UNIT 61.

THE INFLUENCE OF CINEMA IN THE SPREAD OF THE LITERARY

PRODUCTION IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

0. INTRODUCTION
1. THE HISTORY OF CINEMA
2. FILM: A NEW ART AND A NEW LANGUAGE.
2.1 Film language
3. LITERATURE AS A SOURCE FOR FILM PRODUCTION.
3.1 Film versus literature
3.2 Influence of the cinema on literary works.
3.3 The adaptation of literature in cinema.
3.3.1 Types of adaptations.
3.3.2 The success of the novel as a source
3.3.3 Other genres in film adaptation
3.3.4 Historical outline of adaptations.

4. ENGLISH LITERATURE ON SCREEN.

5. FILM NOIR ON SCREEN

6. FILMS IN THE CLASSROOM.

7. CONCLUSION

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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0.INTRODUCTION.

This unit deals with the role of cinema on the diffusion of literary works in the English
language. In doing so, we will try to analyse how the cinematic genre has helped the literary
genre to expand at a high speed all over the world and to bring life to literary works.

One question which may arise is “what was first? Literature or cinema? At first, one
might say that it was literature since most films are based on literary works. Yet, the answer is
that both of them track to ancient times, and it is almost impossible to pinpoint the exact date.
Nowadays, most historians agree that the literary genre is linked to man´s first attempts of
communication through language and therefore, oral transmission literature in the past within
religious and magic practices whereas the story of cinema traditionally traces back to “the
ancient Greeks and moving shadows”.

Cinema should by now have attained some measure of cultural respectability. But
many literary critics still view film at worst as the illegitimate offspring of theatre and
photography, and at best, as a vulgar, commercial medium, capable very occasionally of
achieving its own aesthetic identity; while film theorists tend to value work that tis the sole
creation of writer-direction.

Films adapted from novels typically invite favourable comparison with literary
originals, from film critics, newspaper reviewers and audiences alike. Critics see film
adaptations of novels as flawed, as they are not original, journalists and audiences react with
disappointment at superficial dissimilarities, dismayed by the loss of favourite characters or
incidents. Such films are often judged by the degree to which they adhere to or diverge from
their literary source material. In the section we will discuss the different ways to adapt in a film
a novel.

The relationship between fiction and film has been analysed by literary and film critics, by
filmmakers and also by writers, ever since Eninsten referred to the use D.W. Griffith made of
Dickens as a source of inspiration for technique in the early history of film.

Literature has been of vital importance in the history of cinema, to such a degree that,
without literature, the new art would have been different from what we know today. We will
try to analyse and understand this influence of one on the other and see how cinema has then
helped to the spread of knowledge about literary works.

1. THE HISTORY OF CINEMA

The concept of the motion picture was first introduced to a mass audience through Thomas
Edison´s kinetoscope in 1891. However, it wasn´t until the Lumiere brothers released the

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cinématographe in 1895 that motion pictures were projected for audience viewing. In the
United States, film established itself as a popular form of entertainment with the nickelodeon
theatre in the 1910s. (called nickelodeon because of their 5 cent admission charge)

The release of the Jazz Singer in 1927 marked the birth of the talking films, and by
1930 silent film was a thing of the past. Technicolor emerged for film around the same time
and found early success with movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. However,
people would continue to make films in black and white until the late 1950s

By 1915 most of the major film studios had moved to Hollywood. During the Golden
Age of Hollywood, these major studios controlled every aspect of the movie industry, and the
films they produced drew crowds to theatres in numbers that have still not been surpassed.
After World War II, the studio system declined as a result of antitrust legislation that took
power away from studios and of the invention of the television.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a rise in films—including Bonnie and Clyde, The
Wild Bunch, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Easy Rider—that celebrated the emerging youth
culture and a rejection of the conservatism of the previous decades. This also led to looser
attitudes toward depictions of sexuality and violence in film. The 1970s and 1980s saw the
rise of the blockbuster, with films like Jaws, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and The
Godfather.

