Film Extracts

Film clips to inspire and sharpen the desire to watch

We’re in class, and we’re having a debate before filming our film essai, the final task in this year’s rules of the games that allows us to explore all that we’ve learnt together in one short film.  We’ve got the structure of the film outlined:  Antoine, a student of class CM2, is summoned to the headmaster’s office after a playground scrap.  Whilst waiting he accidentally finds a list of names showing who is moving up to secondary school and notices his name, but not that of his best friend Hichem. 

We discuss our choices of shot and mis en scene, guided by the year’s theme – How and why do you show something, or not show and hide something? Inspired by the film clips seen in class and by the films seen in the cinema, propositions and ideas ring out from the group around the room. Antoine should never smile, should never talk, Cassandra suggests, like the character of Masao in Takeshi Katano’s Kikujiro, he suffers and must keep his secret safe, without ever revealing it. Hugo adds that we could show the divide between the two characters by showing Hichem’s reflection in the window, when Antoine is in the foreground of the shot, like in An Affair to Remember. Rosellini’s Fear inspires the use of off screen sound for the return of the school jotters’ sequence, and Nicholas Ray’s They live by Night the choice of hiding the violence in the playground fight sequence.

François Minadakis
Teacher, France.

 

François Minadakis

François Minadakis with two pupils of Gabriel Péri Primary School (Saint-Martin-d'Hères) lduring « A nous le cinéma ! » meetings in 2017.