Pirate analysis · Wed Nov 29, 08:19 by Eleri Straker
Today I was showing my year 10 how to write a film review and as my source material, I used reviews of the latest Pirates of the Caribbean film from two different film magazines. My intention was to show them two reviews with very different opinions of the same film. I had introduced them to the notion of an audience, that each review was aimed, and consequently written in differing styles for different readers.
They were highly amused by the cleverly witty commentary from the niche market magazine SFX (whose views they approved of) and slightly irritated by the views presented in Empire that suggested that the film was not as brilliant as they thought it was. Of course, whether or not they agreed with the views expressed in the reviews was not the issue. They soon twigged that it was the language that made the articles interesting. Or, not so much the language as the way language was used. Being a very bright class, they quickly spotted the piratical metaphors used in the SFX review. But one boy, watching me struggle with a particularly long and convoluted sentence in the Empire review, suggested that perhaps I was meant to find it difficult. He argued that as the magazine editor would surely have improved on the awful sentence that I’d just read out…it might have been deliberately bad. He argued that it was possible therefore that, as the article said that the film was long and convoluted and difficult to follow, that the sentence was a metaphor for the film…
After a moment to do a double take at the insight of his comment, I had to agree that he was probably right since no professional magazine would allow such a badly written article…would they? But even if they did, I was hugely impressed that a fourteen-year-old could analyse language so well.
Earlier that day, coincidentally, I was teaching a year 12 media class about film analysis (the other string to my bow) and using an extract from the same Pirates film. One or two students understood the director’s techniques pretty quickly and appreciated the clever use of light and sound… whereas others, one rather arrogant boy in particular, seem to believe that any film made before 2005 isn’t worth the celluloid it’s printed on! I keep having to repeat that the study of film technique isn’t the place for value judgements, yet every lesson, no matter what film I produce for analysis, someone, usually the same boy, mutters, “This film’s really crap.” It’s as if he can’t get his head around the notion that the fact that he doesn’t like a particular film is totally irrelevant when it comes to analysis. Unless he grows out of this habit he will fail this particular module.
So listening to my much younger English student’s analysis of the language techniques used in the Empire article some two hours later made me smile…
Perhaps I should suggest that my sixth form media class sits in on my year 10s, they might learn something useful… like humility.