The adoption of the VCR by most households in the 1980s reduced audiences at movie
theatres but opened a new mass market of home movie viewers. Improvements in computer
animation led to more special effects in film during the 1990s with movies like The
Matrix, Jurassic Park, and the first fully computer-animated film, Toy Story.

The 1990s saw the rise of two divergent strands of cinema: the technically spectacular
blockbuster with special, computer-generated effects and the independent, low-budget film.
The capabilities of special effects were enhanced when studios began manipulating film
digitally. Early examples of this technology can be seen in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
and Jurassic Park (1993). Films with an epic scope—Independence Day (1996), Titanic (1997),
and The Matrix (1999)—also employed a range of computer-animation techniques and special
effects to wow audiences and to draw more viewers to the big screen. Toy Story (1995), the
first fully computer-animated film, and those that came after it, such as Antz (1998), A Bug’s
Life (1998), and Toy Story 2 (1999), displayed the improved capabilities of computer-generated
animation (Sedman, 2000). At the same time, independent directors and producers, such as
the Coen brothers and Spike Jonze, experienced an increased popularity, often for lower-
budget films that audiences were more likely to watch on video at home.

The growth of both independent movies and special-effects-laden blockbusters

continues to the present day.

2 FILM: A NEW ART AND A NEW LANGUAGE

Two main approaches can be analysed in order to understand the nature of the new art:
a) From an idealistic perspective, the cinema was at the top of a pyramidal conception
of arts. According to Hegel’ s Aestheticism, the supreme art is “an organism whose

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 varied elements, although independent from one another, keep a natural
relationship and constitute a unity”. This vision implies that each art has something
specifically different from the rest, e.g. Einstein considered montage as the specific
aspect of filming. Alfred Hitchcock was the Hollywood director most strongly
identified with montage, and theories of montage. He often explained his notion of
cinema as creating meaning through the editing together of shots into a sequence, of
fragments into a unity.
b) From a formalist approach, a greater importance is given to the form. This vision
implies that any text can be transformed into a new form of expression. In the 1920s
Russian theoreticians belonging to the group known as Russian formalists studied the
relationship between cinema and film as part of their reflections on art and literature
in general.

From the 1920s on we find many studies about the relationship between fiction and film.
There are those who focus on the divergences between the two arts, considering the cinema
as a kind of secondary art form, not worthy of a place among the “Arts” because of its
association with entertainment and popular taste. We also come across those who, while
accepting the aesthetic value of the moving picture, stress the superiority of literature over
cinema and centre their analyses on the dependence of the latter upon the former. The
opposite view can be seen in the most extreme theory of the independence of films from the
other arts, an attitude to be found among the filmmakers who belonged to the French
nouvelle vague.

The cinema had a clear inheritance from 19th century theatre, and from the 19th c novel. It
takes source material from both theatre and novel. Any fictional film is necessarily a kind of
merging of the two media and of their modes of operation. It’s theatrical, in that it is acted
out, through visible characters, not words on a page; and it unrolls at a fixed pace, the same
for every member of the audience. It’s novelistic, in that the story goes on unaffected by the
audience. There is no live presence or interaction. There has consequently been a repeated
movement from (broadly speaking) the theatrical to the novelistic.

2.1. Film language

As we have common approaches to human language, by means of linguistics, and to
literature, by means of Aesthetics, there must be a common approach to the study of film
language. This should be based upon literary language and images. Whereas the main
narrative medium in a novel is the linguistic narration, in films it is the image, the look. Images
can then be considered as the minimal units of film language, as they cannot accept further
divisions. However, there are some problems in order to accept images as minimal units:
firstly, they cannot be taken in isolation, and secondly they do not sustain language.

Another proposal for basic units is cuts, as they represent a meaningful combination of
sound and image (actually they are forms of a sequence of images and sounds). This sequence
constitutes a system, which articulates into a narrative syntax and forms the script of a film.

Film scripts can be specifically created for film production or can be the result of transforming
a literary work into a technical resource for film production. An early influence of literature on

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file scripts can be observed through the history of film. From Lumiere’ s film language to
modern films there have been many quantitative changes. At the very beginning films were
quite “theatrical”: in terms of (a) space; (b) time; and (c) performance.

