We are finishing the 2nd ESO the course and we need to have a panoramic vision of
our world, the 21st century world, so we are going to use some sequences of recent films
to try to approach it during a 55 minute class.
We started in Europe with sequences of Bourne's ultimatum, with images of Turin,
Paris, London and Madrid. We can recognize some of the features of developed countries
through the observation of the train stations of Waterloo (London), of Atocha (Madrid),
the airport of Heatrow (London), the metro of Paris. And we crossed the Strait of Gibraltar
towards the new geographical set of North Africa and we let ourselves go, with the camera
on Paul Greengrass's shoulder, for the persecutions on the roofs of Tangier.
And through a transition with maps and using the music of Bourne's ultimatum to give
continuity, we entered sub-Saharan Africa with the initial sequence of Blood Diamonds,
a full-fledged shake, in case one had fallen asleep, with the talks on trafficking of raw
materials in Africa.
Regarding Asia, we visualized some of the conflicts in Western Asia through the
sequence of Redacted in which a pregnant woman is machine-gunned in an American
military checkpoint, and several sequences of Kandahar, about awoman in aKoranic school. For South Asia I have chosen some fragments of Slumdog Millonaire
-persecution in the poor neighborhood of Bombay, scenes with the skyscrapers in the
background-, ending, of course, with the final Bollywood dance. And for East Asia, although
I wanted to show images of Shanghai, I finally decided on Still Life, to visualize the current
China, with the enormous transformations carried out for the construction of the Three
Gorges Dam. And for Japan I chose the sequences of Babel in which deaf girls
appear in a Tokyo plaza and a nightclub.
We crossed the Pacific to South America with the beginning of the City of God. It is difficult not to fall into manichaeism but we seek resounding images and do not have much time. The chase of the rooster in the favelas seemed to me sufficiently enlightening
of the social reality. And for North America we chose the head of The wire, ending with
the Bourne denouement on the New York bridge.
Activities
1. Draw a map indicating the route ordered by the stages and cities that the
characters of the different films follow.
2. Describe how the different cities in which the film is placed are, comparing
them.
3. Write a brief report on the ideas suggested by this montage with different
movie sequences