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why_does_film_matter | |
File Size: | 2100 kb |
File Type: | why does film matter |
*YOUR TEXTBOOKS Looking at Movies: An Introduction to Film and The Art of Watching Films by CAN BE FOUND ON GOOGLE CLASSROOM. Chapters from other texts can be found under Unit 1.
See the glossary in your text for terms for each unit. There are many links and ppts to explain the terms so you can see them. Film Studies is a visual art so you will need to know the term and see it in the film. Other times you will hear the term. Use the links to watch clips that show you the term in action.
BELOW ARE LINKS TO ALL THE TERMS YOU MIGHT LEARN THIS YEAR:
BELOW ARE LINKS TO ALL THE TERMS YOU MIGHT LEARN THIS YEAR:
1st Quarter/Unit 1:
- Questions about Movies and AFI list (individual)
- Complete a Film Review for any film (individual)
- Read Chapters 1,2, and 4. Take notes and answer questions (individual)
- Know Terms, View PPTs, and Watch DVD Tutorials
- Screening Films in class. Stay awake, take notes, and complete an analysis sheet for each film shown (partners fine)
- Compare Run Lola Run to Groundhog Day (partners)
- Unit 1 Homework Project: Narration, Structure, and Meaning (Individual or groups of 4 max)
- Essay Test (individual)
- Quizzes? Multiple-choice Test?
- Extra Credit (partners ok)
UNIT 1: Narrative Structure, Form, and Content (Chapters 1, 2, and 4)
Documents from the first week:
questions_for_discussing_a_film.pdf | |
File Size: | 106 kb |
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_film_review_questions__1_.pdf | |
File Size: | 58 kb |
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survey_film_studies__1_.pdf | |
File Size: | 38 kb |
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100movies_afi___1_.pdf | |
File Size: | 741 kb |
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unit_1_chapters_1_2_and_4.pdf | |
File Size: | 46 kb |
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unit_1_analysis_sheet__narrative_form_and_content.pdf | |
File Size: | 85 kb |
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film_studies_homework_one.pdf | |
File Size: | 93 kb |
File Type: |
Why Take Film Studies in High School?
Advocacy for Film
High school film teachers
aim to reel in their students
Film classes are offered in universities.
But they are often shortchanged at the high school level.
By Brian Libby | January 06, 2004 edition
When Gwen Bailey began teaching film last year at Richard Lindblom High School on Chicago's south side, she noticed that several of her students were barely passing their other classes. To Ms. Bailey's surprise, however, many not only earned an 'A' in film, but went on to improve their other grades, too. "It's because film is an excellent way to examine life," says Bailey, who shows films like "Citizen Kane" and "Rashomon."
Despite movies' dual role as a popular art form and a useful tool for academic study at colleges and universities, such educational opportunities remain rare in high schools. For example, Bailey estimates only about one or two of Chicago's more than 50 public high schools offer film study courses.
"I had to work for a couple years to get our English department to let me do it," Bailey recalls, "because they thought,
'We don't know if this is substantive enough.'
" Part of the problem is perception. Not only is film often not taken as seriously as literature, but in schools there is frequently a perception that showing movies amounts to lazy teaching, allowing instructors to read a newspaper in the back of the class while the VCR does his or her job.
"It is definitely an uphill battle for teachers to get their principals to acknowledge that film is a good educational tool," says Naomi Walker of Cinema/Chicago, a branch of the Chicago International Film Festival that offers screenings to public high schools.
While film classes remain the exception to the rule, organizations like Cinema/Chicago reflect a growing number of partnerships between high schools and arts organizations that give students more opportunity to see classic films and to use film as an educational tool in other courses.
In Los Angeles, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences works with the nonprofit Urban Education Partnership in Los Angeles to provide educators with tools for teaching students how to evaluate media. In Seattle and Portland, like Chicago, those cities' international film festivals offer opportunities for youth to see classic films such as "Citizen Kane," "8 1/2," and "2001: A Space Odyssey.
