Елабужский государственный педагогический университет
Факультет иностранных языков
Контрольная работа № 2
Для студентов III курса заочного отделения.
(практика устной и письменной речи)
Елабуга, 2006
Control Work N 2.
For the third course on topic
“Cinema”.
I. Read, translate the following text and do the exercises given below.
The five most profitable movies of the seventies fit the pattern of gender established in the thirties rather well: a musical, a scientific movie, a gangster film, a horror film and a thriller. The generic patterns of the Golden Age of Hollywood are still very much with us forty years later. But they have undergone some changes.
Within five years after the advent of sound (1926) they had become well established and have remained the dominant models, with variations until today.
The musical and the western are perhaps most clearly defined. The lines which separate gangster from detective and from mystery films are less sharp. Horror films and science fiction sometimes seem to merge, but the war film is always easily identified, as is the usually, romantic, historical adventure. The “women’s” film or “tearjerker” of the forties always clearly identified itself.
Meanwhile, comedy, the broadest of genres, continually throws off new variations - which on closer examination often reveal their roots in earlier comedies.
During the fifties, as Hollywood came to uneasy terms with the new medium of television, most of the classic genres began to feed on themselves. Westerns flourished as never before thanks to the wide screen and widespread use of color. Historical films throve too for the same reason. Other genres, however, deteriorated. The musical came to depend more and more on Broadway for stage adaptations, losing the cinematic originality which had made it one of the superior genres of the thirties. Comedy and the tearjerker met in the person of Doris Day.
Throughout the sixties, as the film industry began to recover its health, the pattern of genres expanded. New variations were developing as filmmaking moved out of the studio on location. Detective film turned into secret-agent (spy) films which usually depended on the conventions of the chase.
The Black Power Movement of the sixties may not have accomplished much politically - still less economically - but culturally it had a truly profound effect. For the first time in the nation’s history, Black people - one-fifth of the nation have been liberated from the cultural ghetto. They are no longer nonpersons in the media world, but seen and heard daily on television and cinema screens.
1). Make up all types of questions to the text for your groupmates to answer.
2). Match the names of the following genres of films and their definitions. Consult a dictionary if you need it.