Part II: the movies in the age of mass media

История американского кино

 

 

Учебно-методическое пособие по английскому языку для студентов 2 курса факультета творческих экранных профессий

Часть II

 

 

Санкт-Петербург

 

Составитель: старший преподаватель кафедры иностранных языков Голубева С.Л.

Рецензент: кандидат педагогических наук, доцент кафедры иностранных языков Мирошникова Н.Н.

 

 

Рекомендовано к изданию в качестве учебно-методического пособия для студентов II курса ФЭИ всех специальностей кафедрой иностранных языков Санкт-Петербургского Государственного Университета Кино и Телевидения.

Протокол № заседания кафедры от.

 

 

Предлагаемое учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для устной и письменной практики в обучении студентов по программам ESP. Оно представляет собой тексты по истории американского кино из книги американского писателя Роберта Скляра ‘Movie-made America’, адаптированные для студентов II курса ФТЭП. Пособие также содержит послетекстовые лексическо-грамматические упражнения и глоссарий по специализированной тематике.

 

 

PART II: THE MOVIES IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA

EXERCISES

I. Match the words with their definitions and translate them into Russian.

1. vague   2. humble   3. nurture   4. tenement   5. teeming   6. proximity   7. craft   8. surpass   9. notorious   10. temptation   11. matinee

a. full of people, animals etc. that are all moving around b. large building divided into apartments, especially in the poorer areas of a city c. unclear because someone does not give enough detailed information or does not say exactly what they mean d. nearness in distance or time e. to help a plan, idea, feeling etc. to develop f. not considering yourself or your ideas to be as important as other people's synonym modest g. famous or well-known for something bad h. a performance of a play or film in the afternoon i. a job or activity in which you make things with your hands, and that you usually need skill to do j. to be even better or greater than someone or something else k. a strong desire to have or do something even though you know you should not

 

II. Phrasal Verbs

a) Exchange the bald-typed phrasal verbs into the expressions with the close meaning from the box. Put the verbs into the appropriate grammar

Tense.

to establish to be valuable to head for to control wipe accepted

The company was set up just after the war.

His promises don't count for much.

I think it's time we made for home.

The company was taken over by Sony in 1989.

He brushed the tears off his eyes.

She took up their offer of rent-free accommodation

 

b) Find these phrasal verbs in the text. Use them to make up your own sentences.

III. Word Forms

a) Often the same base can be used in verb, noun, adjective and adverb form. Complete the following chart with the missing forms

Verb	Noun	Adjective	Adverb
accept	acceptance	acceptable unacceptable	acceptably unacceptably
	craftswoman craftsmanship
		sumptuous
	clamour
	сreator creation
		versatile
		humble

b) Complete each sentence with the correct verb, noun, or adjective

Form of the words in the chart above. Use one form of each word

Base, and do not repeat any words.

1) Agatha Christie _______the character Hercule Poirot.

2) We had a lot of applicants for the job but only a few of them were________.

3) The station was filled with the _______of shouting voices and movement.

4) Meryl Streep is a wonderfully _______actress.

5) Meals are served in the intimate restaurant and include a_______ buffet breakfast.

6) Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford were all men of _______origins and no inherited wealth.

7) The musician spends years perfecting his _______.

IV. Grammar: Passive Voice

a) Read chapters 5 and 6 again, find the passive form of the following verbs and define their tenses.

nurture; find; maintain; bear; make; accept; consider; treat; require; hail; rank; take; give;

b) Rewrite the following sentences in the passive as in the example

1. Police use trained dogs to find drugs. Trained dogs are used by the police to find drugs.

2. Her parents made her clean her room.

3. They will have finished the work by tonight.

4. Who discovered America?

5. Who did they give the prize to?

6. They clean the rooms daily.

7. The snow will have covered the mountains by Christmas.

8. Hijackers were holding the plane passengers hostage.

9. Who is going to feed your dog?

10. Someone has made a complaint.

CHAOS, MAGIC, PHYSICAL GENIUS AND THE ART OF SILENT

COMEDY

The American comic tradition and American movies were made for each other.

Together they projected their grotesque exaggeration, their extravagance, violence and sexual license, on a screen as large as the world.

The four films advertised in Keystone’s first announcement ran the gamut of subject matter Sennett was to use in silent comedy: the buffoonery of plain folks (Cohen Collects a Debt); girl in bathing suit (The Water Nymph); the incompetent cop (Riley and Schultze); sexual competition (The New Neighbor). Ridicule the poor, ridicule the powerful, ridicule romance, ridicule the prevailing standards of propriety in female dress; Sennett’s comic aggression made its debut cutting a wider swath through society and its values than any previous expression of the comic tradition in America, with the single exception of that nineteenth-century masterpiece of comic prose, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Indeed, Sennett’s greatest debt for his particular slapstick style was probably to Griffith. From Griffith he learned, as he wrote, to “cut our pictures sharply... and we did get ‘pace’ into them.”

