Movie Lessons

I have always taught All Quiet on the Western Front in such a way that we ended up finishing on or near the holidays.  Originally, I used to show the movie Duck Soup - for which the movie questions can also be found here.  Then about six years ago - we started watching Grande Illlusion.  While I do miss the Marx Brothers (many students have a party during break and watch it together for extra credit) - there is something almost perfect about this movie by Jean Renoir - and the Holiday setting towards the end of the film also works quite well. 

When I teach the Romantics, I use this wonderful, underrated movie as a bridge between the Enlightenment (Age of Reason) and the Romantic Era.  When you see the movie, it almost feels at though that was the director's intention: the Romantic and imaginative Baron versus the forces of reason and reality that battle, and nearly kill him.  There are movie questions for three days of viewing in class, as well as an extra credit assignment involving multiple artistic depictions of the same scene from the story of Baron Munchausen, that asks students to comment on those depictions and their relationship to "imagination."  Read more »

This movie, The Sweet Hereafter, based on an excellent book -- ties much of what I do in my class during the year together.  It also uses a central metaphor of "The Pied Piper of Hamlin," to bring together many of its own themes.  These questions are different than most of the ones found on this site -- they are more open ended and are intended to have the students take notes that will then be put together after the film is finished.

I was lucky enough to see this film at its premeire at an NCTE meeting that was held in Chicago.  Al Pacino was there - and he was introduced by the late Chicago film critic Gene Siskel.  The standing ovation that he received at the end of the movie - was well deserved and I think that my students' (and my own) appreciation for Looking for Richard has just grown in the following years.  It really does encapsulate the ideas of the Folger Library and Peggy O'Brien in a wonderful, engaging way.  It is also a great movie to show students before they put on their own Shakespeare scenes - to give them an idea of coming to an understanding of the text - through performance.  I have listed this under Macbeth as we show this movie when students are first getting together to practice their Macbeth scenes.

This is the second part of the Il Postino movie questioins - and I have tried to revise them to reflect what we have been studying throughout the year - but to also bring in a higher level of critical thinking as well.  There is so much in this movie that reflects what we do during the year: literally - we precede the viewing of the film with Pablo Neruda - and before that Dante.  But perhaps most importantly, the ideas of metaphors to explain what we find incomprehensible in our lives.  Also the fact that we are surrounded by a beauty that we don't often even realize is there (think "A Christmas Memory") and all we have to do is look around us.

After we finished reading In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway, I realized this year that we needed a movie to show along with it.  I narrowed it down to 4 films and finally decided on Robert Altman's Nashville.  This film about the intertwining lives of characters during a week or so in Nashville, Tennessee - fits in perfectly with Hemingway's collection of like-wise intertwined stories and characters.  The more we watched, the more the students a