D.W. Griffith introduced several innovations. In the films he made from 1908 to 1913, his main
strategies were (a) to bring the camera closer to the actors, and (b) to develop a system of
parallel action, cutting back and forth between different locations; this allowed cinema to free
itself from the single perspective and single time of theatre, and to attain a “novelistic”
flexibility of movements. The story of the early 1930s is of the progressive overcoming of the
new technological constraints imposed by the introduction of sound, making possible the
recovery of a novelistic fluidity, with the added naturalism of dialogue.

3. LITERATURE AS A SOURCE FOR FILM PRODUCTION

3.1 Film versus literature.

We are used to regarding narrative sound film as a lazier, more passive experience rather than
reading, the process of absorbing it seems almost too easy. In spite of devices like flashbacks
the temporal line in the cinema is overwhelmingly present, what we see on the screen is on
the act of happening. Confronted with today´s mass audience films, which create a high
sensory impact by using an extremely elaborate battery of special visual effect, we forget that
watching a film is as sophisticated a process as reading. Audiences, have to be educated in the
disciplines of “reading” film rather as they are taught to read letters. Reading involves
subliminal processes of mental self-discipline quite comparable to the decipheral of linear
type. The various similarities that psychologists have found in the way we read film and read
books may go some way towards explaining why the early filmmakers turned with such
enthusiasm to the novel as a source of inspiration.

Since film arose as storytelling art, there has been a tendency by filmmakers, writers,
critics and audiences to associate it with literature, although there are filmmakers like Ingmar
Bergman or Normal Mailer, who claims that film has nothing to do with literature. Many
writers have either openly acknowledged their attempt to adapt cinematic approaches or
techniques to their own work or have agreed with the novelist Graham Greene that “there is
no need to regard the cinema as a completely new art; in its fictional form it has the same
purpose as the drama”. Dealing with the similarities between cinema and literature, critics also
refer to the opinions expressed by the novelist Joseph Conrad and the filmmaker D.W: Griffith.
Conrad said:” My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to
make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see” This passage is cited in
studies of film and literature because it closely parallels a remark made almost two decades
later by Griffith: “The task I am trying to achieve is above all to make you see”

3.2 Influence of the cinema on literary works

Cinema has been said to influence the conception of the literary work in several ways:

a) Breaking the logical sequence of time. Flashbacks are the cinema’ s best-known device
for expressing a shift of time and permit the filmmaker to interpolate material from a
character’ s past into the present, or vice-versa.

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 b) Narration from different perspectives. A clear example is the film The Bad and the
Beautiful (Vincent Minnelli, 1952). Many novels have appeared in which different
narrators tell the same story: William Faulkner’ s The Sound and the fury.
c) Greater freedom in “credible presentation”. Taking for granted the readers’ familiarity
with cinema conventions, some authors have tried to imitate the use of “look”, of the
image in the cinema when writing literature. Salman’s Rushdie The Satanic Verses
(1988) is a novel where the narrated story and narrative techniques used would have
been impossible before the development of the cinema.
d) Some writers have made scripts out of literary Works William Faulkner worked for the
cinema at different occasions form 1932 to 1952 (Hemingway’ s To Have and Have
Not, 1944; Raymond Chandler’ s The Big Sleep, 1946). However, other writers have
opposed this relationship: e.g. Virginia Wolf
e) Film industry as theme in literary works. F. Scott Fitzgerald went to Hollywood for the
first time in 1927. he worked as a scriptwriter for several for the most important
studios. His life in Hollywood, and his love for the studios became the source for his
last unfinished novel, The Last Tycoon.

3.3 The adaptation of literature in cinema.

Through the cinema, and especially through the Hollywood pictures, the world audience has
been introduced to major works of British and American literature. Actually, almost all the
works of the classical English and American literature, as well as modern 20 th century
literature, have been adapted to movies at some stage .From Shakespeare and Dickens, the
most adapted authors, to 20th century authors which have achieved almost more popularity in
the cinema than in the print such as Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming, literature is profusely
represented in films, and the plots and characters from English and American literature has
become part of the world´s popular culture through them.

