Here is the second DVD of Cine-VO, the Paris CRDP audio-visual collection. English teachers now have an innovative tool that will allow pupils to discover three classic films reflecting a rich and varied cultural heritage.
The authors, who are all secondary-school teachers, are not cinema experts per se, yet they are avid movie-goers, who truly enjoy the cinema. Hence, they have given their own “amateur” (in the French sense of the word) analyses of the films, tying it up with a sound knowledge of the films’ cultural backgrounds, as would any teacher eager to pass their artistic passions on to pupils. The film analyses always lead to classroom tasks and are oriented towards spoken interaction.
With Ken Loach, pupils will discover an aspect of British culture and a socially committed filmmaker whose film is rooted in the harsh social context of the post-industrial era in Yorkshire.
With Hitchcock, pupils will disentangle a delightful quid pro quo during the Cold War, with Mount Rushmore as a backdrop; and with Sweet and Lowdown, pupils will be put to the test: Did Emmet Ray really exist? And they will catch a glimpse of the Jazz Age in the 1930s.
This DVD also provides ample teaching material: analyses of film stills, short presentations of the cultural and artistic background of each film, along with worksheets for pupils; short extracts from reviews, including the Hitchcock-Truffaut discussions. The rationale is that pupils should never be passive recipients of knowledge, but should perform tasks, putting this knowledge to use.
Extracts from dialogues, vocabulary lists in context, (including film-analysis vocabulary) and grammar exercises are also provided.
Some pupils - the authors’- have already had a first bite at the cherry. They seem to have enjoyed it. Let us thank them!

We hope that this will help give back to classic cinema a dimension that some have feared would be lost forever: younger generations have often seen remakes without having seen the originals; many films have been badly preserved or lost, and people are going to the movies less and buying (or downloading) DVDs instead. Yet, ironically enough, thanks to digital technologies, cinematic memories are in fact being preserved. All the better for the cinema  and for us!

Marie-France Chen-Géré, IA-IPR, Academy of Paris