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Contexts
Cinema is always evolving and it’s exciting to witness, to explore and to understand.
Every film reflects the concerns of its time, the particular way of looking at the world in that culture, that society, that time. To fully understand a film, you need to know something of the era that spawned it. As you will have already considered in your Edusites Core Units, film is very much a cultural artefact, a reflection of the society that created and watched it. Each film is influenced by all of the films that have gone before it – the collective consciousness of how we ‘look’ at a film - and will have specific conventions that link it to others of its genre, its type.
For your examination, an understanding of the film’s production and of events in the world at that time will offer perspectives on how to better view its narrative presentation and thematic concerns. More importantly, you will learn how its use of film language and film aesthetics will have been shaped (and in turn shaped) by the way that other films of its time were constructed.
Films are shaped by the contexts in which they are produced. They can therefore be understood in more depth by placing them within two important contextual frames. The first involves considering the broader contexts of a film at the time…
