Методические рекомендации

  по использованию DVD-фильмов

     на уроках английского языка.

 (На примере фильма «Эффект бабочки»)

                                                                         Севастьянова Е. В.

                          Pre-viewing activities.

1. The title interpretation.

What do you associate “the butterfly effect” with? Brainstorm the idea.

The tagline of the film «The Butterfly Effect» is: «Change one thing, change everything». What thoughts does it provoke? Suggest as many ideas as possible.

    2.  Reading and discussion.

We all have moments when we wish we could change something. Right a wrong. Correct a mistake. Gain love -…or power. What if we really could? To find out we asked some provocative thinkers to riff on the Chaos Theory and explore the interplay of cause and effect in our lives. Skim the following articles to learn what the researchers into the problem suggest. After reading discuss the articles with the group, share your feelings and opinions of them.

                            Out with a Bangs, in with a Fogg.

                                    (By Bruce Sterling).

     I’m a science-fiction writer, though the most popular story I ever wrote doesn't have much science in it. It’s about a dead rock critic.
    In his real life, this rock critic, Lester Bangs, died of the flu and a Darvon overdose. But since I get to write imaginative fantasies, I decided to give Lester a different and alternate life. So, instead of dying as he did, Lester Bangs almost dies under the wheels of a reckless New York taxi.

    Shocked by this off-the-wall mishap, Lester buys an airline ticket out of town, ends up in San Francisco, discovers the love of his life, gets married, moves to Kansas, abandons his wild and reckless ways, and dies much later, in his sixties, while shoveling snow.
  In other words, through a random twitch of the wheel, a human life takes a new course. The new road-map of Lester's life makes as much sense as Lester's relatively senseless death--maybe more, when you think about it.
  This story of mine has been reprinted more, and in odder places, than any of my other works. That may be because people admire stormy characters like Lester Bangs.
  I tend to think it’s because people really like metaphysics. They enjoy tales of fate and predetermination and ego and self-determination and moral responsibility and Imminent Will.
  Folks just dig that stuff somehow. They want to feel vast, spooky powers playing out within their own existences. They can’t help but sense that the loose mishmash

of events that forms their passing days has, well, a good story behind it. Something dramatic and meaningful.
   It’s both disquieting and liberating to realize that freedom doesn’t require any free will. Even phenomena as dumb and blind as lightning, wind and rain have what physicists like to call “sensitivity to initial conditions.” Deterministic chaos. The Butterfly Effect.
   This means some tiny fate-altering sneeze of a butterfly can lead to a Category Five Caribbean-born storm pancaking the pylons and powerlines in Pensacola, Florida. Due to random whimsy, really.
    A hornet could do a hurricane just as well, or a housefly. We call this notion “the butterfly effect” because a butterfly is so pretty. Deterministic chaos is a glittering, graceful idea. As the Chinese say, “the butterfly never hurries even when pursued.”

    What better symbol for the existential mystery of life, where meaning,

resolution and intention crumble at the boundaries of randomness? It seems futile, yet it's full of vitality.
   Through a kind of butterfly accident, I recently wrote an introduction to Jules Verne’s classic, Around the World in 80 Days, written in the 1880s.
   Here we’ve got Phileas Fogg, this ultra-rational robot-man from Isaac Newton’s clockwork universe. Cool, predictable, imperturbable. Not the kind of guy to pay much heed to butterflies, it would seem.
   And yet Phileas Fogg makes a senseless bet on a chance remark at a card game, then takes off like a bat out of hell. In a matter of hours Fogg is off to fight angry natives and rustle elephants.
   There’s no question of Fogg ever backing off and returning to his previous rut. The book gets steadily more exciting as Fogg destroys every illusion of stability in human life.
  The weirder he gets, the less likely he is to chicken out. It's like he's been given some tremendous source of storming energy that no rational act of will could ever have unleashed within his soul.
   As Thoreau said, even the quietest of men is often topping-out on desperation. We never quite know what we can do till lightning strikes. Man, woman and child, we are all deeply contingent beings.
   By nature, we are the heirs and heiresses of a genetic lottery...one female egg in the fertile, wriggling human soup of millions of possibilities. There is nothing so unlikely as the flesh we happen to inhabit, and we are all mysterious beings within our own minds.

