Teacher's Guide: "A Hard Day's Night"

New York: United Artists Corporation / The Center for Understanding Media, Inc.. Fine. (ca.1972). First Edition. Softcover. [as new, with no discernible wear of any kind]. (B&W photo cover) An uncommon piece of Beatles-related ephemera, consisting of four mimeographed pages (text on one side only), fastened together with a single staple, inside a printed folder with a photo of the Fab Four on the cover. This was issued under the banner of UA:16, the non-theatrical (16mm) distribution arm of United Artists, to assist high school teachers who wanted to use The Beatles' 1964 debut feature film as part of their classroom curricula (these teachers (truncated) would have to have been quite a few degrees cooler than any high school teacher I ever had, with the exception of Mr. Patrick Burns). Its contents are organized under four headings -- The Origin of the Film; The Filmmakers and Their Format; The Attitude of the Film; Suggestions for Usage -- and as might be expected from the imposition of such an overlay onto such an essentially anarchic film, the results (despite their obvious sincerity) are often unintentionally hilarious. One sample: The film, "according to type, may be classified as an entertainment documentary, or as an actuality reenactment, or as all other kinds of contradictory terms. It is unique in its class because it sets out to record the actual face of an entertainment event without losing the distancing effect of cinema artifice." The "Suggestions for Usage" section begins: "A Hard Day's Night is basically an experience. In colleges, it has a validity as a sociological study, but on the high school level it is a chance for a teenager to confront himself and his values. The teenagers presented in the film are actually people, not actors, and as previously described by [Hunter] Davies, 'emotionally, mentally, or sexually excited, foaming at the mouth' etc. Although the film elicited the same reaction, hopefully in the seventies in the classroom it would received a more balanced reaction. The movie itself is an antidote to runaway emotionalism." (NOTE that I have dated this based in part on its inclusion of quotes from Hunter Davies's 1968 biography of The Beatles and Joseph Gelmis's 1970 book "The Film Director as Superstar.") . (Inventory #: 29863)