English assignment
   
topic 1
 
Golding's inspiration is:
pessimistic: human nature is inherently violent,
which reflects the mood of the post-war and
post-Hitler years and comments the 19th optimism
of progress and education.

 
topic 2
This is the 1960's movie of the Nobel Prizewinning novel by William
Golding. Filmed near Puerto Rico in black and white, it faithfully reflects
the novel's themes of good and evil.

A group of young British schoolboys are marooned on a tropical island
during a future nuclear war. There are no adults with the boys, none of
whom is over 13 years old. So the boys attempt to form a society, based
on their school's rules and what little they know of adult rules of
behaviour. One boy is the good one, Ralph, who attempts to form a
democratic society. His nemesis is Jack, who's the party type. He forms
a rival group of hunters, who are not interested in getting rescued.

Eventually the groups split, leaving sensible Ralph isolated. The theme
here is that the boys prefer the excitement of the hunter over that of an
organized group. Then the hunter group rapidly disintegrates into
savagery, all pretense of civilization falls away. At the horrific climax, the
boys kill Simon in a savage attack and set the island on fire.

Golding handles his themes very well. Good and evil. How thin is the line
between civilization and savagery. How anarchy so easily triumphs over
organization. Despair that doing one's best is not enough. Friendship,
loyalty and betrayal.

It is easy to see why this novel is so frequently set as high school study
material. The themes are timeless and reveal more and more nuances
with repeated study.
 
topic 3

Harry Hook's adaptation is not as faithful to the William Golding novel as
you'd wish (they excised the Lord of the Flies dialogue with Simon!)
and because of it, the movie is less allegorical and less resonant. A group
of young men from a military academy are stranded on an island. The
group quickly becomes fractious with a passive section led by Ralph,
trying to get rescued, and a hunter faction, led by Jack, trying to procure
meat and "have fun." Peter Brook's 1963 filming seemed to get closer to
the Darwinist sense of this cultural disintegration. Here, the hunter faction
seems more like Peter Pan's Lost Boys than the bloodthirsty murderers
they are. The performances, particularly young Getty, don't quite carry
the weight of the situation. It's still, however, sobering to slowly watch the
school uniforms traded for war paint, and the little boys turn into little
savages. The colour version doesn't follow the script and allows the boys to swear.
 
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