Film English (ALE116)

Lectured by 劉芳礽
 Course Description
This course aims to expand students’ knowledge and to
develop their critical thinking skills in film.
Genres, styles and periods in the film history will be
covered to introduce the development of this visual art.
Each weekly session therefore is packed with clips from
selected European, American and Asian cinemas to
provide students a broad understanding of film and its
wider cultural context, as well as an enhanced
appreciation of film in general.
 Evaluation
I. In-Class Performance 20%: Student’s responses to
lectures, discussions and questions.
II. Academic Activities 25%: personal responses and
group discussions to the assigned questions, assigned
writing (uploaded to e-learning before due date)
III. Mid-term project 25%
IV. Final project 30%
 Textbooks (tentative)
I. Film Text：
1. Selected Shorts by the Lumière Brothers
2. Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (1902)
3. Edwin S. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery (1903)
4. Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925)
5. Terence Fisher’s Dracula (1958)
6. Feng-Pan Yao’s All in the Dim Cold Night (1974)
7. Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960)
8. Huang Hsin-yao’s The Great Buddha+ (2017)
B. Novel Excerpts：
1. Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897)
2. Selected Scripts of Psycho
參考書籍
1. 影片英文字幕閱讀: The Internet Movie Script Database
http://www.imsdb.com/
2. Film English by Kieran Donaghy http://film-english.com/
3. Mascelli, Joseph V. The Five “C”s of Cinematography. Silman-
James Press, 1998.
4. Giannetti, Loius. Understanding Movies. 13th edition. Pearson,
2013.
5. Sparknotes http://www.sparknotes.com/
 Animation on Food I

Title: Coca-Cola Ad
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvsTjZko2gw
Grandpa: Living a Healthy Lifestyle (2014)
1. What is compared? What is the point of this
comparison?
2. What messages do you get from this advertisement?
 Animation on Food II

Title: Food (2014)

Director: Siqi Song
Genre: Animation, Short
Link: http://songsiqi.com/food/
1. How many kinds of food in Food? What are they?
2. Please categorize these foods.
3. What messages are conveyed by these foods?
4. In your opinion, why does the director make
these foods speak for themselves?
 Synopsis
 FOOD is an animated documentary that features interviews with
a wide variety of eaters from around the world. Ranging from
vegetarians, vegans, pescetarians to some seriously dedicated
carnivores, the conversation raises many substantial issues about
the environment and modern life. By pairing real interviews with
stop-motion animation, the film presents a group of “edible
characters” discussing themselves.

 Keywords: vegetarians, vegans, pescetarians,

 carnivores, edible
More shorts
The Big Swallow (1901) by James Williams
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pEEMqr6lyg

1. What messages are conveyed by this short?

2. How does the camera move and what effect is
achieved by this movement ?
 Food (2014)
Dir. Siqi Song

Animation, Short: http://songsiqi.com/food/

1. How many kinds of food in Food? What are they?
2. Please categorize these foods.
3. What messages are conveyed by these foods?
4. In your opinion, why does the director make these foods speak for themselves?

Sausage: Um~ I love hot dogs. I love my soul food. They just like make me happy.

Burger: I like all meat. Meat on the land. Meat in the air. Meat in the sea. I especially
like meat from the sea. Meat comes from like different kinds of places and it’s all
delicious.

Chicken: I like everything made with eggplant. I would like marry eggplant if I was a
person. I would date eggplant and we would make beautiful eggplant babies, but um
haha…….

Burger: I just… I just like dog understands people, food don’t eat cheese burgers.
What’s the point of living? They’re delicious.

Cookie (male): About 15 years ago, we first became vegetarians um… because of a
TV program, wasn’t it?
Cookie (female): Yes, something about chickens.

Cookie (male): Yea. It was a TV program showing about the conditions of factory
farmed chickens in an…we were… after watching the program, okay… we don’t want
anything to do with that.
Cookie (female): Don’t want to hurt them.

Burger: It’s like kids are forced to eat vegetables, right? They don’t want to, they’re
disgusting. And like you had to force them to do it. But you don’t have to force them
to eat, like cheese burger. Cheese burger’s delicious.

Chicken: I watch the film called The Vegetated and they had the footage of animals in
slaughter houses. Chicken’s getting their beaks sheared off. I…it’s just like I don’t
want to go back.
Burger: Like what if you even eat, if you do not eat any meat.

Crab: I traveled through Africa last summer. And if I didn’t eat meat, I would not
eaten…. A guy had to eat for T bone and I had to eat a monkey. I had to eat a camel. I
had to eat gazelle. You know…like sometimes you don’t have a choice.

Sliced strawberries: I think it’s true we design this culture, this modern world. Well,
we live in cities and we can do everything we want. And we can be a lawyer, we can
be a designer, we can be whatever we want. And those craziness jobs take out all of
our time. And we don’t have time to eat, we don’t have to time to shop. We don’t
have to time to go out and hunt animals and go out and grow vegetables. And we
don’t have the space to grow vegetables or to raise animals.

Burger: I think maybe healthy is overrated. Um…I think quality of life had to be
looked like that. So I would rather live a shorter better life than a longer miserable
life eating vegetables. Right?

Sausage: I think it’s important that we’re caring about more than just ourselves. For
me, a place to start was um my food choices.