A Clockwork Orange (Advanced English Lesson)

Instruções:
Essas aulas de inglês são para alunos intermediários e avançados de inglês como segunda língua. Eles incluem “Ler”, “Ouvir” e “Escrever”. Basta seguir a lição respondendo às perguntas à medida que as encontra. Todas as vagas em negrito devem ser traduzidas para seu próprio idioma para ajudar na compreensão do novo vocabulário.

A Clockwork Orange is a 1971 dystopian crime film adapted, produced, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel of the same name. It employs disturbing, violent images to comment on psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, youth gangs, and other social, political, and economic subjects in a dystopian near-future Britain.

(distopian, adapted, based, disturbing, psychiatry, juvenile delinquency, near-future)

SECTION ONE (movie trailer clip) 1971

SECTION TWO (Storyline)

READING SECTION

INTRODUCTION

In my opinion the movie Stanley Kubricks “A Clockwork Orange” is an ideological mess, a paranoid right-wing fantasy masquerading As an Orwellian warning. It pretends to oppose the police state and forced mind control, but all it really does is celebrate the nastiness of its hero, Alex.

PARAGRAPH ONE

I don’t know quite how to explain my disgust at Alex (whom Kubrick likes very much, as his visual style reveals and as we shall see in a moment). Alex is the sort of fearsomely strange person we’ve all run across a few times in our lives — usually when he and we were children, and he was less inclined to conceal his hobbies. He must have been the kind of kid who tore off the wings of flies and ate ants just because that was so disgusting. He was the kid who always seemed to know more about sex than anyone else, too — and especially about how dirty it was.

PARAGRAPH TWO

Alex has grown up in “A Clockwork Orange,” and now he’s a sadistic rapist. I realize that calling him a sadistic rapist — just like that — is to stereotype poor Alex a little. But Kubrick doesn’t give us much more to go on, except that Alex likes Beethoven a lot. Why he likes Beethoven is never explained, but my notion is that Alex likes Beethoven in the same way that Kubrick likes to load his sound track with familiar classical music — to add a cute, cheap, dead-end dimension.

PARAGRAPH THREE

Now Alex isn’t the kind of sat-upon, working-class anti-hero we got in the angry British movies of the early 1960s. No effort is made to explain his inner workings or take apart his society. Indeed, there’s not much to take apart; both Alex and his society are smart-nose pop-art abstractions. Kubrick hasn’t created a future world in his imagination — he’s created a trendy decor. If we fall for the Kubrick line and say Alex is violent because “society offers him no alternative,” weep, sob, we’re just making excuses.

LISTENING SECTION

VIDEO QUIZ (watch the short video and answer the five questions below)

QUESTIONS:

Who wrote the original book?
Name three of Stanley Kubricks other movies.
Why did Kubrick withdraw the movie from Britains cinemas?
Which fashion movement was (spawned) started because of this movie?
Do a little Google research and name three pieces of music from the movie.

PARAGRAPH FOUR

Alex is violent because it is necessary for him to be violent in order for this movie to entertain in the way Kubrick intends. Alex has been made into a sadistic rapist not by society, not by his parents, not by the police state, not by centralization and not by creeping fascism — but by the producer, director and writer of this film, Stanley Kubrick. Directors sometimes get sanctimonious and talk about their creations in the third person, as if society had really created Alex. But this makes their direction into a sort of cinematic automatic writing. No, I think Kubrick is being too modest: Alex is all his.

PARAGRAPH FIVE

I say that in full awareness that “A Clockwork Orange” is based, somewhat faithfully, on a novel by Anthony Burgess. Yet I don’t pin the rap on Burgess. Kubrick has used visuals to alter the book’s point of view and to nudge us toward a kind of grudging pal-ship with Alex.

CONCLUSION

Is it really necessary to display such violence on screen? Or is it necessary to show possible truths in society so that it prepares us for the worst humanity can throw at us. Is violence in movies getting more intense simply in order to shock us into wanting more. And what is the ultimate consequence of this?

SECTION THREE (Writing) 150 words:

Write 150 words expressing your opinon about on-screen violence on television and cinema.

(To help you with this writing exercise here is an ebook you can download AMAZON DOWNLOAD)

GRAMMAR TO USE:

Use as many adjectives as you can think of to describe your positive or negative feelings about on-screen violence on television or cinema. ADJECTIVE LIST DOWNLOAD >>> Top-Adjectives

MUSIC FROM THE MOVIE