5+B+2011+-+2012

**NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2011** **OLIVER TWIST**

**coming soon...**

**You can find almost everything on line, included films or part of them.** **Here's the first part of the film based on "OLIVER TWIST" by Dickens** **Watch it and answer the questions below:**

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**Who is the girl ?** **What's the matter with her?** **Where is she going? Why?** **What type of place is it? Describe it.** **What is the girl wearing around her neck?** **Does it arouse anybody's curiosity? Why?**   *******  <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">**Ten years have passed and baby Oliver's life is quite hard... Describe what happens inside the workhouse** <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">**Focus on the meal: what does Oliver do when he finishes his soup?** <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">**How does**

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<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">Watch this sequence: this is a nice introduction to our 2nd Module (the Victorian Age) <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">**//The Young Victoria//** is a romantic dramatization of some of the events preceding and following the coronation of Queen Victoria, focusing on her early reign and romance with Prince Albert in the 1830s. The film is very recent as it was made in 2009.

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">Who was Queen Victoria? What type of woman was she? Well, the film provides you with plenty of information (it's a good film, with a wonderful Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria), but remember: a film is just a film... If you want to know more about a woman, about a queen whose reign lasted for about 60 years, you will have to rely on other sources... To begin with go to this website:

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<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">Throughout her long reign, Victoria symbolized the increasing power and prestige of the British Empire, but also epitomized the dignity and family values of the monarchy. <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #000000; display: block; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">However, groundbreaking studies by Steven Marcus, //The Other Victorians// (1966), and Ronald Pearsall, //The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality// (1969), have emphasized the schizophrenic quality of the age, pointing out the sordid realities behind the façade of respectability, especially the vices of prostitution, pornography, “perversion,” and homosexuality, all of them regarded as crimes. <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">Queen Victoria was admired and loved by British people because she introduced a period of stability to Britain, industrialisation and Imperialism. The way of life changed completely: a way based on agriculture to a modern urban economy based on trade and industry. Many important inventions (ie the telegraph, railways, photography, the sewing machine, etc) took place in XIXth century England. But it was also a period of social distress, a period in which workers began to join in associations, which are called trade unions. <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">It was a complex and contradictory era: it was the age of progress, stability, great social reforms, but especially in its early period it was also charactersised by poverty, labour exploitation (children and women), injustice and social unrest. The conditions of the lower classes were really appalling: lack of sanitation, unhealthy houses, alcholism, made life miserable as it is portayed in Dickens's novels.

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">**OCTOBER 2011**

<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">A quick check of the Internet Movie Database (a useful but dangerously addictive resource) offers 66 titles under //Frankenstein//, plus assorted TV adaptations... So it was difficult to make a choice but in the end I opted for <span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">//**Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein'**//**(1994)** ===<span style="color: #008000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 120%;">It's Kenneth Branagh's "modern" take on the novel, with a stronger Elizabeth, a superb interpretation of the Creature (Robert De Niro), including a proper conversation on the sea of ice, and the presence of Walton, the narrator. That's for Saturday 28th. I hope you will enjoy it. ===



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 * <span style="color: #800000; font-family: 'Comic Sans MS',cursive; font-size: 140%;">SEPTEMBER 2011 **