Since the 1927-28, more than three-fourths of the Academy Awards for “best picture” have
gone to adaptations, and of those, about three-fourths were based on either novels or short
stories. Several reasons can be proposed for this:

1. Novels already present a narrative articulation, so they are easier to adapt, and they
were born some centuries before cinema, so that the number of stories is quite
enough for producers to find a suitable story.
2. Producing a film is highly expensive, so film producers find it less risky to try with
already successful material.
3. Literature is full of successful material, stories, (novels, plays, short stories, etc.) which
have proved to be successful among the reading public. These readers are considered
movie audience.

An important consideration must be made: adapting means translating from one language to
another, from a language of words into a language of images, and any translation implies
changes. Research into the nature and limits of this process of trans codification is still needed
in order to have a clear picture of it. How each literary genre is susceptible of being adapted
would be one of the fields of research still open. In any case we find differences in the degree

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and nature of the changes suffered by the literary work, and this will make us consider the
existence of different types of adaptations.
In adapting a novel, the screenwriter is always faced with difficult choices: what to
include/exclude, how to compensate for necessary excision, how to conflate characters and
incidents, how to show what the writer tells.
Novels are adapted for the screen in three ways, which might be described by analogy
with modes of literary translation:
3.3.1Types of adaptations:
 Transposition (also called “pictorialisation of a novel”, “illustration of a book”,
or literal translation”): the purpose is to translate the original text from the
written language into the film image as if it were a copy, trying to introduce as
few differences as possible. Examples of this type could be: Henry Fielding’ s
Tom Jones, adapted for the cinema in 1963 by Tony Richardson or Jane
Austen’ s Pride and Prejudice, in the 1940 version by Robert Z. Leonard, Peter
Brook´s Lord of the Flies or Kenneth Branagh´s Mary Shelley´s Frankenstein. .
This has been the preferred type of translation made by Hollywood producers through the
history of cinema, especially during the golden age. On the other hand, since adapting means
selecting, these films do show differences from the literary works, some scenes or even
subplots are usually eliminated although the essence of the work remains intact.
 Re-interpretations (also called “re-structure”, “re-emphasis”, “re-statement of
the original novel”, “critical gloss”, etc.). The strategy to be followed is to
retain the fundamental narrative structure at the same time as a substantial
reinterpretation is being made. The idea is to recreate the original text making
use of more modern technical devices developed by the cinema.

Some interesting examples where this strategy has been followed are: Coppola’ s version of
Bram Stoker’ s Dracula (1992) or David Lean’ s Great Expectations (1946), where the film
director concentrated on the sentimental level, social tragedy is only hinted.

 Free adaptation (“re-writing”, “analogical re-elaboration”): The literary work is

just the “raw material” to work upon, a “pretext” , a source of inspiration in
order to create a new work of art. The director only keeps certain situations,
characters, as a starting point to create a different work, modifying structure
and even the literary author’ s vision. The result is usually a completely
different work of art.
Examples of this third type would be: Federico Fellini’ s La Dolce vita (1960), considered to
have been an analogy of T.S. Eliot’ s The Waste Land or Alfred Hitchcock’ s The Thirty-nine
steps.
In these different types of adaptations, there are different techniques: elision is nearly
mandatory and when a novel is part of a literary saga, incidents or quotes from later or earlier
novels will be inserted into a single film.
Additionally, and far more controversially film makers will invent new characters and new
stories that were not present in the source material. These are sometimes invented to provide
the narrative voice.

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 As to the choice of the novel, film adaptations prefer novels with externalities and
physical description instead of the Modern novel or any fiction which has any interior
monologue, or worse, stream of consciousness. When source novels have exposition or
digressions from the author´s own voice, a film adaptation may create a commenting, chorus-
like character to provide what could not be filmed otherwise. Thus, in the adaptation of John
Fowles´s The French Lieutenant´s Woman, the director created a contemporary Englishman in
a romance with a woman to offer up the ironic voice that Fowles provided in the novel, and
the film version of Laurence Stern´s novel, Tristam Shandy, had the main actor speak in his
own voice, as an actor, to emulate the narrator´s ironic and metafictional voice in the novel .

