Moving Image Education

The film The Sandman is a very useful film in secondary English. It can be used to discuss the process of adaptation of written texts to the screen (the film is a loose adaptation of an E.T. Hoffman story), and also used to introduce the concepts of allusion and homage - how texts reflect the influence of other texts.

The inspiration for the film comes from a very short section of the (much longer) Hoffman story:

...I at length asked the old woman who acted as my youngest sister's attendant, what sort of a man he was - the Sandman? "Why, Nathanael, darling, don't you know?" she replied. "Oh! he's a wicked man, who comes to little children when they won't go to bed and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes, so that they jump out of their heads all bloody; and he puts them in a bag and takes them to the half-moon as food for his little ones; and they sit in the nest and have hooked beaks like owls, and they pick naughty little boys' and girls' eyes out with them." After this I formed in my own mind a horrible picture of the cruel Sandman. When anything came blundering up the stairs at night I trembled with fear and dismay

This is an example of how a small detail of a written text can be the spark which inspires a filmmaker to create a new twist on the tale.

discuss

Why do you think this section caught the eye of filmmakers as the starting inspiration for a film? Before showing the film to the class, ask them in groups to come up with a synopsis for a short film inspired by the above After watching the film The Sandman in class you could discuss what the filmmakers added to the film which isn't found on the text. Give your class short passages of longer texts which have a lot of interesting visual images and ask them in groups to devise a synopsis/storyboard for a film inspired by their snippet of text.

allusion and homage

Novels, plays and poems do not exist in isolation, but are influenced by works of literature from the past. For example, the Harry Potter series reflects the influence of previous children's novels such as Tom Brown's School Days in the depiction of boarding school life, Roald Dahl's Matilda with the Dursley family, and Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch series.

Films are no exception, and with over a century of high developed film culture to draw on it's no surprise to see film directors reflect the influence of what they have seen in their work. Direct references such as these are known as allusions or homages. The Sandman is very clearly influenced by German Expressionist cinema in the use of framing, character movement and set design.

Another clear influence in shot types is the films of Alfred Hitchcock. The forward zoom/reverse tracking shot used at (time, or embed that clip) was first used in major film in the opening sequence to Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)) to depict the lurching sensation of the main character as he hangs from the roof of a tall building; also the top shot above is also a clear homage to similar framing in Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)), where the top shot is used to conceal the identity of the body being carried by main character Norman Bates.

This top shot is an homage to Hitchcock's Psycho (1960)