" James Gleason, who teaches film at Cleveland High School in Reseda, Calif., near Los Angeles, says teens yearn for better movies, even if they don't know it. Although students are initially resistant to older films, particularly ones filmed in black and white or in a foreign language with subtitles, Gleason is encouraged to see that good movies still captivate.
"After 20 minutes of watching 'It Happened One Night' or 'Citizen Kane,' they're totally into it," he says. "It takes them a while to get up to that new level of watching and understanding movies, but then you really begin to see a change in film literacy."
Yet those who advocate for film study face a difficult task because high school students already face a challenge learning the basics. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for example, US high school seniors ranked below students from Canada and most of Europe. If students can't master established fields of study, ask some, how can we devote any of the school day to teaching them about movies?
Meanwhile, the federal No Child Left Behind education act has required greater emphasis on testing. This, in turn, makes the value of learning film literacy harder to quantify. "How can we argue that film is good for them?" asks Walker. "Is this preparing them for a test? No. It's a tough argument."
At the same time, the very nations that America is trying to catch up to in achievement are less likely to discount film studies. "Elsewhere in the developed world, media and film are considered very important texts for students to be able to comprehend and critique," explains Dennis Palmer Wolf, director of Rethinking Accountability Initiative at Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
"Almost any European nation either has explicit courses in those topics or makes them an integral part of the language-learning courses."
Wolf points out that film classes not only teach students about cinema itself, but also give them skills for critiquing media images.
"Take political ads, for example, the ways in which a cameraman chooses to frame and block the speakers in a political debate," says Wolf. "All of those are ways of controlling information.
" The hope, then, is that these critical skills will be carried on beyond classroom screenings of "Rashomon" or "Vertigo" into the real world - making kids more savvy observers.
At Catlin Gabel school in Portland, Ore., for example, teacher Tony Stocks assigns his students to review a movie in theaters or on video using the critical tools they've been taught. Some recent films include "Catch Me if you Can," "Whale Rider," "Matchstick Men," "Adaptation," and "Once Upon a Time in Mexico."
"It sometimes proves a real revelation to them," he says. "They realize how much is happening on the screen, or in some cases, how little."
"I want them to be demanding about something that's going to take two and a half hours of their lives to look at," agrees Bailey. "I want them to be discriminating when they sit down in front of the screen."
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE FROM ANOTHER EDUCATOR:
Over the five years I taught high school, I came to the realization that all my students were illiterate.
OK, that's hyperbole. They could all read books — but when it came to reading images, none of them knew montage from mise en scène. This, of course, despite a world that has never placed a greater value on visuals.
I have a proposal to fix this: High schools should make taking a course in film studies mandatory for graduation.
This suggestion will likely fill some of you with dread — dark visions of teachers falling asleep while the latest Transformers movie buzzes in the background. I often heard from parents and educators alike: Why do students need to take a class to learn how to watch movies?
It's true, of course, that anyone can watch movies without the kind of training you need to read books. But students should (hopefully) know how to read a sentence well before high school — what high school literature classes teach is how to read critically. High school film classes would do the same thing, only for images.
For the last four years of my teaching career, I taught a film history elective once a year. As we went along, learning about Black Maria and the Hays code and watching films from each era, we would also gradually build our tool kit for analyzing the films we watched, studying how to dissect form as well as absorb content.
The watershed moment in every class came near the beginning. After tracing the developing complexity of films through the silent era, we would take two paradigmatic silent features — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariand The Battleship Potemkin -- and tear them apart as a workshop in understanding images. As the classes painstakingly examined the expressionist sets and grotesque makeup of Caligari, they began to grasp the emotional response and atmosphere that can be created through effective mise en scène. Even more revelations awaited in Battleship Potemkin, where they learned to identify how the director Eisenstein would place the camera for dramatic or emotional effect, and the power of cuts to build tension and plant ideas in your mind.
