A-Level Film Studies - Daniel Kallin

THE TRUTH BEHIND SECRETS & LIES A class about class in Mike Leigh's Palme D'or winning 1996 film Social realism in cinema has always been about the nature of identity from Ozu’s aging grandparents in Tokyo Story ¸ to Ray’s coming-of-age protagonist  in his Apu trilogy, to the Italian Neorealism of De Sica and Rossellini, all of whom inspired Mike Leigh directly, and whose influences can be seen across Secrets & Lies. Part of this sense of identity is through the character/s’s relationship with their surrounding, and that is most often expressed through issues of class, gender, and race. Within the UK in the 1990s; class, gender, and race, were all being re-evaluated  within society in Britain’s post-war, post-Thatcher, pre-Labour phase where anything could happen politically and socially. Within Secrets & Lies, Leigh explores how these ideas started to be explored as separate entities , despite being of equal importance and in equal need of attention. Feminism wa...

  The Gunfighter (Kissack, 2014) Classic western tropes - instantly recognisable but SUBVERTS TROPE with a humerous voicover which can be heard by everybody - so can the music - meta-humour ballet of death Loves Westerns - wanted to create a parody but also critical of how similar they all are in plot, characters and structure Contemporary society - too much honesty leads to conflict  Conflict between characters - they all shoot each other and they have all done things to wrong each other Subverts the typical narrative by having a revealing narrator - puts humour in a typically serious situation Swimmer (Ramsay, 2012) Black and white, camera drifts across the water like a boat, stays close to the floor to mimic the swimmer's eyes - not getting much information but still getting a little Uses nature as a transitional device - frames the humans as outsider Music is ethereal and magical, hinting at a deeper and more fantastical world around the swimmer High Maintenance  (Van...

  A seventeen year-old boy wakes up on a Monday morning. To start his bed is in an all-white room but as his alarm goes off he awakes in an ordinary bedroom. There is a montage of his morning routine as he brushes his teeth, makes and eats breakfast and ties his shoes before leaving the house. He hasn't noticed anything unusual yet. When he gets on the bus to go to school he sits in his usual seat right in the middle of the back. As he sits there, somebody walks towards him and sits on top of him. As he protests and asks them to get off him, they appear to be unaware that he is even there. This is the first sign that he is invisible. He blinks three times and now he is walking through the front gates of school. As he goes to sit down in his first lesson of the day, none of the students nor the teacher notices he is there. Whenever anyone speaks, animal noises come out of their mouth. He blinks three times. Now he is with his friends and they too don't notice him. He begins to p...