Film Appreciation

 The movie Battle of Britain was directed by Guy Hamilton and Harry Saltzman. The main cast was formed by Wilfred Greatorex and Laurence Olivier among others. The genre of the movie is drama and war and it lasts about 151 minutes. This movie was released in the year 1969.

The mise-en-scene of the movie is the following:

The setting is Britain, but specifically we can say that the setting is England’s sky a few years after World War II. The props used in this movie are planes, tanks and army bases. As we have already mention, the main characters in this movie are Wilfred Greatorex and Laurence Olivier. The costumes are the uniforms of the English, Polish and German’s army and the rest of the actors have costumes linked with the period of time they are representing which is 1940. Regarding make-up, we can see the sweaty and dirty faces of  different members of the army. The lighting in this movie is very important, but it is important to clarify that most of the time the scenes are recorded under the natural light of the sun because great part of the movie takes place outdoors principally in the England sky. The prints in the movie are diegetic with the exception of the credits.

Regarding the sound of the movie we discovered the following:

The music is very intense and instrumental in order to give emphasis to the battle. There is no use of silence but the noise is a very important element throughout the whole movie.  We can identify the noise of the bullets, the bombs and the engines of the airplanes. The dialogue between the characters is not as important as the action. There is no presence of narrator.

After analysing the editing of the movie we can conclude that the cuts of the film are composed by common cuts, only we couldn’t find any scene with fades in or out, cross fade, jump cut or dissolve. One scene follows another scene with a very simple cut. Regarding time, the only characteristic is the raccord shoulder/ over shoulder in the scene of one of the death of some pilots during an air crash. There is no presence of flash-backs or flash-forwards in this movie.

The cinematography area is much more complex to analyse than the other three big steps in language of film. Regarding the camera angle we found all the types (high, low, straight, and aerial) but most of the scenes have the presence of aerial view from the plane to the earth. The different camera distance in the movie makes the viewers feel the vertigo of flying  those small airplanes and suffer those horrible accidents. We can see a lot of deep focuses of the pilots’ faces during the battle and also extreme long shots when the camera shows big areas of the fields from the sky. The movement of the cameras is tracking and panning in order to elaborate the different angles. There is no frame out in the Battle of Britain.

As we know the number one cultural objective of film is entertainment and throughout this movie we can enjoy the different film techniques that were used in the realization of this film. The Battle of Britain is a very entertaining movie because you can feel the anxiety and distress of the English army so you can’t stop seeing it without knowing the final result of this war. The second cultural objective is to be an ideological tool. The battle of Britain is a very good tool to learn about the history of this war between English and Germans and also gives us the possibility to visit different countries and learn different history facts.

Group’s opinion

I believe that this blog was a very interesting and motivating task. It is something different from all the tasks that we were used to. We learned how to work in group using our critical minds and analyzing a film in detail. We didn’t know how to work in a blog and we had to learn how to do it; we discovered it was very interesting and useful. Our group was well-organized; we worked to obtain the results that we desired when we were planning how to create our blog

Comments

What a fantastic mise-en-scene! What a terrible mise-en scene! Those would probably be the comments regarding the film The Battle of Britain. During the whole film you are wondering what is going to happen next.Guy Hamilton, the film director was an idealistic, optimistic film director whose films were marked by a thin frontier between sentiments and emotions.Films are made for an entertainment purpose as well as for a cultural one. This movie in particular shows us what happened in real life, it shows history. This film shows the events that took place at that time when the battle of Britain occurred. The feeling of anxiousness and sadness can be felt while watching the movie. The film presents us with amazingly successful shots from the air and flying sequences, showing us the airplanes, the sky, the clouds, the airplanes again, with the sound that characterizes them. These shots produce in the viewers a feeling of  harsh reality with the constant explosions of airplanes, fights, tanks, troops, and airplanes’ smashes.With this film we learned about history, we not only entertain ourselves with it, we also learned about this interesting episode of history.“The film company made some “standardized” modifications including fitting elliptical wingtips, modifying canopies and turtle decks as well as removing later series whip antennas and cannon stubs in order to achieve a “1940s” look.” (www.wikipedia.com) 

