for a shanty town in Brazil•In the late 18th century, the first settlements were a place where former slaves with no land ownership and no options for work lived. Over the years, many freed black slaves moved in.•Even before the first "favela" came into being, poor citizens were pushed away from downtown and forced to live in the far suburbs.•Today, there are over 500 favela communities existing within the city of Rio and comprise about a third of the total population. Five-hundred thousand to 1 million are estimated to live on the hillsides•Many consider the favelas the source of Rio's urban problems, citing them for crime, violence, promiscuity, family breakdown and the creation of a culture of poverty. The prevailing view is that the favelas are just a transfer of poverty form the country to the city and are responsible for the negative effects of over-urbanization.•Water can be gained from an outlet. •Only about 50% of the faveladors have access to an in-house toilet facility. From these facilities, sewerage runs through open ditches and eventually ends up at street level, creating an incredible health hazard.•Electricity is scarce and very hard to access. •Rubbish is either incinerated on the hill or brought down to the street where the city is supposed take it away but as they don’t always do that it can build up on street and also become a source for disease.•It is very difficult for people to get jobs •The migrants who live in the favelas are looked down upon. Part of this is due to the fact that the majority of these migrants are black or mulatto. •Over 70% of the faveladors are mixed race or black. This compares to less than a third of the rest of the city

• Historical context:• From 1964- 1985- there was military rule, this meant oppositional parties were

suppressed, civil liberties curbed and a strict media censorship policy was enforced. • The country was in what we would consider a dictatorship. • Cidade de Deus, a housing project for Rio's urban poor, was built by the

government in the 60's as a dumping ground for the city's troubled, violent youth. it became one of the most dangerous spots in the country. It wasn't the state that made the laws ruling the City, it was the teenage drug lords that ruled the turf, using violence and the threat of instant death as their law.

• Riddled with a corrupt police force and an out of control drugs and gun culture, these notorious favelas were governed by their own rules and were a society in their own right. Youth gangs took over the slums during the 1960s and didn't relinquish their stronghold until the mid-1980s. Unfettered by the law, the City of God's youth quickly took up armed robbery, graduating to cocaine dealing in the 1970s, and to mass gang warfare in the early 1980s.

La Haine: social context

• What stereotypes would we associate with French culture and France as a nation?

• Love of art and high culture• Fine cuisine• fashion• Garlic and smelly cheese

• The phrase les banlieues has been increasingly used as a euphemism to describe low-income housing projects in which mainly French of foreign descent reside.

• les banlieues have become, in popular opinion, in the media and amongst France's political élites, a stigmatized space of social fragmentation, racial conflict, (sub)urban decay, criminality and violence.

• The French word banlieue on the other hand evokes an entirely different set of connotations - drugs, crime, delinquency, civil disorder, Islamic fundamentalism and even terrorism - all of them negative. Les banlieues are not full of comfortable houses for an affluent middle class, but are composed, rather, of large high-rise blocks full of the very poorest of France's population

•Racism in France has a longstanding history and remains as a contemporary issue. •The three main characters of La Haine represent three different scapegoats in French society – Jews, Blacks of North African descent, and Muslims. •France’s xenophobia was exemplified by a Jean-Marie Le Pen (leader of the ultrarightest National Front) statement in 1985 that the “invasion” of immigrants had passed the “threshold of tolerance.”(Singer, 1985). •Descendents of these non-European immigrants still find themselves “confronted by racial and cultural discrimination in the world of work, housing, leisure and electoral politics.” (Sarabia, 2004) •“The current tensions result directly from high unemployment and indirectly from the left’s failure for many years to perform its function as the principled enemy of every form of racial discrimination.” (Singer, 2004). •These tensions recently manifested themselves in the form of rioting across French cities in 2005. •The spark to the flaming riots was the death of two Arab boys who ran away from the police and hid in an electrical substation. •La Haine explores these types of issues surrounding racism and relations of cops and suburban citizens.

1. La Haine- After the riot- Keith Reader

• Banlieue has come to be short hand for societal woes in France• Working class areas on the edge of large cities • Built to replace the shanty towns that were originally there • Badly run down and house largely unemployed young population with little hope or vision for the future • Drug dealing, robbery, gang warfare and violence against the police who they hate• A sense of hopelessness and anger • Key themes within the Banlieue films • The importance of the gang or the crowd of friends• The self enclosed way of life on the estates• The anxiety about drugs• Poverty• Ugliness of the setting • Solidarity against the police

The ethnic mixture of the group- Vinz, Siad and Hubert, symbolizes the idea of the importance of solidarity against the police

The banlieue is presented as a desert, with no feeling of public space (consider how the police move them on, or they are filmed by the TV cameras) and precisous little private space- consider the cramped conditions of the flats that they live in. The characters are ejected from nearly every place they go in the film

Some key questions to consider with the film

• What cultural stereotypes are being adhered to or subverted?

• How does the film represent France and French culture?

• Do the characters appear to be influenced by other cultures? Do they identify with French culture?

• What does the opening and the film as a whole say about multiculturalism in France?

Historical context of the film.• Kassovitz has said that the idea came to him when a young Zairian, Makome

M'Bowole was shot in 1993. He was killed at point blank range while in police custody and handcuffed to a radiator. The officer was reported to have been angered by Makomé's words, and had been threatening him when the gun went off accidentally.

• Kassovitz wanted the film to be ‘wake up call’ to France about the problems of the banlieues slums.

• He also wanted to express the feelings of ‘marginalisation’ many immigrant groups felt as victims of social deprivation in a country that had ignored them for a long time.

• In addition France was in the middle of period when the extreme ‘far right’ party Front National (France’s equivalent of the BNP) where gaining support. This is shown in the scene involving the skinhead.

TSOTSI:points from the PDF • The evidence of poverty and affluence – consider the logo on Pumla• Dube’s shopping bag that Tsotsi steals to carry the baby off in – ‘Expect• More’.• • The evidence of pollution.• • The evidence that South Africa’s capital Johannesburg and its• townships are lively, energetic, bustling places.• • The prominence of crime and violence and the response of the police to• crime and criminals – however young.• • The evidence of disease – particularly HIV/Aids (clue: look out for• posters and also Tsotsi’s flashback memories of his mother)• • Evidence of mixed communities or highly segregated communities• (apart from the one white policeman – why is there so little evidence of• white people in this film – crossing Tsotsi’s path?)• • The evidence of strong cultural/artistic forces at work in the townships• (clue: consider the language, music and even the colourful fabrics and• hanging glass and metal mobiles that Miriam produces in her home to• help make ends meet.)