Coen Brothers

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Hierarchy, bureaucracy and paperwork

Video-based ELT class on bureaucracy featuring clips from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and the Coens’ Hudsucker Proxy

France is a country that suffers somewhat from bureaucracy, excess paperwork and a rigidly hierarchical work culture. These issues are not unrelated. As a fonctionnaire in the Education Nationale I have suffered some absurd bureaucy to prove who I am to my own employer, processes which involve sending paperwork up the chain to be signed by those authorized to do so (i.e., the top brass). The fact that senior members of, say, the Human Resources department do not themselves have the authority to approve such documents is quite revealing: we are talking about a “top-down” culture here. Continue reading →

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Hotel English with Barton Fink

ESL/EFL lesson about hotel experiences, reservations and complaints, based on clips from the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink

Barton Fink is a film situated at the beginning of what I think it is fair to call the Coen Brothers’ heydey in the 1990s, preceding as it does Fargo in 1996 and The Big Lebowski in 1998, a run interrupted only by the fine, but admittedly lesser work The Hudsucker Proxy in 1994. A satire of the Hollywood system in the 1940s,  it came out a year before Robert Altman’s more contemporaneous, multi-protagonist “comeback” movie The Player in 1992. I mention the latter as each film delves into the more soul-destroying undercurrents of Tinseltown with a metafictional twist: the eponymous playwright turned screenwriter in the Coen brothers movie and Tim Robbins’s studio mogul in The Player both – in their quest for Hollywood glory – seem to become literally authors of their own dramas. Continue reading →

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The Hudsucker Proxy

Communicative English class about supply & demand, the production process, marketing and fads

This scene from the Coen Brothers’ 1994 screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy is one of the great comic sequences in cinema history. With a little *chunking* and judicious control of sound it has enormous potential in English as a foreign or second language classes, both for general English and, as we will see, business English. As always, the lesson plan below is just a guide and a starting point for a conversation-based language class. The clip works very well in tandem with any discussions about childhood fads/crazes, as well as the way products are marketed and sold, and can be used as a platform for fun creative activities. Some suggestions for how to follow up on this class feature below. Continue reading →