               A change in the weather, a change in the world.

                                  (By Dr.Lienhard)

   In 1960, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz tried to model the weather. He wrote simplified equations and solved them on a primitive computer. Sure enough, his output did behave a lot like real weather. His colleagues watched over his shoulder. They were fascinated.
   One day, Lorenz tried to continue a run he'd done the day before. He restarted it halfway through. He put in a number from the first run. The output started out just the way it had the day before. Then it began to diverge, crazily.
   The equations were the same. The starting point was the same. But the results diverged. Lorenz checked his computer. He checked his arithmetic. Nothing had changed. Same equations, but on subsequent days the results diverged.
   There was one difference, but how could it matter? Lorenz rounded off the fourth decimal place of the starting number on the second day.
   He stopped to consider: All weather predictions do what his program just did. You can predict the weather for the day after tomorrow. Stretch that to a week and your prediction always departs from reality.

    The implication was staggering. We’ve always presumed that if you barely change a cause, you’ll barely change the effect. Suddenly, Lorenz saw the weather would change utterly if you started things out just a little differently.

    No wonder real weather is so unpredictable! Weather obeys physical laws. But if you change one breath of air, those laws will spin out in a whole different story.

    Meteorologists began talking about something they called the Butterfly Effect. The idea was that if a butterfly chances to flap his wings in Beijing in March, then, by August, hurricane patterns in the Atlantic will be completely different.

    Lorenz had taken the first step on the road to showing that our world is far more chaotic than we dreamed. For generations scientists have been predicting things. But we’ve only predicted those things that are predictable – the breaking load on beams, the thrust of a rocket.

    And weather, of course, is just one face of the larger thing we all want to know, but which we never shall predict. Somewhere in the world, a butterfly will always flap its wings and thwart our age-old craving to predict our own future.

3) Read the summary of the film and answer the following questions:

1. What do you know about the film?

2. What do you expect to know?

3. What do you think how the events will develop?

4. What can catch your attention?

Summary box

                                While-viewing activities.

1. Watch the film and give titles to the following scenes:

 2. Decide who the following words refer to:

How do you feel about each of the quotations? Discuss it with your friend.

3. Show your emotions!

Watch the episodes and complete the table:

How do you feel about the emotions in the film? Are they:

A) just right       B) too much      C) too little to the situation?

                   Post-viewing activities.

1. Discussion:

1) What did you like/dislike about the film? Why?_________________________

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2) What, if anything you learn from the film?______________________________

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3) What were the film-makers trying to tell us? Do you think they were successful? Why? Why not? ____________________________________________________

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4) What are the key incidents in the film? Which was the most memorable scene for you? Why? ______________________________________________________

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5) Which character in the film did you like best/least? Why? __________________

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6) Which events in the film were the most realistic/ unrealistic? _______________

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7) Did the ending of the film seem appropriate? Why? Why not? How would you have ended the film? _________________________________________________

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2. Language extension activities.

1) Read the plot summary of the film and fill in the blanks with the suitable word from the box provided. There are some extra words you do not need to use.

Evan Treborn grows up in a small town with his 1)… working mom and his friends. He suffers from memory 2)… where he suddenly finds himself somewhere else, 3)…. Evans friends and mom hardly believes him, thinking he makes it up just to get out of trouble. And it does seem to always happen something bad during these blackouts. Something that makes his friends 4)… and violent. As Evan grows up he has less of these blackouts until he seems to have 5)…. Since the age of seven he has written a 6)… of his blackout moments as a kind of 7)…. One day at college he starts to read one of his old diaries, and suddenly a 8)…hits him like a brick! It appears his brain has finally 9)… some of his lost memories. But to relieve old memories can have dramatic 10)… as he is about to find out...

2) Here is the summary of «The Butterfly Effect». Complete it using the words in capitals at the end of the summary to form a word that fits in the corresponding space.

     Evan Treborn has lost track of time. From an early age, 1)… moments of his life have disappeared into a black hole of forgetting, his boyhood marred by a series of 2)… events he can’t remember.