3.3.2 The success of the novel as a source.

The single most important medium for film adaptation has been the novel. For most years, the
production of American films based on novels is around 30%. If the Academy Awards tell us
anything about the American film industry, it is interesting that since their creation in 1927
more than three-quarters of the awards for the best picture have gone to adaptations. And the
box office has traditionally favoured novels. The list of the twenty most successful films of the
1950´s –according to statistics- featured fifteen adaptations of novels, from both classic novels
like “Around the world in Eighty Days”,and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and contemporary
best-sellers like Peyton Place and From Here to Eternity. By the 1960s, this figure dropped as
low as nine out of twenty (Thunderball, Mary Poppins) and in the 1970s the twenty most
popular films included only six novel adaptations. However, during the 1980s and the
beginning of the 1990s there has been a recovery of literature back on the screen. It´s also
worth remembering that today´s major films like Star Wars, Close Encounters or ET do not
start life as a novel, but they usually end up as paperback novelisations, or some of them are
novels at first , but from the very beginning, they were written to end up as films, such as
Michel Crichton´s Jurassic Park.

3.3.3 Other genres in film adaptation

In addition to adaptation from novels, films frequently use plays as their sources. William
Shakespeare has been called the most popular screenwriter in Hollywood. Not only are there
film versions of all of Shakespeare plays, but there are multiple versions of many of them, and
there are films adapted from Shakespeare´s plays very loosely such as West Side Story, Kiss me
Kate, and Ten Things I Hate about You. On the one hand, theatrical adaptations do not involve
as many interpolations or elisions as novel adaptations, but, on the other hand, the demands
of scenery and possibilities of motion frequently entail changes from one medium to another.

Radio narratives have also provided the basis of film adaptation. The Hitchhiker´s
Guide to the Galaxy, for example, began as a radio series for the BBC and then became a novel
which was adapted to film.

Comic book characters, particularly superheroes, have long been adapted into film,
beginning in the 1940s with Saturday movie serials aimed at children. Superman (1978) and
Batman (1989) are two later successful movie adaptations of famous comic book characters. In
the early 2000s, blockbusters such a X-Men and Spider-Man have led to dozens of superhero
films. The success of these films has also led to other comic books not necessarily about

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superheroes being adapted for the big screen, such as Ghost World (2001), American
Splendour (2003) and Sin City (2005).

Documentary films have been made from reportage, as dramatic films, for example,
All the President´s Men. An Inconvenient Truth is Al Gore´s documentary film about climate
change. It is a film adaptation of a multimedia presentation, therefore, of a lecture. Many
films have been made from epic poetry. Home´s works have been adapted multiple times in
several nations. Finally, both Greek mythology and the Bible have been adapted frequently. In
these cases, the audience already will de-emphasize elements of suspense and concentrate
instead on detail and phrasing.

3.3.4 Historical outline of adaptations.

Silent Era: Extraordinary silent movies came such as Griffith´s adaptation of Thomas Dixon´s
The Clansman under the title of Birth of a Nation and the adaptation of Frank Norris´s novel
McTeague under the name Greed (1923). More films based on novels like Wallace´s Ben Hur,
Blasco Ibañez´s The Four Men of the Apocalypse and adaptations of Zola in France and Dickens
in England were produced

Early sound cinema: One of the earliest important novel adaptations after the introduction of
sound was Universal’s 1931 version of Bram Stoker´s Dracula. A year later the same studio
adopted a much more imaginative approach with James Whale´s version of Mary Shelley´s
Frankenstein.

Conventional Hollywood approach: The conventional Hollywood approach to literature is

typified by David O. Selznick, whose work dominated the first two decades of sound. Selznick
grasped more quickly than any other producer the commercial advantages of making relatively
faithful paraphrases of famous bests-selling novels and using Hollywood stars to enhance the
portrayal of major fictional characters. His approach was to choose which stars best fitted a
celebrated novel, and then to build the story as conscientiously as possible around them,
reconstructing the exterior action of the plot with a few set-pieces. The result was, among
others, Greta Garbo in Anna Karenina (1935), Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the
Wind (1939) and Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontain in Hitchcock´s Rebecca (1935).Selznick was
aware of the cinema´s enormous capacity for generating emotional involvement, and he
therefore preferred epic love stories, frequently even increasing the high romantic interest of
his originals.