The Director

“Guy Hamilton came to England in 1940 and started out as supporter director to important filmmakers like Carol Reed on The Fallen Idol (1948) and The Third Man (1949), and John Huston on The African Queen (1951) before taking control himself. Some of his earliest films were the Alastair Sim led An Inspector Calls (1954) and PoW drama The Colditz Story (1955).He mostly directed thrillers of an elaborate and modish kind, such as the second Harry Palmer espionage thriller Funeral in Berlin (1966), and four James Bond films including the classic Goldfinger (1964) with Sean Connery and Roger Moore in Live and Let Die (1973). When he has strayed from this territory the results have not always been satisfactory. The Party’s Over (1964) ran into serious censorship problems, preventing it from being seen by a wide audience. The Battle of Britain (1969) was one of his most elaborate and costly works, but by no means the best.” (The information was taken from the web page http:www.britmovie.co.uk)

A five minutes’ scene

Analysis (Task 3)

Regarding the similarities between our classmate’s movies and ours, we didn’t think we would find many similarities since every movie has different characteristics which make them unique. Nonetheless, we found some technical file similarities between The Third Man, Cabaret, The Wild Bunch, and The Battle of Britain. The Third Man, like The Battle of Britain, both have Trevor Howard as a cast member and the country of the movie is the UK as well.  The movie Cabaret and The Battle of Britain both use the language German as well as English. Cabaret is also similar since it is set before World War II when the Nazis were taking control.              The Wild Bunch and The Battle of Britain are both released in 1969 and they both have action and drama as the genre. The Thin Red Line, Rebel Without a Cause, and The Battle of Britain have similarities to when these movies take place. The Thin Red Line and The Battle of Britain both take place during World War II and they are both war genre. Rebel Without a Cause and The Battle of Britain are both about a war although Rebel without a Cause takes place after the World War II. After researching and viewing our classmate’s blogs, we found several similarities between the movies that were assigned to our classmates and ours.  

Plot Summary

The Battle of Britain is a war movie, inspired by the attack carried out by the Nazi army in England during the Second World War. During 1940, the Germans have occupied almost the entire European continent. England remains intact, but Hitler was preparing a new offensive. London is threatened. The British air force, its pilots and other security forces, are preparing to defend its skies of an impending attack Nazi. The action throughout the movie is amazing a keeps you in the border of the seat during the entire film. Please watch it and discover what the end of this battle is. 

Who was the winner?

(Information based in some details of the web page www.hoycinema.com/batalla-Inglaterra-1969.htm)

 

Gallery

This Photo Gallery is made up of some pictures that we chose together about the real Battle of Britain recollected from different web pages.

Background of the film (Task 2)

The Battle of Britain took place in the Second World War which began on September 1^st 1939. This war started because Germany invaded Poland and this is when Britain and France declared war. Poland was invaded in only twenty eight days because of all the tactics they had: tanks, airplanes, and troops. Britain and France tried many strategies so that this wouldn’t turn into a war. Unfortunately, after the quick conquer of Poland and France, the invasion of Britain seemed like a sure fact. This changed since the German Air forces “lacked strategic heavy bombers. More importantly, they lacked quality fighters with the fuel endurance to act as escorts to the bombers they did have” (http://www.info-poland.buffalo.edu/britain/airbattle.html) The British weren’t very well prepared either. On one side, they were going to fight against some much better prepared forces. On the other side, they had a radar system which permitted them to be aware when the Germans went. Another fact that was on their side was that they were fighting in a territory that was known for them. Because of this and a lot more, the British won with the help of the Polish pilots.     “Battle of Britain was the first major battle to be fought entirely by air forces. It was the largest and most sustained bombing campaign yet attempted, and the first real test of the strategic bombing theories developed since the previous World War.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain)

History of the film (Task 2)

    The history of this movie was inspired in a real fact. The main plot is about how the Nazi army tries to attack England in 1940. The events take place at the beginning of War World II. All this occurred when “diabolical mind of Adolf Hitler is planning to bomb England into submission to his warped dreams of a ‘Fortress Europe’” (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064072/plotsummary). The Germans have invaded the entire European continent except from England that is intact. London is threatened by Hitler’s army, but all the British air forces are well prepared to defend their territory. People around the world thought that The Battle of Britain was impossible to win, but the army showed off with admirable tenacious and strength that they reached the victory.    “Some scenes were recorded in the airbase in Tablada, Sevilla” (http://www.wikipedia.com). Some of the planes used in this movie were made in Spain too.