Sennett made comedies under the Keystone trademark for five years, distributing first through Mutual and then as part of Harry Aitken’s Triangle organization.

The remarkable flowering of silent-movie comedy in the 1920s makes it difficult to assess Sennett’s achievement fairly. Chaplin and Keaton relied on grace, precision, nuance, gesture and surprise in their famous comedies, while Sennett’s style was rough, blunt, gross, broad and obvious.

In a narrow sense, Charlie Chaplin was another Sennett legacy. The Keystone producer “discovered” Chaplin, hired him, stimulated the development of his comic style during their struggles over conflicting philosophies of humor, and over the span of a year featured him in thirty-five films, almost precisely half of Chaplin’s total film performances during the silent era.

When one understands that Chaplin’s consciousness was English–and working-class English–before it was American, some essential elements of his comic repertoire begin to fall into place. No comedian before or after him has spent more energy depicting people in their working lives: his first motion picture was the prophetically titled Making a Living. Chaplin’s class settings differ visibly from Sennett’s. Though the Keystone comedians were lowlife characters with no visible, or legal, sources of income, their behavior marks them as belonging within the great middle range of the American class system, even if often at the lower end. In the comedies Chaplin made at Keystone and later, the characters were concentrated at the extreme ends of the social scale more easily encompassed by English than by American ideology, the extremes of wealth and more often of poverty.

After his active first year of work with Keystone in 1914, Chaplin directed and acted in fourteen films for Essanay in 1915; twelve for Mutural in 1916-1917; eight for First National between 1918 and 1922, including one feature, The Kid (1921); and two for United Artists distribution, The Gold Rush (1925) and The Circus (1928).

In December 1913 Chaplin became a Keystone comic.

But Chaplin already had his own ideas about making people laugh. Dressed for his movie debut in the frock coat, top hat, monocle and walrus mustache of his stage act, from his first moment on the screen in Making a Living he moved more slowly, subtly and gracefully than anyone yet seen under the Keystone trademark.

In oversize shoes, baggy pants, tight coat, bowler hat, wearing a mustache and sporting a cane, the Tramp appeared in Chaplin’s second Keystone picture, Kid Auto Races at Venice. Chaplin did not, of course, invent the figure; among its many appearances in popular comic media, the tramp was a familiar type in British, French and Italian film comedies at the time. But Chaplin gives himself credit for seeing more in the figure than anyone had yet realized. “You know this fellow is many-sided,” he told Sennett, “a tramp, a gentleman, a poet, a dreamer, a lonely fellow, always hopeful of romance and adventure. He would have you believe he is a scientist, a musician, a duke, a polo player.”

During this period at Essanay, Chaplin introduced yet another form of magical transformation, extended from the Tramp to the animate and inanimate world. Material objects and even living things become magically adaptable in his hands. The technique was first demonstrated in His Night Out, when Charlie, a drunk, tries to get water out of a telephone receiver and shines his shoes with his toothbrush and paste. Later, in The Tramp, unable to figure out how to milk a cow, he works its tail like a pump and comes back with a full bucket; in A Woman, impersonating a woman, he sits down on a feather hat, the hat pins stick in his pants and he jumps around looking like a rooster; in Work he turns a lampshade into a skirt for a nude statuette and sets it dancing; and in the famous scene in The Gold Rush, he cooks and eats his boots, devouring the shoelaces as if they were spaghetti.

Chaplin’s magical transformation of creatures and things was carried out entirely by the human imagination and through human movement, assisted by no camera manipulation or laboratory processing: it lifted cinema fantasy for the first time beyond the realm of trick photography.

His remarkable period of concentrated productivity reached its climax at Mutual, particularly in two films, Easy Street and The Immigrant (both 1917), which serve as both tributes and farewells to the symbiotic relationship between the early movies and their working-class audience.

 

EXERCISES

III. Word Forms

a) Complete the following chart with the missing forms: verb, noun, adjective and adverb.