That approach is still used to the present day in many Hollywood films producing the
interesting case of remakes. Remakes are new productions of classical films. An old story with
a new director and new actors becomes a new film, which can be more or less successful than
its predecessor. Some examples of stories adapted more than once are Dicken´s Oliver Twist or
Great Expectations, Shakespeare´s Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering
Heights, Hemingway´s Farewell to Arms, etc..

Adaptations also respond to the time period when they are made. Classical movies
from the 40s and 50s were made at a time when the movie industry was much more
concerned about morality. Hollywood had a strict production code, for films to reach as wide

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an audience as possible. This means that controversial topics were eluded, often mutilating the
plots of novels, and plays. This is well known for example in cases such as the adaptation of
Tennessee Williams plays A Streetcar named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, where central
elements such as rape and allusions to homosexuality were respectively eliminated. On the
other hand, more recent films, responding to modern expectations, include controversial
topics and even sexually explicit scenes which seem distanced from the original literary works
from which they were adapted, such as The Scarlet Letter, where both things are done,
presenting Hester as a more sexually conscious character, and as a prototype of early
feminism.

4. ENGLISH LITERATURE ON SCREEN

As mentioned before, the genre of the novel had a great success as a source for film. Classical
novels have been an essential source.
This is mainly due to the economic success that these films obtain. Many of Dickens’ s works
have been adapted for films, some of them many times. Indeed, probably no other novelist in
history has written so many works which have been made into so many movies – in Dickens’s
case, over seventy films, thirteen of them adaptations of Oliver Twist alone.

Shakespeare’ s most famous Works have also been frequently adapted: from USA
productions such as Lawrence Olivier’s versions of Henry V (19477), Hamlet (International
Grand Prize at Venice film Festival, 1948) and Richard III (1955), to British 90’s adaptation
made by Kenneth Branagh on Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet.

Jane Austen’ s novels have also been made films: Pride and Prejudice, Ang Lee’ s Sense
and Sensibility (1995), in which the screenplay was written by the main actress Emma
Thompson, and Emma (1996), starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Tony Coletter. Among the
Victorian novels that have also been adapted we can name Emily Brontë’ s Wuthering Heights
and Charlotte Brontë’ s Jane Eyre. The first film based on this novel was produced in 1934 by
Cristy Cabanne. A very famous one is that by Robert Stevenson in 1943 with Jean Fontaine and
Orson Welles in the main roles.

But it´s not just the classics which have been adapted. Penny dreadful- cheap novels
with sensational themes- have inspired dozens of B-movies. Agatha Christie´s has remained
popular, particularly her detectives Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Other favoured authors
have included Ian Fleming, whose James Bond character has inspired no less than 20 films,
Arthur Conan Doyle, countless Sherlock Holmes adaptations, including three silent serials
(1921-23), and John Buchan, whose The 39 Steps was adapted three times, most famously by
Alfred Hitchcock (1935). Joseph Conrad´s rich body of work has often been filmed, notably in
Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim, and Apocalypse Now (1979), a radical interpretation of Heart
of Darkness.

Perhaps the most cinematic 20 th century writer has been Graham Greene
(1947): Brighton Rock, The Third Man and countless others. George Orwell, by contrast, has
seen only three significant films of his work, an animated Animal Farm )1954) and two versions
of Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1956 and 1984.

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 In the 1970s we have the most satisfying screen rendition of Thomas Hardy´s
fiction, Tess, by Roman Polanski. Other creditable adaptations include John Schlesinger´s Farm
From the Madding Crowd. Ken Russell tackled D.H. Lawrence´s Women in Love (1969),and the
Rainbow (1989). In the 1980s, E.M Forster´s novels were adapted, A Room with a View,
Howards End and A Passage to India.

Nowadays, contemporary writers are also getting a look in. Among the most successful are
Nick Hornby- High Fidelity (2000), and About a Boy, Helen Fielding´s Bridget Jones´ Diary (2001)
and J.K. Rowling, whose Harry Potter books have become the predominant screen franchise of
recent years. The Book of Illusions, by Paul Auster (2002) My notes.