    What remains is the ghost of 3)… and the broken lives of his childhood friends, Kayleigh, Lenny and Tommy.

    Throughout his 4)…, Evan was under the care of a psychologist who encouraged him to keep a journal, 5)… the events of his day-to-day life. Now in college, Evan reads from one of those journals and finds himself thrust 6)…back in time.

   Evan comes to realize the notebooks he keeps under his bed are a 7)…, a way to return to the past to reclaim his memories. But these 8)… only leave Evan feeling responsible for the damaged lives of his friends, 9)… Kayleigh, the childhood sweetheart he still loves.

    Determined to do something now that he was 10)… of doing then, Evan purposely travels back in time, his present-day mind 11)… his childhood body, in an attempt to re-write history and spare his friends and loved ones these traumatic experiences. By 12)… the events of the past, Evan hopes to transform the present.

   But every time Evan changes something in the past, he returns to the present to find his actions have unexpected and 13)… consequences. Try as he might, he can’t seem to create a 14)… that allows he and Kayleigh to live “happily ever after.”

   The Butterfly Effect is a 15)…, provocative thriller that represents an intriguing new direction for Ashton Kutcher and features a dynamic ensemble cast.

1) CRUSIFY; 2) TERROR; 3) MEMORISE; 4) CHILDREN; 5) DETAILED;      6) EXPLICATE; 7) VEHICULAR; 8) RECOLLECT; 9) SPECIALITY;             10) CAPABILITY; 11) OCCUPATION; 12) ALTERATION; 13) DISASTER;   14) REALISM; 15) SUSPENDED.  

3. Pair discussion.

According to the Chaos Theory “…the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in one area of the world can cause a tornado in another». Thus, if you barely change a cause, you’ll barely change the effect. Can you present as many examples as possible of how one action causes a series of reactions? Work in pairs and think of:

4. Group discussion.

«Such minor changes, such huge consequences…» Think of some major events in the history of mankind.  Can you imagine what our life would be like now, if they hadn’t taken place? Discuss your ideas in groups.

5. Sociological survey.

It’s hard not to imagine situations in your life that you would want to change. Do you wish you could travel in time back to forgotten events and change their outcome? Organize a survey among your friends “Life Then and Life Now”. Find out how things could have changed in your friends’ lives if they had had some events which altered them.

                             LIFE THEN                          LIFE NOW

For ideas: the country they were born in, the school they chose, the books they read, the people they met, etc.

6. Pyramid discussion.

Respond to the following statements. Discuss your opinions.

1. We never quite know what we can do till lightning strikes. Man, woman and child, we are all deeply contingent beings.

2. By nature we are the heirs and heiresses of a genetic lottery…one female egg in the fertile, wriggling soup of possibilities.

3. There is no such thing as chance, only patterns we do not understand.

4. Change one thing, change everything.

5. If a child feels Safe, Wanted and Loved, you are a successful parent.

6. Changing reality isn’t truly the answer to happiness.

7. A relationship is like sand in your hand. If held loosely in the palm of your hand it stays there, but as soon as you close your hand tightly it slips through your fingers.

8. Time will catch up to you no matter what you do to change it.

7. Creating the alternative ending of the film.

If you were offered to write your own version of the screenplay, what would be the ending like?

8. Film review.

Act as a critic and write a film-review about 180-200 words. Use the guidelines provided.   

1) What is the title of the film? ________________________________________

2) Who are the main actors in the film and what roles do they play? ___________

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3) Who directed the film?_____________________________________________

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4) Who wrote the screenplay? _________________________________________

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5) Is this film like any other films you have seen? If so, what film is it like? ____

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6) Who are the main characters in the story? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

7) What is the setting? ________________________________________________

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8) What is the film about? Summarize the story (without the ending!) in 5 sentences. Remember that your reader wants to know enough about the film to make a decision about going to see it, but not so much that there’s no need to go! ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

9) What is your opinion of the actors and the acting? ________________________

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10) Do you recommend this film? If so, what sort of people will enjoy seeing it? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

11) What star rating do you give this film? (****- excellent, ***- better than most, **- average, *- below average, no stars- poor) _____________________________