WORKHOUSES

What was a workhouse?

The workhouse was 19^th century England’s attempt to solve the problem of poverty.
England at this time was a thriving industrial centre, but there was still a huge growth in the population that meant thousands of people lived in poverty.
Hunger, disease and squalor were a part of everyday life for so many. The government decided to try to stop this and make the country a better place for the poor to live in.
Following on from the 1601 Poor Law Act, the 1834 Poor Law Act was passed. In it was the instruction to all unions to build a place in which all their poor could be housed.
Workhouses were originally meant to be places where the poor could work in return for food and board but the workhouse was not a place of comfort for those who were forced to enter them. Instead they were institutions of terror, in which inmates were harshly treated, put to work and made to suffer for being a burden. They were essential being punished for being poor, and the workhouse served as a deterrent to being poor.

What was it like in the workhouse ?

Life was meant to be much tougher inside the workhouse than outside, and the buildings themselves were deliberately grim & intimidating - they were designed to look like prisons. They were full of illness & disease brought about by over-crowding & the starvation diet. When you were admitted to the workhouse, you were stripped, searched, washed & had your hair cropped. You were made to wear a prison-style uniform. Women were at all times kept separate from the men, including their husbands. Children were kept separately from adults - even from their own parents.

History of the workhouse

The first legislation for providing relief to the poor were the Acts of 1572, 1597 & 1601. The 1601 POOR LAW ACT gave responsibility to local parishes for looking after very poor people, who were able to claim assistance from the parish's householders. Poor people were able to live at home when they were getting parish relief. With the 1834 POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT people receiving help from the parish had to live in a workhouse & could no longer live at home. In return for parish relief, they would be made to work hard in the workhouse; which is how the term originated. The Act also allowed parishes to club together into unions responsible for building workhouses & for running them. In the next few years hundreds of workhouses were built at a typical cost to the union of £5,000. By 1926 there were 226,000 inmates & around 600 workhouses with an average population of about 400 inmates each. The 1929 LOCAL GOVERNMENT ACT abolished workhouses & their responsibilites were given to county borough & county councils.

Work in the workhouse

The work inmates were made to do was deliberately tedious. Householders objected to supporting idlers, so work was meant to keep people busy & to subsidise the cost of relief provided by the parish. Work was not always available & there was sometimes local hostility to the workhouse's cheap labour. After rising at 5am (in summer), an inmate worked 7-12am and 1-6pm; which is a 10 hour working day. Bed was 8pm. As well as gardening, cooking & sewing, there was corn milling, sack making, oakum picking (unravelling short lengths of rope) & crushing stone.

Food in the workhouse

Until 1842 all meals were conducted in silence without cutlery. All meals were basic and tasteless, following the same mundane weekly menu. These menus had been established in the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act to ensure that the very basic levels of nutrition were met. H.M. Prisons official ration was 292oz of food per prisoner per week.In the Workhouse this ration was only 137oz (approx.) of food per inmate per week.

The staples were bread, cheese, gruel (thin oatmeal), soup, potatoes, and very rarely meat and bacon. Food was also stripped of everything that might have been attractive to inmates. Especially salt. And in the early workhouses of the 1830s inmates had not even been allowed cutlery.

Résumé:

Les "workhouses" ont été crées officielement en 1834 mais existaient déja depuis 1601.

Ces maisons permettaient au gens pauvres ou incapables de survivre eux même à leurs propres besoins de pouvoir être loger et se nourrir en échange d'un travaille.

Crées pour lutter contre pauvreté, ces institutions terririfiaient la population car les personnes pauvres étaient forcées d'y rentrer. La vie y était très rude et les conditions de travaille extrèmes. Les occupants traités plus comme des "prisonniers" faisaient des journées de 10 heures et avaient beaucoup de corvées. Les conditions de vie étaient rudimentaires. La nourriture était réduite au minimum. Le régime de base était de mise et les proportions les plus réduites possibles.

A leur arrivée, les familles étaient séparées. D'un coté les hommes, de l'autre les femmes et enfin les enfants. Ces maisons éffayaient beaucoup la population et tout le monde redoutait d'y être envoyé.

Imagine either what happend before the scene or after.

Office at Night, Edward Hopper, 1940, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, USA)

Every morning, Rosa, a young secretary, woke-up and took her shower. She did her face very quickly and brushed her hair in the same way. She had her breakfast with one fried egg, sliced bacon, pan cakes with syrup and coffee. Then she went to work like every week day for seven years. In the street, she knew exactly where she went. Rosa came down in the underground and stopped two stations later. She was in New-York, at The Manhattan Center building, ready to work.

Like everyday, she kissed all her collaborators and colleagues. Rosa climbed to the 78th floor and opened her office. She put her jacket on the back of the chair and went taking mails. She put it on director’s desk and went back working.

This long day spent, she was alone because her director was at an appointment to the other end of the town. When he came back, he was so tired that he crossed Rosa's office without even saying “hello”. A little bit angry, Rosa listened to the door to know what had happened. But silence…no voice, no noise. A little bit scared to hear nothing, she opened the door fast.

His boss was crying, an torn envelope in his hand.

Suddenly he said:

“ -    Rosa, I think it’s done!

  -      But, What? What is done?

  -     The crisis has overtaken us. The company is going to go bankrupt. I’m so sorry… 

  -     I’m going to be unemployed.”