5. FILM NOIR ON SCREEN.

Film noir is a cinematic term used primarily to describe stylish Hollywood crime drams,
particularly those that emphasize cynical attitudes and sexual motivations. It is characterized
by such elements as cynical heroes, stark lighting effects, frequent use of flashbacks, intricate
plots and an underlying existentialist philosophy. The genre was prevalent mostly in American
crime dramas of the post-World War II era.

The source was from the plots and themes of American literary works-usually from
best-selling hard-boiled, pulp novels and crime fiction by Raymond Chandler, James McCain,
Dashiel Hammet or Cornel Woolrich.

Cinema was the vehicle that allowed the film noir genre to survive until the present
day. As this type of literature was neglected and voluntarily under published by the major
publishing houses during the seventies in America, it threatened to disappear. The low esteem
given to it there by traditional literary critics and the American view of it as “just
entertainment” were two more factors accelerating the decay. The cross-fertilization between
the two media, books and films, is and will remain an important factor of evolution for the
genre.

6. FILMS IN THE CLASSROOM

Language teachers have been using films in their classes for decades, and there are a number
of reasons why film is an excellent teaching and learning tool. Motivation is one of the most
important factors in determining successful second-language acquisition. Films and TV shows
are an integral part of students´ lives so it makes perfect sense to bring them into the language
classroom

Another benefit is that it provides a source of authentic and varied language. Film
exposes students to natural expressions and the natural flow of speech. The visuality of film
makes it an invaluable language teaching tool, enabling learners to understand more.

As examples of activities that can be done in class, film can act as springboard for
follow-up tasks such as discussions, debates on social issues, role plays, reconstructing a
dialogue or summarising. If there is a book of the film (graded reader), we can play a scene of

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the film and have the students connect it with the one in the book, we can play the scene
without the sound so that students provide the dialogue.

If we want to show movies regularly in class, we can create a generic worksheet that
we can use for all the movies we show. With questions like:

What´s the setting of the film? What´s the basic plot? Who is the protagonist?

What are your impressions of the movie?

With this type of activities the students will learn to take notes during a film, and they will
develop proper note-taking skills.

Teaching them how to write a film review can be another activity

We must remember that apart from all the linguistic benefits of using film in class, we will get
our students interested in the literature the film is based on.

Websites: superb blog by Steve Muir and Tom Spain. Lesson plans based on short videos,
especially clips from tv series, for teachers of advanced students C1 y C2.

Lessonstream: website with creative and imaginative lesson plans based on short videos.

Viral ET.

Film English. 120 detailed lesson plans based on short films.

ESL Notes.

Vimeo Staff Packs.

English Central. The best website for students to improve their speaking and pronunciation
Videos with subtitles and activities to record themselves.

English Attack for young learners.

Learn English Teens Film Uk

Bombay Tv: the students can add subtitles and voice-overs to Indian television and film

clips.

7. CONCLUSION

In conclusion, detective and crime fiction has evolved into a diverse and complex genre, with
distinct traditions that reflect the cultural contexts in which they were written. The American
detective story, epitomized by authors like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, focuses
on gritty realism, morally ambiguous protagonists, and often explores the darker aspects of
society. In contrast, the English whodunit, represented by authors such as Dorothy L. Sayers,

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P.D. James, and the iconic Agatha Christie, tends to emphasize intricate plotting, puzzle-
solving, and the portrayal of upper-middle-class settings. While both traditions share a central
theme of crime and investigation, they differ significantly in tone, character development, and
approach to the resolution of the mystery. Ultimately, both traditions have contributed
immensely to the genre, each shaping our understanding of detective fiction in its own unique
way, offering readers everything from taut, atmospheric noirs to cleverly constructed, cerebral
puzzles.lmEnglih.com

8. BIBLIOGRAPHY:
British responses to the cultural influences of American films
The Oxford History of World Cinema. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. OUP 1996
The Routledge Companion to Film History 2006. William Guynn.

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