Friday, December 11, 2009

What wikipedia says about the movie

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (film)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Mark Herman
Produced by	David Heyman
Written by	Screenplay: Mark Herman Novel: John Boyne
Starring	Asa Butterfield Vera Farmiga David Thewlis Jack Scanlon David Hayman Rupert Friend
Music by	James Horner
Cinematography	Benoît Delhomme
Editing by	Michael Ellis
Studio	BBC Films Heyday Films
Distributed by	Miramax Films
Release date(s)	United Kingdom: September 12, 2008 Israel: October 30, 2008 United States: November 7, 2008
Running time	94 minutes
Country	United Kingdom United States
Language	English
Budget	$12.5 million
Gross revenue	$40,030,299

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in the United States) is a 2008 British drama film directed by Mark Herman and produced by David Heyman, starring Asa Butterfield, Jack Scanlon, David Thewlis, and Vera Farmiga. It is based on the book of the same name by Irish novelist John Boyne.^[1]

The film tells the story of Bruno, a nine-year-old German boy who leads a rather comfortable life in Berlin during the World War II. His father is a high ranking Nazi SS officer, but things change when the family has to move due to his father's new post. In his innocence, Bruno sees the nearby concentration camp as a "farm" and wonders why its inhabitants are always wearing striped pyjamas. Eventually Bruno becomes friends with a Jewish boy his own age who lives on the other side of the gate.

Read the full text

Friday, November 13, 2009

Chapter 1-2

J. BOYLE :THE BOY WITH THE STRIPED PYJAMAS. Introduction.
1. Look at the cover of the book. List the items you can see on it. Use specific vocabulary.

2. Just by looking at the book cover, what sort of story can you imagine? Write down a few lines about what you may expect.

3. «Lines may divide us, but hope will unite us.»
«A story of innocence in a world of ignorance.»
Comment these quotations in a few lines. What do they mean? Can you draw a connection with the picture on the book cover?

Chapter 1. Bruno makes a discovery
Summary: write 4-6 lines to sum up chapter one.

Vocabulary:
p.1 : a maid: une servante, une domestique
to bow: faire une courbette, révérance
wooden crates: des cageots
to muster: marmonner
to bundle: faire son baluchon, paqueter
p.2: whether .... or: si .... ou .... si
though: cependant
the butler: le maître d' (hôtel)
=~ chef des domestiques
p.3: the rims: les bords
to bother: tracasser, ennuyer
a Hopeless Case: un cas désespéré
p.4: to nod: hocher de la tête, approuver
mucky: sale, boueux
hands of a clock: les aiguilles (montre,
pendule)
to steer clear of : se tenir à l'écart de
a smock: une blouse (de travail)
p.6: slanted : en biais, inclinées
the frame: le cadre
p.7: the rules: les règles
to splutter: bredouiller
to munch: mâcher
p.8: that would be telling:
ça serait trop en dire
to snap at: rembarrer, rétorquer
p.9: the bannister: la rampe
a whooshing sound: dans un souffle ,
qui fait zoum
Questions on the text.
1.Write down the name of the characters who appear in Ch.1
2.What is special with the way they are spellt?
3.Write down two expressions that Bruno uses which are specific to him.
4.What does the packing mean?
5.What is going to happen to Bruno?
6.What do the capital letters at the beginning of Mother, Father, Fury mean?
7.Who might Gretel be?
8.Who tells the story?
9.How do you know? Give a few examples which illustrates your saying.
10.What social class does Bruno belong to ? Find a few examples which illustrate your point.
11.Where does the story take place?
12.Who are Karl, Daniel, and Martin?
13. What moment of the year does the story take place?
14. What does he like best in the house?
Chapter 2+3: The New House The Hopeless Case
Summary: write 6-7 lines to sum up chapter two and three

Vocabulary:
p.12 : nooks and crannie: des recoins
to stroll:se promener, se balader
overspilling: qui débordent
to feel dizzy: avoir le vertige
p.13: frothy: mousseux
p.14: to chalk it up to experience: le mettre sur le compte de l'expérience
p.15: foreseeable: prévisible, proche
p.16: cubby holes: cagibi, débarras
a chest of drawers: une commode
full to the brim: plein à ras bord
p.17: a creak: un craquement
p.22: to mistake: se tromper
p.23: to spin around: tourner autour
p.24: to acknowledge: reconnaître
a bedspread: un couvre-lit
p.25: with a thud: avec un bruit sourd
p.26: hollow: creux
p.27: a driveway: une allée
ripe for: mûr pour
p.28: to swallow: avaler
p.29: pigtails: des couettes, des nattes

