SETTING

SETTING

Setting: means the time and place.

PLACE: Billy Elliot is set in Everington, a mining village in County Durham, North East England. (Billy tells the panel at the Ballet school that he is from Everington. )

Everington is an enclosed community under threat. The government is about to close down the mines. It will mean the community will fall apart.

TIME: It is set during the Miner’s strike of 1984-1985. 1) How do we know it’s the 1980s?

2) How do we know there is a mining strike happening?

3) How do we know that it spans over two years?

• Mise en SceneA useful and general term for the staging of a

film; it includes lighting, costume, props, framing, camera movement etc. It is often used to describe an approach to filming where the actors, scenery and props tell us the story with the camera recording it. It is characterised by unobtrusive camera work and minimal editing.

Billy’s Street.Signifiers:Describe what you can see in this snapshot and what it tells you about Billy’s life.

Mrs Wilkinson and Debbie’s street.Describe what you can see in this shot. How does this show that Mrs Wilkinson’s life is different to Billy’s.

The promoter of industry, a hundred years ago, dared to perpetrate the ugliness of my native village. And still more monstrous, promoters of industry today are scrabbling over the face of England with miles and square miles of red-brick “homes”, like horrible scabs. And the men inside these little red rat-traps get more and more helpless, being more and more humiliated, more and more dissatisfied, like trapped rats. D.H Lawrence

This quote is about the mining industry in England over 80 years ago.

- Is his view of the red-brick housing shared by the film-makers? Is some of Jacky and Tony’s aggressiveness explained by the way they are forced to live?