Verb	Noun	Adjective	Adverb
	extravagance
	ridicule ridiculousness
			precisely
adapt
attain
		blunt
		conspiratorial

 

b) Complete each sentence with the correct verb, noun, or adjective

IV. Phrasal Verbs

a) Exchange the bald-typed phrasal verbs into the expressions with the close meaning from the box. Put the verbs into the appropriate grammar

Tense.

increase understand separate return close perform continue convert

1. Later, in The Tramp, unable to figure out how to milk a cow, he works its tail like a pump and comes back with a full bucket

2. In Work he turn s a lampshade into a skirt for a nude statuette and sets it dancing

3. Chaplin’s magical transformation of creatures and things was carried out entirely by the human imagination and through human movement

4. Theatre attendance was up in 1930 over 1929, and theatre corporations actually created higher profits that year.

5. Nearly a third of all theatres were shut down.

6. The code went on to prohibit a vast range of human expression

7. The code cut the movies off from many of the most important moral and social themes of the contemporary world.

 

b) Use these phrasal verbs to make up your own sentences.

APPENDIX

This example of glossary contains special terms for Applied Art students.

The definitions are taken from:

1. Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. 2000. Pearson Education Ltd. Longman.

2. Longman Exams Dictionary.2006. Pearson Education Ltd. Longman.

3. Word Net 2006 Princeton University.

GLOSSARY

 

adaptable	able to change in order to be successful in new and different situations
abhor	to hate a kind of behaviour or way of thinking, especially because you think it is morally wrong
acquisition	1. the process by which you gain knowledge or learn a skill 2. the act of getting land, power, money etc. 3. something that you have obtained by buying it or being given it
affiliate	to join or become connected with a larger group or organization
animate	living; opposite inanimate
aspirant	someone who hopes to get a position of importance or honour
attain	to succeed in achieving something after trying for a long time
bankruptcy	the state of being unable to pay your debts
belabor	1 belabour the point: formal to keep emphasizing a fact or idea in a way that is annoying 2 old-fashioned to hit someone or something hard
blunt	1. not sharp or pointed 2. a heavy object that is used to hit someone 3 a method of doing something that does not work very well because it has a lot of other effects which you do not want
bribe	to illegally give someone, especially a public official, money or a gift in order to persuade them to do something for you
buffoon	someone who does silly amusing things
bygone	a period of time in the past
captivating	very attractive and interesting, in a way that holds your attention
carpenter	someone whose job is making and repairing wooden objects
clamoure	to demand something loudly
confound	1. to confuse and surprise people by being unexpected 2. to defeat an enemy, plan etc.
consciousness	1. the condition of being awake and able to understand what is happening around you 2. your mind and your thoughts
conspiracy	a secret plan made by two or more people to do something that is harmful or illegal
craft	a job or activity in which you make things with your hands, and that you usually need skill to do
debut	the first public appearance of an entertainer, sports player etc. or of something new and important
disarray	the state of being untidy or not organized
discontent	a feeling of being unhappy and not satisfied with the situation you are in
disdain	a complete lack of respect that you show for someone or something because you think they are not important or good enough
double-breasted	double-breasted suits, a double-breasted jacket, coat etc. has two sets of buttons
encompass	to include a wide range of ideas, subjects, etc.
enmeshed	very involved in an unpleasant or complicated situation
essential	extremely important and necessary
estimate	to try to judge the value, size, speed, cost etc of something, without calculating it exactly
exaggeration	a statement or way of saying something that makes something seem better, larger etc. than it really
extravagance	1. spending or costing a lot of money, especially more than is necessary or more than you can afford 2. very impressive because of being very expensive, beautiful
extramarital	an extramarital sexual relationship is one that a married person has with a person who is not their husband or wife
fervor	very strong belief or feeling:
forge	to develop something new, especially a strong relationship with other people, groups, or countries synonym
folk	1. Especially American English people who live in a particular area or do a particular kind of work 2. used when talking to a group of people in a friendly way
gamut	the complete range of possibilities
gross	to gain an amount as a total profit, or earn it as a total amount, before tax has been taken away
grotesque	1. unpleasant, shocking, and offensive 2. extremely ugly in a strange or unnatural way
hail	1. to describe someone or something as being very good 2. to call to someone in order to greet them or try to attract their attention
humble	not considering yourself or your ideas to be as important as other people's synonym modest; opposite proud;
irrecoverable	something that is irrecoverable is lost or has gone and you cannot get it back
jurisdiction	the right to use an official power to make legal decisions, or the area where this right exists
legacy	something that happens or exists as a result of things that happened at an earlier time
license	to give official permission for someone to do or produce something, or for an activity to take place
loom	1. to appear as a large unclear shape, especially in a threatening way 2. if a problem or difficulty looms, it is likely to happen very soon
matinee	a performance of a play or film in the afternoon
matinee idol	an actor who is very popular with women
merge	merge with to combine, or to join things together to form one thing
mogul	a businessman or businesswoman who has great power and influence in a particular industry
notorious	famous or well-known for something bad
nurture	to help a plan, idea, feeling etc. to develop
odium	odium a strong feeling of hatred that a lot of people have for someone because of something they have done
persuasive	able to make other people believe something or do what you ask
plead	1. to ask for something that you want very much, in a sincere and emotional way 2. to state in a court of law whether or not you are guilty of a crime
precision	the quality of being very exact or correct
propriety	1. correctness of social or moral behavior 2. the proprieties especially British English the accepted rules of correct social behaviour
proximity	nearness in distance or time
purview	within/outside the purview of somebody/something formal within or outside the limits of someone's job, activity, or knowledge
quizzical	a quizzical expression is one that shows that you do not understand something and perhaps think it is slightly amusing
rags-to-riches	a rags-to-riches story is about someone who becomes very rich after starting life very poor
realm	a general area of knowledge, activity, or thought
rebuke	to speak to someone severely about something they have done wrong
recreate	to make something from the past exist again in a new form or be experienced again
restrain	to stop someone from doing something, often by using physical force
retain	1. to keep something or continue to have something 2. to remember information
ridicule	unkind laughter or remarks that are intended to make someone or something seem stupid
rooster	a male chicken synonym cock
royalty	a payment made to the writer of a book or piece of music depending on how many books etc. are sold, or to someone whose idea, invention etc. is used by someone else to make money
salacious	showing too much interest in sex
slapstick	humorous acting in which the performers fall over, throw things at each other etc.
span	a period of time between two dates or events
subpoena	a written order to come to a court of law and be a witness
subvert	to destroy someone's beliefs or loyalty
sumptuous	very impressive and expensive
supple	someone who is supple bends and moves easily and gracefully
surpass	to be even better or greater than someone or something else
swath	1. a long thin area of something, especially land 2. cut a swathe through something to destroy a large amount or part of something
sway	1. to move slowly from one side to another 2. to influence someone so that they change their opinion
teeming	full of people, animals etc. that are all moving around
temptation	a strong desire to have or do something even though you know you should not
tenement	tenement a large building divided into apartments, especially in the poorer areas of a city
tramp	someone who has no home or job and moves from place to place, often asking for food or money
unabated	continuing without becoming any weaker or less violent
up-and-coming	likely to become successful or popular
vague	unclear because someone does not give enough detailed information or does not say exactly what they mean
vault	1 a room with thick walls and a strong door where money, jewels etc. are kept to prevent them from being stolen or damaged 2 a room where people from the same family are buried, often under the floor of a church
versatile	someone who is versatile has many different skills
vilify	to say or write bad things about someone or something
violence	1. behaviour that is intended to hurt other people physically 2. literary an angry way of speaking or reacting
walrus	a large sea animal with two long tusks (=things like teeth) coming down from the sides of its mouth

