1)Underline 5  similarities between Ken Loach’s life and work  and Gustave Courbet’ s life and work.

2)Choose 5 sentences or more and ask as many questions as you can.

http://lewebpedagogique.com/inthehudson7/2011/09/18/details-in-gustave-courbets-paintings-courtesy-of-the-musee-de-courbet-in-ornans/

http://lewebpedagogique.com/inthehudson7/2012/01/11/musee-courbet-third-presentation-under-construction/

Gustave Courbet was born in  La  Vallée de la Loue (Loue Valley) in Franche-Comté on June 10th 1819 .He studied in Besançon and Paris. His family wanted him to study law but he preferred drawing and painting. He spent a lot of his time in museums copying a huge amount of paintings and eventually stopped studying law. He was politically involved in La Commune and was attributed the destruction of La Colonne Vandôme.

He liked saying “Courbet sans les courbettes”.It means that he was a very straightforward person with a lot of  personality- at times, too much!He wrote many interesting pamphlets and letters to explain his viewpoints  about painting. He didn’t want to work for the Académie des Beaux-Arts and refused any type of promotion linked to the government because he wanted to be a free “thinker”.

He had a son who  died when he was 25 years old .

He was condemned by the French government and put in prison.  He died in exile in Switzerland on December 31st 1877. The debate about his responsibility or the absence of responsibility in the destruction of the Column is  still going on.

His painting has the realism of every day life:

-people  at work

-people coming back from a burial

-ordinary people  at a burial

-hunting scenes with realistic details

-ordinary people by the riverside

-nudes  with realistic details

-portraits and landscapes of his region

The common key-word and denominator between the two  people is  r e a l i s m .

 

Ken Loach was born on June 17th 1936. He started studying law  and eventually became a comedian. He is interested in shooting films and documentaries about  daily life.He becomes  the reference for “docudrama”, a mixture of fiction and documentaries.

He wants to show the difficulties of people in today’s world. The words  which best sum up his work are= dark and gloomy, depressive  and depressed, depression,  gloominess and darkness.

He usually resorts to ordinary people rather than real actors.

He likes shooting films about the working-classes.
  Kes (1969)  is a film about a young boy who trains a kestrel in an ordinary working-class family with very ordinary people.

 

-cinema as a tool for understanding our world

-cinema should inform, educate and high light our human condition

-cinema should stress important elements in people’s daily life=

their problems in their jobs and their family relationships.

-cinema should serve politics, ethics and economy more than entertainment.

– “Humour is essential to our humanity”. “It is a question of  survival.”

– Football is part and parcel of social life in working class families

Regions shot by the artist:

 Sheffield, Manchester-Liverpool , Glasgow.

http://www.visitengland.fr/destinations/find/yorkshire/dg.aspx