This was exciting for me, not least because it tipped the gender balance of students in the room to about 50:50! However, it threw up it's own challenges because I didn't know the Costume students at all. They had been taught by a colleague during the first term, whereas I had been teaching the film students from day one.
The first afternoon session was a bit of an unknown. I had to work out what these students were interested in, find out what makes them tick, and how to get their attention on topic. I have to say they were really great! Although they started out a little quietly, they soon engaged with some of the ideas under discussion, and we had critical discourse about their interests and what they expected from the module. The Film students were much more relaxed and open, and very much owned the space, so I decided that this would need to be addressed over the course of the next few weeks. I decided to put together a scheme of work that would address the following:
- 1. Interesting themes that would engage both film and costume students, and their particular and diverse interests.
- 2. Focus on discussion, and creative tasks that would encourage group activity, including a project where I would put teams together.
- 3. Strategies to encourage full engagement with the themes under discussion, focusing on developing their research skills.
The scheme of work I put together encouraged independent research as well as group discussion and some informal presentation / sharing of research each week. It focused around themes to do with monsters, and particularly analysed mise-en-scene and cinematic/photographic storytelling.
The first topic we began to analyse was the fairy tale. This is a great topic to use with creative students because it is so rich with imagery and there have been so many retellings and re-appropriations of the key themes and characters. We focused on Red Riding Hood, and it's key motifs, and also used auteur theory to contextualise the work of Guillermo del Toro, particularly Pan's Labyrinth (2006).
link to seminar slides
link to seminar slides
Sket (2011 dir. Bhogal)
Vogue US 'Into the Woods' (2007 Mert & Marcus)
Red Hot Riding Hood (1943 Tex Avery)
Pan's Labyrinth (2009 dir. Del Toro)
Having begun to investigate the notion of the monster in fairytales, the second week moved this topic on, looking at Bluebeard specifically. We focused on the concept of the Orient, Orientalism, learned cultural norms and stereotypes. We used a wide variety of case studies to discuss race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity.
Bluebeard
Orientalism in painting
Rihanna 2013 Pour it up
Our third week focused on bringing together notions of monster / other / cultural beliefs, and looked at the way the monster is used as representative of particular ideologies.
Link to seminar slides
District 9 (2009 dir.Blomkamp)
Aliens (1982 dir. Cameron)
Monsters (2010 dir.Edwards)
Our fourth week began to look towards developing a project. We focused on semiotics, mise-en-scene and how to read images.
For the costume students some of this was entirely new, and the film students had a chance to show off their knowledge. The focus was on discussion, individual and group analysis of particular images and film examples, and an understanding of the full range of elements that relate to mise-en-scene. The level of critical analysis was really strong. Students felt able to speak up about their ideas, and were noticeably increasing in confidence.
Child with Toy Hand Grenade (1962 Diane Arbus)
Engagement throughout these first four weeks was excellent, and the students brought many examples and case studies of their own to the discussion. However, they were still quite stuck in their own cohorts so, for me, I felt it was really important to encourage some cross-discipline work, and focus their energy on working with people they might not ordinarily have worked with.
The next post shows how we used some of the ideas investigated in the seminars to work on a set design project.
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