A complete package of lessons on 'Pan's Labyrinth' - context, close analysis and student acitivities

Note some of these resources require a copy of Tanya Jones’ book, ‘Studying Pan’s Labyrinth’ (Auteur, 2010).

This is the package of resources I created during the lockdown to teach the Guillermo del Toro film, ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006). This was created for the Eduqas AS/A-level specification. It was the one text that we had no time to cover in lessons so this assumes no teacher input. The pack includes:

1. A very detailed PowerPoint with short audio clips for most of the slides, activities to complete and hyperlinks to other sites so that it could work as a stand-alone activity without teacher input. The PowerPoint covers:

• Social and historical contextual material related to the film;
• Del Toro as an auteur;
• Production context

1. Two activities focusing on two scenes in the movie: the opening scene and the first quest. These again include audio commentaries on the scenes, screenshots, list of key terminology to guide the annotation of the scenes.

2. I have three further resources: cloze exercises to consolidate understanding of narrative/genre and all aspects of film language: mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound and editing. These lengthy cloze exercises draw heavily on Tanya Jones book, ‘Studying Pan’s Labyrinth’ (Auteur, 2010). You would need a copy of this book to complete the cloze exercise.

I scanned and sent my group sections of the book as they didn’t have access to physical copies during lockdown. For copyright reasons I can’t include these. Page numbers refer to pages from the small A5 version of this text.

N.B The Context PowerPoint includes egregious movie quotes. (See below).

As a nod to the idea of ‘Easter eggs’ in movies, and to try to get my students to engage with the text, I embedded famous movie quotations into the PowerPoint and set up a little competition if they could spot them they could win a real Easter egg. Quotes and movies cited listed below in case you want to do the same or just wondered why I shoehorned these quotations into the presentation!

There’s no place like home.” Wizard of Oz

“I’m the king of the world!” Titanic

“I am your father.” – Star Wars

“They may take our lives, but they’ll never take our freedom!” Braveheart

“I’ll be back.” terminator

Go ahead, make my day." Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry?

“Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Godfather

“I see dead people.” Sixth Sense

Every time a bell rings an angel gets his wings’ It’s a Wonderful Life

This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Casablanca.