Rosa took her résumé in the drawer. She didn’t understand what was happening. She just thought to kill herself at this moment.

Life is bad sometimes, precisely during crises.

EDWARD HOPPER

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Biography:

Edward Hopper was a pioneer in picturing the 20th-century American scene. Hopper was born on 22 July 1882, in the small Hudson River town of Nyack, New York State.

At seventeen, he entered at New York school for illustrators; then from 1900 he studied for about 6 years at the New York School of Art.

Between 1906 and 1910 he made three long visits to Europe, spent mostly in France but also in other countries. In Paris he worked on his own, painting outdoor city scenes, and drawing Parisian types.

Back home, from about 1908 he began painting aspects of the native scene that few others attempted, but his pictures were too honest to be popular; they were rejected regularly by academic juries and failed to sell. In 1915 Hopper took up etching.

Between 1919 and 1923, his prints presented everyday aspects of America with utter truthfulness, fresh direct vision, and an undertone of intense feeling. For the first time, they were admitted to the big exhibitions, won prizes, and attracted attention from critics.

So, he began in the early 1920s to paint more and with a new assurance.

In 1924 he married the painter Josephine Verstille Nivison. Both of them preferred a life of the utmost simplicity and frugality, devoted to painting and country living.

After his breakthrough in the 1920s, he received lots of honours and awards, and admiration from both traditionalists and the avant-garde.

He died in his Washington Square studio on May 15 1967.

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His work:

His works convey a particular mood, often characterized by isolation, detachment, and melancholy. Hopper's subject matter were: the city, the small town and the country. His city scenes were concerned not with the busy life of streets and crowds, but with the city itself, a huge complex of steel, glass… When one or two women do appear, they seem to embody the loneliness of so many city dwellers. Light plays an essential role. Often his city interiors at night are seen through windows. This interplay of lights of differing colours and intensities turns familiar scenes into pictorial dramas. His landscapes have a crystalline clarity and often a poignant sense of solitude and stillness. It was this combination of love and revealing truth that gave his portrait of contemporary America its depth and intensity.

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Hopper and the cinema :

Comparisons can be drawn between the style and characteristics of many of Hopper's works, and the visual style of Film Noir. He loves cinema. The cinema returned the compliment by turning to him for stylistic inspiration, and film noir became his great love and the area of his chief influence. He created a world of loneliness, isolation and quiet anguish that we call Hopperesque. Hopper's influence became, consciously or unconsciously, pervasive. Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) was a crucial point where the sinister verticality of Hopper's mansard-roofed house in his first acclaimed painting House by the Railroad (1925), was combined with the unprepossessing horizontality of his numerous paintings of motels. Not surprisingly Hopper has been a major influence on the road movie.

House by the Railroad, 1925, Museum of Modern Art

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THE ISLAND

Official site

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Director :

Michael Bay

Release Date :

17 august 2005 (France)

Genre :

Action, Sci-Fi, Thriller

Awards :

3 nominations

Cast :

Ewan McGregor 

Scarlett Johansson 

Djimon Hounsou 

Sean Bean

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Trailer :

Summary :

In 2019, Lincoln Six Echo and Jordan Two Delta are best friends in a repressive and intriguing society, where everybody expects to win the lottery. The prize is to move to a paradisiacal island outside the domes that protect the dwellers against the contaminated environment. Jordan won the lottery, and Lincoln accidentally found the scary truth behind the Utopian award: they are clones, generated to provide replacement organs and parts to the owners of insurance policy. He is going to find a plan to escape with his best friend who’s in danger.

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Impression :

I really enjoyed this movie. There is a very good cast. Ewan McGregor is great as Lincoln, playing the role with curiosity and bravery. The action sequences and special effects were spectacular. “The Island” is about the possibility, in the not too distant future (2019), of a clone farm, for lack of a better term. It was a very original, amazing and intriguing movie. Really exciting too. It was so strange because they knew the ocean, grass, insects, and all of the worlds wonders only from pictures and looking outside the window. None of them have ever smelled fresh air. The only drive in their lives is that some day they could move to the last habitable island in the world. But one clone will become intelligent, like true human, and he is going to know the truth about them.

It was a great movie because from start to end it leaves you guessing. It was a fantasy, but keep in mind a fantasy is something that could happen. After, you can expect just one thing: that it can’t happen.

This is Science Fiction at its best.

Pretty to watch.

Enjoy !

You have been the choice

STRANGER THAN FICTION

Trailer

Soudtrack

Introduction :

Firstly we see a block of flats which is probably located in the suburbs. The sky is faintly lit because the scene takes place in the morning.

Secondly, the camera zooms up over the roves and arrives in a bedroom where blinds are opened. There a man is sleeping. Next to him, on the bedside table there is his wristwatch which suddenly rings because it’s quarter past seven (it's time to wake-up)

So, first the man stops the alarm clock, then he wakes up, next he goes to the bathroom to brush his teeth. He is so methodical that he keeps counting every brush strokes. Thirty-eight times back and forth, thirty-eight times up and down.

To finish, he gets dressed with formal clothes, he is fastidious consequently he ties his tie with a perfect single Windsor knot. He is a robot-like. He is fussy too because he cleans his jacket at the last minute.

He must be an accountant or a tax-man.

Suddenly he hears the narration of his life in off. So he is extremely worried because it’s so strange. He is surprise too. He doesn’t understand what happened; he asks if nobody is there.