The idealist in me thinks this alone should be enough to justify my proposal. In a perfect world, every teenager would have the ability to grasp just how dizzying Buster Keaton's leaps from frame to frame are inSherlock, Jr., and would fully appreciate the sumptuous slow motion of Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love. In our results-oriented education system, however, where every decision must be justified through quantifiable impact on future productivity, I don't hold out much hope for convincing people that students should spend their time transforming into mini aesthetes.
Let me offer a more practical reason, then.
Students need the skills they would learn in a film studies class because our society's lack of visual literacy has handicapped our critical thinking and turned us into gullible consumers of images. In my more traditional role as a history teacher, I slowly learned the sheer faith students had in visual data. Photographs, charts, and even paintings were treated as bearers of indisputable (if frequently mysterious) facts, not rhetorically charged pieces of persuasion. Of course, you can see this in adults too, from the unquestioned circulation of clearly photoshopped images on Facebook to the utter credulity with which the stories offered to us by cable television news are accepted.
There would be many challenges in implementing mandatory film studies in high schools, but the biggest — a lack of instructors qualified to teach it — only points urgently to the need.
High school film teachers
aim to reel in their students
Film classes are offered in universities.
But they are often shortchanged at the high school level.
By Brian Libby | January 06, 2004 edition
When Gwen Bailey began teaching film last year at Richard Lindblom High School on Chicago's south side, she noticed that several of her students were barely passing their other classes. To Ms. Bailey's surprise, however, many not only earned an 'A' in film, but went on to improve their other grades, too. "It's because film is an excellent way to examine life," says Bailey, who shows films like "Citizen Kane" and "Rashomon."
Despite movies' dual role as a popular art form and a useful tool for academic study at colleges and universities, such educational opportunities remain rare in high schools. For example, Bailey estimates only about one or two of Chicago's more than 50 public high schools offer film study courses.
"I had to work for a couple years to get our English department to let me do it," Bailey recalls, "because they thought,
'We don't know if this is substantive enough.'
" Part of the problem is perception. Not only is film often not taken as seriously as literature, but in schools there is frequently a perception that showing movies amounts to lazy teaching, allowing instructors to read a newspaper in the back of the class while the VCR does his or her job.
"It is definitely an uphill battle for teachers to get their principals to acknowledge that film is a good educational tool," says Naomi Walker of Cinema/Chicago, a branch of the Chicago International Film Festival that offers screenings to public high schools.
While film classes remain the exception to the rule, organizations like Cinema/Chicago reflect a growing number of partnerships between high schools and arts organizations that give students more opportunity to see classic films and to use film as an educational tool in other courses.
In Los Angeles, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences works with the nonprofit Urban Education Partnership in Los Angeles to provide educators with tools for teaching students how to evaluate media. In Seattle and Portland, like Chicago, those cities' international film festivals offer opportunities for youth to see classic films such as "Citizen Kane," "8 1/2," and "2001: A Space Odyssey.
" James Gleason, who teaches film at Cleveland High School in Reseda, Calif., near Los Angeles, says teens yearn for better movies, even if they don't know it. Although students are initially resistant to older films, particularly ones filmed in black and white or in a foreign language with subtitles, Gleason is encouraged to see that good movies still captivate.
"After 20 minutes of watching 'It Happened One Night' or 'Citizen Kane,' they're totally into it," he says. "It takes them a while to get up to that new level of watching and understanding movies, but then you really begin to see a change in film literacy."
Yet those who advocate for film study face a difficult task because high school students already face a challenge learning the basics. In the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) for example, US high school seniors ranked below students from Canada and most of Europe. If students can't master established fields of study, ask some, how can we devote any of the school day to teaching them about movies?
Meanwhile, the federal No Child Left Behind education act has required greater emphasis on testing. This, in turn, makes the value of learning film literacy harder to quantify. "How can we argue that film is good for them?" asks Walker. "Is this preparing them for a test? No. It's a tough argument."
