The name is absent

Appendix 3.2: Sample films - synopses and character lists

Goldfinger uκ 64

A HARD DAY'S NIGHT dir Richard Lester UK 1964

This film, shot in black and white and set in contemporary UK,
is essentially a vehicle for the hugely successful pop music
group, the Beatles. In the course of delivering (in the days
before pop videos) live action footage of the four stars the
film also offers an acutely observed portrait of London in the
early sixties. Much of it clearly entailed location shooting
and there are various 'typical' scenes such as the interior of
a pub, the exterior of a junk shop, the Thames towpath. The
documentary mode is also suggested in the camera and lighting
techniques used, familiar from British documentary itself as
well as from current affairs programmes on contemporary
television. A considerable amount of information is offered,
between the lines as it were, about the preparation involved
in a television show, and about twenty four hours in the life
of a successful band. In this sense the film conforms to a
familiar postwar strain in British film making where the
expectation that a film should inform as well as entertain is
satisfied. On the other hand many cinematic 'tricks' are
employed: while this playfulness with the formal possibilities
of film seems to be a hallmark of British cinema in the 1960s
(cf, in this sample, Tom Jones) it is also reminiscent of much
earlier forms of the absurd in cinema, recalling the work of

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