Answer the questions below.
1.What adjectives are used to decribe the new house?
2.What is Bruno's worry?
3.Complete the chart below.
House in Berlin
New House

4.List the name of vegetables Bruno mentions and write down their translation in French.
5.What are the other characters like?
6.Draw a portrait of the Young Officer.
7.What did Bruno see from the window in the ceiling? Do we know?
8.What do we know about Gretel? Draw her portrait.
9.What does « OutWith » stand for?
10. Creative writing: write down what you imagine Bruno has seen from his window. Use specific vocabulary. Write a minimum of 12 lines. Use your imagination.
Chapter 4:What they saw through the window:
Summary: Write 4-6 lines to sum up chapter four.

Vocabulary:
p.31 : to tend: s'occuper de
a misty moor: une lande brumeuse
p.33: to spread out: s'étendre
p.34: suitable: qui convient
to peer around: regarder autour
p.35: barb wires bales: les rouleaux de barbelés.
stacks: les tas
p.36: chain gang :travail en équipe, enchainés, pour du travail pénible
wheelbarrows: brouettes
to be spotted: être aperçus
crutches: les béquilles
p.37: huddled together : serrés les uns contre les autres
to lunge: bouger par accoup
filthy: sale
Answer the questions below.
1. « They were everyone » . What does it mean?
2. What else do we learn about Gretel.
3. What do Bruno and Gretel's questions about the countryside show ?
4. Describe the relationship between the brother and sister.
5. How far is the camp?
6. How many people could they see?
7.What had all these people in common? What connection can you draw with the title?
8. Written activity: what do you think is going to happen? Write down 10-15 lines telling what is going to happen in the next chapters.

Chapter 5:Out of Bonds at All Times
Summary: Write 4-6 lines to sum up chapter five.

Vocabulary:
p.31 : to load: charger
a truck: un camion
p.40: to frown: froncer les sourcils
to shrug: hausser les épaules
p.42: in awe: qui a peur de ed: tend: s'occuper de
p.43: efficiency: efficacité
laughter: éclat de rire
in a row: en rangs
p.44: a handful: une poignée (de)
p.45: gloomy: sombre
mahogany: acajou (bois)
to give a hug: tenir dans ses bras
slobbering : baveux
p.46: overawed: intimidé
to clamber: grimper
p.48: tears welling up: les larmes lui monter
to disappoint: décevoir
p.49: to argue: discuter, répliquer
a gaze:un regard
p.52: to blink: cligner des yeux.
Answer the questions below.
1. How long has passed since they arrived in their new place?
2. What does the flashback of Bruno's arrival in the new place tell us?
3. How did they travel?
4. What year are we?
5. On p.44, what are « the two words that Bruno had been taught to say »?
6. List adjectives that Bruno uses to describe the new place. What do they tell the reader?
Listening comprehension. Watch the extract and answer the questions below.

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Chapter menu

Chapter 20 p.214-216

Chapter 19 p.200-213

Chapter 18 p.193-199

Chapter 17 p.186-192

Chapter 16 p. 176-185

Chapter 15 p.161-175

Chapter 14 p.150-160

Chapter 13 p.134-149

Chapter 12 p.126-133

Chapter 11 p.116-125

Chapter 10 p.104-115

Chapter 9 p.95-103

Chapter 8 p.86-94

Chapter 7 p.67-85

Chapter 6 p.55-66

Chapter 5 p.39-55 (2 students)

Chapter 4 p.30-38

Chapter 3 p.21-29

Chapter 2 p.11-20

Chapter 1 p.1-10

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Book review from the Guardian

Educating

Bruno

The slow revelation of detail in David Fickling's Holocaust story for children, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, impresses Kathryn Hughes

