TV DRAMA: AE FOND KISS

We celebrate Burns Night - this year, marked on Monday. Burns is a beloved Scottish poet.

This extract is actually the opening five minutes of a film called Ae Fond Kiss (dir, ken Loach 2004), but it works very well for the purposes of analysing the representation of people, places and issues. It is set in Glasgow and the title means 'one sweet kiss'. 

These words are also the title of Burns' famous Scottish poem set to music: 'ae fond kiss, and then we sever / ae farewell and then forever'. The song plays over the end of the dramatic opening to this extract.

Need to know facts:

Place: Glasgow

Characters: Casim Khan, brother to rebellious Tahara, who struggles to find herself between the bullying of some Scottish schoolmates and her Pakistani relatives.

Roisin, music teacher

PREP tonight : watch this presentation that will help you with terms relating to representation like connotation and denotation. It takes 9 minutes.

Semiotics analysis for beginners! | How to read signs in film | Roland Barthes Media Theory

 We watched Ae Fond Kiss and analysed representations of people, places and ideas:

PEOPLE what it is like to be a first and second generation Pakistani immigrant living in Glasgow; what it is like to be bullied at school like Tahara
PLACES Glasgow, the night club with bhangra music and Bollywood films; the traditional corner shop selling fruit and veg run by Tarara's father Mr Khan; a conventional Catholic school
IDEAS what it is like to be stereotyped as a terrorist just because you are Muslim; can you fall for a white Catholic girl if you are a Muslim boy from a traditional family and your father expects an arranged marriage?

For prep, you watched a presentation on Semiotics with vocabulary like sign, denote, connote, naturalised sign, Roland Barthes. Please make a blog post on what you learned.

Due date is Friday 12 February.
Post title SEMIOTICS

Barthes' Semiotic Theory broke down the process of reading signs and focused on their interpretation by different cultures or societies. According to Barthes, in The Rhetoric of the Image signs had both a signifier, being the physical form of the sign as we perceive it through our senses and the signified, or meaning that is interpreted.

You could support your points with a screenshot from Tales Of Terror From Tokyo