Images of War | Session

10 – 20 minutes

1. Enlarge the scale of the previous tableaux by having 4 or 5 students working together to construct an image. Working from Henry V, ask them to represent the pot boys who follow the army of Henry and who are killed by the French. 'There's not a boy left alive, and the cowardly rascals that ran from the battle ha'done this slaughter'(Gower 4.7). They can decide how to show them - at work, at play, sleeping or slaughtered. This work should take roughly five minutes and should involve each group in discussion of what they want to show and how they are going to show it.

2. Display the resulting images and ask how they could be changed to suggest other meanings.

Other images/tableaux can be made, some of which can involve the whole group; for example, soldiers of the French army before and then after the battle of Agincourt. If the image is posed as if for a painting or a photograph to hang in the officers' mess, then the group as a whole will need to negotiate the spatial relationships of the individuals, and what it signifies. Who is in the foreground, whose image is more prominent than others? Does the image display the ranks of those shown in it and, if so, how?

Once students have explored directly some of the evaluative decisions that go into constructing and de-constructing static images, they can then establish the link between such images and the electronic processes that produce moving images: the lens of a camera. By using the cardboard frames you have provided, students can crudely but effectively simulate the process by which the lens mediates reality, can themselves select what an audience will and will not see. They can also begin to explore some of the relevant cinematic conventions used in filming Shakespeare.

3. Working in groups of 6 - 8 have half the group allow the other half to construct them as a sculpted image.

4. Once this has been done, have the sculptors use their picture frames to explore 3 different ways of looking at the image, which, whenever possible, show it in different and contrasting ways. Encourage them to look through their frames from different angles - from low down looking up, from over the shoulder of one of the figures in the image, ask \hem to have at least one close-up shot. Get them to compose the image not by moving the sculpture, but my moving the frame. Using the frames in this way illustrates how the camera, controlled by a director, can foreground an individual and marginalise others, can draw attention to a specific aspect of an individual or group, can seem to invite the spectator to see the world of the image from one particular point of view, and can seem to invite the spectator to empathise with one or two selected individuals.