German Survey of Film

11-28-2001

Minutes

à At the beginning of the class Dr. Reimer went over the guidelines concerning the oral reports that will begin next week. The oral reports should be between four and six minutes long, with the maximum being seven minutes. He then discussed the showing of film clips during the oral report. He said that they should be no longer than two minutes, and that you should state the relevance of the clips in advance.

à Dr. Reimer also noted that there would be a question on the final concerning the oral reports, so notes should be taken during the reports.

à We will have to write evaluations of the reports that will go into determining our grade on the report.

à The three most common errors the people make while doing their oral reports are: going way over the time limit, just giving a plot synopsis, and not relating the clip to the report.

à We then got into small groups and discussed the questions about Winter Sleepers.

à Afterwards we went over the questions with the entire class. The first two were pretty self-explanatory, a short summary of the film, and a blurb for the back of VHS or DVD box.

We then discussed the role of coincidence in the film. Dr. Reimer said that Tykwer got much of his inspiration for films concerning coincidence and color from the Polish director Kieslowski. Kieslowski believed that everything in life has a certain outcome. Overall we decided that coincidence had a major role in the film. Next we went over the question as to what the colors meant in the movie. The red Becky wore was decided to indicate her passion, temper, and sexuality. Laura’s green may have represented her envy towards Becky and Marco at the beginning, but later on symbolizes sickness. Marco’s blue seemed to indicate his coldness. We didn’t go over René or the ‘yellow’ girl that Marco shacked up with, but I can tell you my opinion on them. I think René’s black may have something to do with his memory problem, and ‘yellow’ girls may have symbolized her youth. As for the last question, the appropriateness of the title, Dr. Reimer talked about the drop of blood that introduced Becky, and its relationship to the story of Sleeping Beauty. Other suggestions included the people in the movie actually sleeping with one another, or the fact that the characters couldn’t see past one another.

à We ended the class with Dr. Reimer passing out papers, and us turning in our questions.