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas
by John Boyne

Bruno is a nine-year-old from Berlin who has three best Friends For Life, an elder sister who is a Hopeless Case, and an ambition to be an Explorer. One day in 1943 someone called The Fury decides that Bruno's soldier father is to be posted, together with the whole family, to somewhere called Out-With, which is far away from Berlin, and quite possibly not in Germany at all. The new house is bleak and shabby, and from one side of it you can see a high-wired compound inhabited by sad-looking people in striped pyjamas.
The great strength of Bruno's narrative is the way it is mired in the parochial preoccupations of a nine-year-old. While he is vaguely interested in what the striped-pyjama people do all day, his really righteous anger is reserved for Lieutenant Kotler, a supercilious 19-year-old on his father's staff, who insists on ruffling his hair and calling him "little man". Likewise, it is not until he needs an ally in his campaign to get the household shifted back to Berlin that Bruno bothers to wonder about Maria, the invisible maid who has been folding his clothes and running his baths for as long as he can remember.
For the older reader, of course, Bruno's innocence comes to stand for the wilful refusal of all adult Germans to see what was going on under their noses in the first half of the 1940s. For the younger reader, perhaps even as young as Bruno himself, the slow revelation of detail - the striped-pyjama people are very thin, they aren't allowed to leave the compound, they used to live somewhere else entirely - becomes an education in real time of the horrors of "Out-With", known to the grown-ups as Auschwitz.
Given that he lives in a house of partial views and suppressed conversations, the agent of Bruno's enlightenment comes, naturally enough, from beyond its four walls. Exploring the perimeter of the camp he encounters a boy from the striped-pyjama side called Schmuel. Over the next few months the two children swap life stories through the mesh fence. Schmuel explains how he and his family have been transported here from a ghetto in Poland. Bruno counters with stories of the niceness of his life in Berlin and the stray, worried thought that next time he should probably bring his new friend some food. (He tries, but since being an Explorer is such hungry work, he has the unfortunate habit of polishing off the bread and chocolate before arriving at their rendezvous.)
One of the great triumphs of this book is the way that John Boyne manages the shift in register from the intensely concrete inner world of his child narrator - a place where an elder sister's pigtails or the corner of a bedroom window are branded on your inner eye - to something that borders on fable. It turns out, for instance, that both Bruno and Schmuel were born on the same day, at a stroke turning them into narrative doubles and psychic twins. And then there is the oddness of Auschwitz security being so lax that a child prisoner could make a weekly date with the commandant's son without anyone noticing.
Any slight bumps in tone are smoothed away as the narrative definitively slips anchor and moves into its final urgent stages. Schmuel's father goes missing inside the camp, and Bruno, with his Explorer credentials, insists on helping to find him. Putting on a spare pair of striped pyjamas and scrambling under a loose piece of netting, Bruno is finally able to join Shmuel on the other side of the fence and becomes lost for ever.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a small wonder of a book. Bruno's education is conducted slowly, through a series of fleeting social encounters rather than by plunging him into a nightmare landscape. A scraped knee, an attack of nits, a slammed door - these are the moments through which he is led to a deeper knowledge of the world beyond the wire fence. And yet there is nothing muffled or held back about Bruno's fate. When, in the book's final scene, the two small boys walk hand in hand into the gas chamber, they do so not as narrative symbols but as two flesh-and-blood children caught up in a particular historical moment, one that cannot be told too often or too young.

Movie review

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/boy_in_the_striped_pajamas/

Looking behind the fence

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

Buy The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas from Amazon.co.uk or fromAmazon.com

One of the most moving films of the year, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamasis a powerful, haunting story about the horrors of the Holocaust. Unlike the vast majority of such stories, however, it doesn’t allow the audience to view events through the eyes of a Jewish character. Instead, we see things from a German perspective. But this is not a revisionist telling of the story, let alone a justification of the Final Solution, but a fresh look at it through the innocent eyes of eight-year-old Bruno (Asa Butterfield). I asked John Boyne, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, why he had taken this route since it ran the risk of making us feel more sorry for the oppressors than the oppressed. He replied that he felt compelled to write about this subject, keeping the memory of it alive for a new generation, yet could not presume to tell the story through the eyes of a Jewish inmate. Instead, by looking in through the fence from outside, he could ask the important questions. He says:

read the full text at http://www.bethinking.org/culture-worldview/introductory/the-boy-in-the-striped-pyjamas.htm

First person account

It is set in WWII . It is cleverly written and displays the horrors of the holocaust in a subtle way. It keeps ahead of you , until it delivers the last final pages , which are heartrending
I thought it was a great book. It is almost one of a kind , and The author , even though the book being less than 280 pages long , put two years of effort into writing it. I hope you will read it , because it will never become boring

Summary, background and questions

Summary

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is an eight-year-old boy in wartime Berlin. His officer father Ralph (David Thewlis), a loving husband and father as well as a good soldier, has just been promoted and a party is being held to celebrate. He has become an Obersturmbannführer (equivalent to a Lieutenant-Colonel) in the SS, the part of the German forces that were unswervingly loyal to Hitler, earning him the disapproval of his mother. Ralph’s new posting is in Poland – as commandant of a death camp, and he is taking the family with him.