At the same time, the very nations that America is trying to catch up to in achievement are less likely to discount film studies. "Elsewhere in the developed world, media and film are considered very important texts for students to be able to comprehend and critique," explains Dennis Palmer Wolf, director of Rethinking Accountability Initiative at Brown University's Annenberg Institute for School Reform.
"Almost any European nation either has explicit courses in those topics or makes them an integral part of the language-learning courses."
Wolf points out that film classes not only teach students about cinema itself, but also give them skills for critiquing media images.
"Take political ads, for example, the ways in which a cameraman chooses to frame and block the speakers in a political debate," says Wolf. "All of those are ways of controlling information.
" The hope, then, is that these critical skills will be carried on beyond classroom screenings of "Rashomon" or "Vertigo" into the real world - making kids more savvy observers.
At Catlin Gabel school in Portland, Ore., for example, teacher Tony Stocks assigns his students to review a movie in theaters or on video using the critical tools they've been taught. Some recent films include "Catch Me if you Can," "Whale Rider," "Matchstick Men," "Adaptation," and "Once Upon a Time in Mexico."
"It sometimes proves a real revelation to them," he says. "They realize how much is happening on the screen, or in some cases, how little."
"I want them to be demanding about something that's going to take two and a half hours of their lives to look at," agrees Bailey. "I want them to be discriminating when they sit down in front of the screen."
ANOTHER PERSPECTIVE FROM ANOTHER EDUCATOR:
Over the five years I taught high school, I came to the realization that all my students were illiterate.
OK, that's hyperbole. They could all read books — but when it came to reading images, none of them knew montage from mise en scène. This, of course, despite a world that has never placed a greater value on visuals.
I have a proposal to fix this: High schools should make taking a course in film studies mandatory for graduation.
This suggestion will likely fill some of you with dread — dark visions of teachers falling asleep while the latest Transformers movie buzzes in the background. I often heard from parents and educators alike: Why do students need to take a class to learn how to watch movies?
It's true, of course, that anyone can watch movies without the kind of training you need to read books. But students should (hopefully) know how to read a sentence well before high school — what high school literature classes teach is how to read critically. High school film classes would do the same thing, only for images.
For the last four years of my teaching career, I taught a film history elective once a year. As we went along, learning about Black Maria and the Hays code and watching films from each era, we would also gradually build our tool kit for analyzing the films we watched, studying how to dissect form as well as absorb content.
The watershed moment in every class came near the beginning. After tracing the developing complexity of films through the silent era, we would take two paradigmatic silent features — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligariand The Battleship Potemkin -- and tear them apart as a workshop in understanding images. As the classes painstakingly examined the expressionist sets and grotesque makeup of Caligari, they began to grasp the emotional response and atmosphere that can be created through effective mise en scène. Even more revelations awaited in Battleship Potemkin, where they learned to identify how the director Eisenstein would place the camera for dramatic or emotional effect, and the power of cuts to build tension and plant ideas in your mind.
The idealist in me thinks this alone should be enough to justify my proposal. In a perfect world, every teenager would have the ability to grasp just how dizzying Buster Keaton's leaps from frame to frame are inSherlock, Jr., and would fully appreciate the sumptuous slow motion of Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love. In our results-oriented education system, however, where every decision must be justified through quantifiable impact on future productivity, I don't hold out much hope for convincing people that students should spend their time transforming into mini aesthetes.
Let me offer a more practical reason, then.
Students need the skills they would learn in a film studies class because our society's lack of visual literacy has handicapped our critical thinking and turned us into gullible consumers of images. In my more traditional role as a history teacher, I slowly learned the sheer faith students had in visual data. Photographs, charts, and even paintings were treated as bearers of indisputable (if frequently mysterious) facts, not rhetorically charged pieces of persuasion. Of course, you can see this in adults too, from the unquestioned circulation of clearly photoshopped images on Facebook to the utter credulity with which the stories offered to us by cable television news are accepted.
There would be many challenges in implementing mandatory film studies in high schools, but the biggest — a lack of instructors qualified to teach it — only points urgently to the need.