 

REFERENCES

 

Harmer J. 2001.The Practice of English Language Teaching. Oxford: Longman.

Cook G. 2007. Unmarked Improvement: values, facts, and first languages.

Mattioli G. 2004. On Native Language Intrusions and Making Do with Words: Linguistically Homogeneous

Robert Sklar 1976. Movie-Made America. A Cultural History of American Movies.

Vintage Books/A Division of Random House/New York. USA.

Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture. 2000. Pearson Education Ltd. Longman.

Longman Exams Dictionary.2006. Pearson Education Ltd. Longman.

Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners.2002. Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2002

American Heritage Dictionary 2006. Houghton Mifflin Company.

Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. 2008.

Dictionary. com Unabridged Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dict.

Word Net 2006 Princeton University.

Free NLP Language EBook www.saladltd.co.uk

Thesaurus @ 2003-2008 Princeton University, Farlex Inc.

 

 

История американского кино

 

 

Учебно-методическое пособие по английскому языку для студентов 2 курса факультета творческих экранных профессий

Часть II

 

 

Санкт-Петербург

 

Составитель: старший преподаватель кафедры иностранных языков Голубева С.Л.

Рецензент: кандидат педагогических наук, доцент кафедры иностранных языков Мирошникова Н.Н.

 

 

Рекомендовано к изданию в качестве учебно-методического пособия для студентов II курса ФЭИ всех специальностей кафедрой иностранных языков Санкт-Петербургского Государственного Университета Кино и Телевидения.

Протокол № заседания кафедры от.

 

 

Предлагаемое учебно-методическое пособие предназначено для устной и письменной практики в обучении студентов по программам ESP. Оно представляет собой тексты по истории американского кино из книги американского писателя Роберта Скляра ‘Movie-made America’, адаптированные для студентов II курса ФТЭП. Пособие также содержит послетекстовые лексическо-грамматические упражнения и глоссарий по специализированной тематике.

 

 

PART II: THE MOVIES IN THE AGE OF MASS MEDIA