From his bedroom window in their new house, Bruno sees what he assumes is a farm. At first he thinks there will be new friends for him there, but he’s puzzled by how strange the farmers must be, since they all wear striped pyjamas. As the days pass, Bruno becomes increasingly bored, but he is banned from exploring the garden at the back of the house. One day, he grabs a chance to sneak into the garden, through the window of the shed and into the woods beyond. Soon he reaches the camp fence where he meets Schmuel (Jack Scanlon), a Jewish boy of the same age.

Bruno is envious of Schmuel playing games with his friends all day, while he is stuck outside on his own. But as the days unfold, Bruno gradually learns more about the grim reality beyond the wire, with terrible consequences.

Background

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is based on the bestselling novel by John Boyne, first published in 2006. He says,

It goes without saying that a work of fiction set in the time and place of the Holocaust is contentious and any writers who tackle such stories had better be sure of their intentions before they begin. This is perhaps particularly important in the case of a book written for children. For me, a 34-year-old Irish writer, it seemed that the only respectful way to approach the subject was through innocence, with a fable told from the point of view of a rather naive child who couldn’t possibly understand the horrors of what he was caught up in. I believe that this naiveté is as close as someone of my generation can get to the dreadfulness of that period.

Screenwriter/Director Mark Herman obtained the rights to film the book and teamed up with producer David Heyman, who had been wanting to make a film of it for some time. They realised the difficulties of the project because of how sensitive the subject matter is, but both are convinced, like Boyne, that the horror of the Holocaust is something that every generation must understand so that it is never repeated.

Herman and his team were committed to being as authentic as possible to the period and the realities of death camps, although the story is fictional. In fact, the biggest digression from authenticity was having a boy of Schmuel’s age living in the camp: the tragedy is that the vast majority of children arriving at death camps were sent to the gas chambers immediately.

Inevitably, Herman needed to make some changes to the story in adapting it for the film. One significant one was giving a greater role to Elsa (Vera Farmiga), Bruno’s mother, which enabled them to increase the drama in the family, and show how even the commandants' wives didn’t always know what was happening in the camp. Another was the addition of the propaganda film, which was based on a real film purporting to show the camps as wonderful places. The inclusion of this renews Bruno’s faith in his father when it is beginning to waver, and compounds his confusion about the nature of the camp. The ending has also been changed.

Questions for discussion

What did you think of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas? What did you particularly appreciate? How did your emotions change during the course of the story?
If you have read John Boyne’s novel, how do the two compare? Do you think the changes are helpful or unhelpful? Why?
Do you think Boyne was right to look at this subject from the perspective of a naïve young boy? How effective do you think this was in helping you to approach the subject?
How did you feel about Bruno and his family when we first meet them in Berlin? To what extent did you struggle to identify with them because they are a Nazi family?
What did you think of Bruno’s character? What did you like about him? What didn’t you like?
To what extent could you understand Bruno’s adoration of his father, and his struggle to come to terms with what he was discovering?
How did your feelings about Ralph (Bruno’s father) change during the film? Was there a turning point in your feelings? If so, when?
Why do you think Ralph did what he did? How would he have justified it to himself and to others?
What do you think drove Obersturmführer Kotler to be so cruel?
Why does Gretel change? What impact does this have on Bruno?
How would you describe Elsa? Were you surprised that Elsa (Bruno’s mother) was unaware of the true nature of the camp? How would you have responded to this situation if you had been in her position?
‘Elsa doesn’t think. She doesn’t think for herself, she doesn’t think deeply. She chooses to be oblivious, concerning herself only with the safety of her family and her position in society – everything else is beyond her periphery. She’s a sort of accomplice and assistant to her husband’s ideals, his desires, his morals and his ambitions.’ (Vera Farmiga)

To what extent do you think she is morally responsible for what happens?

How would you describe the friendship between Bruno and Schmuel? What makes it a good friendship?
Why did Bruno betray Schmuel? Why was their friendship able to survive this?
How do you think the family, and Ralph in particular, would be impacted by the final scenes of the film?
How do the characters in The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas exemplify Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘the banality of evil’, that evil arises out of the tendency of ordinary people to follow orders, to accept what they’re told by authorities, to conform to the prevailing opinion? How easily could such evil arise in our own society? What might lead to it? What could prevent it?
To what extent is Bruno’s friendship with Schmuel like God’s love for human beings expressed in Jesus Christ’s incarnation? How is it different?
In what sense is this a redemptive story?
Does The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas fill you with despair or hope? Why?
What would you identify as the most important messages from The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas?

taken from http://www.damaris.org/content/content.php?type=1&id=418