Session 9: Reading Frames and Fractures

3rd Global Conference

Tuesday 14th July 2009 – Thursday 16th July 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Framing Children’s Film Viewing Practices
Brian Finch
College of Education, Massey University, New Zealand

This paper explains and illustrates a conceptual framework for analysing children’s visual literacy practices. The concept of visual literacy that the framework expresses encompasses a range of levels of engagement from literal to critical, but also includes the notion of appreciation. The framework enables analysis of multimodal behaviours such as gestures during viewing. It has the potential to help teachers to acknowledge children’s out-of-school learning about films and to be more informed in planning to build on this knowledge.

The framework draws on ideas from literature education, literacy education and media education. It accepts that viewers need to attend to the ‘grammar’ of visual texts and provides for the ‘appreciation’ of texts as well as the critical analysis of their ideologies. The five level framework does not tightly define appreciation but provides territory where a nexus of thorough and pleasurable engagement with a text, interpretation of it and awareness of its structure can be acknowledged. The framework uses ‘viewing engagement practices’ as an equivalent concept to that in New Literacy Studies of ‘literacy practices’. Using engagement practices allows consideration of a range of multimodal behaviours, such as children’s gestures during viewing, rather than just the verbal or written responses which the metaphor of ‘literacy’ can imply. The framework implies that teachers could build children’s interpretation and appreciation of texts as legitimate goals in themselves, as well as being prerequisites for critical literacy. The framework can function as a pedagogical tool for teachers involved in film education and broader fields of visual literacy.

The framework will be illustrated with examples of the multimodal film viewing practices of 9 and 10 year olds, drawn from doctoral research which investigated the understandings children accumulated through repeat viewing of Harry Potter and the chamber of secrets (Columbus, 2002).

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Visual Literacy in Film: Teaching First Year Undergraduates how to read film using in-class and web-based materials
George S. Larke-Walsh
University of North Texas, USA

At the beginning of all Film Studies courses there is a need to teach the basics of visual analysis. These are the fundamentals of the discipline from which everything else evolves. Therefore, those of us who teach these introductory classes on a regular basis are constantly searching for new ways to encourage students to recognize and assess their own abilities to read film.

I am working on a Learning Enhancement project which includes the development of on-line materials to supplement classroom teaching. I am focusing on the teaching of visual analysis in film. Part of my project involves the creation of an interactive tool to guide students through a segment of classical Hollywood film. My paper to the visual literacies conference will discuss the learning objectives and theoretical criteria behind this interactive tool and share some of my findings from the first semester of its use.

The purpose of the interactive tool is to assist students in their preparation for a written assignment. The assignment asks them to complete a close textual analysis of a film sequence and discuss how the specific formal properties of a chosen sequence contribute to its overall thematic meaning[s]. The interactive tool delivers a similar sequence, but with statements and questions for the students to assess. The sequence is then broken down into various stills to which students must attach both formal and thematic statements. The intention is to provide a working example of how students can use the new terminology learned in class in a practical assessment of a short sequence.

The intention of the project and this paper is to discuss the tool as an extension of lecture material and how it best helps students to recognize their own cinema literacy and gain confidence in adopting a language to explain it.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Reading Between The Lines – Visual Literacy and Film
Faye Ran
Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, Metropolitan College of New York, New York, USA

What is film? It is merely a thin flexible transparent ribbon or band of plastic material, generally cellulose acetate that provides a base for the emulsion, a layer of light sensitive silver halide suspended in gelatin. Recorded on the roll of film are a series of still photographs or frames. The transformation of these static images into apparently moving ones depends on simple mechanical and optical principles — film being moved through a projector at 24 frames per second. Each frame passes in front of the aperture where light is projected and stops for a fraction of a second while a shutter opens; then the shutter closes to provide an interval of darkness during which the next frame can be brought into position According to the persistence of vision principle, the eye retains the static image during thedarkness so that one image, in effect, is dissolved into the next in order to provide either a continuous view of a static object or more important, an illusion of continuous movement.

Yet very often we look at film without being entirely aware of what we are seeing or hearing. The very information a factual film conveys may be so interesting, the story a fictional film narrates so gripping, and the rush of images on s creen so rapid, that we miss as much as see. The content of a film and our reaction to it not only emerges from the subject matter or the story, i.e., the internal content, but also from the manner and elemental architecture in which filmmakers build and manipulate their images, or as Marshall McLuhan likes to point out, the message of the medium. The selection of images and the order in which they are presented, the control over space, light and sound, the tempo, accent and rhythm in which visual images and sounds are organized also convey meaning and provide delight. Space, light, pace, sound, tempo, movement and accent do more tan simply carry a story, they can shape it, modify its content, determine its meaning. Films offer ideas and sensory stimuli at the same time. Therefore for anyone desiring to read a film, he or she must learn to read between the lines, (using film’s basic elements); along the lines (understanding narrative and genre); and across the lines (engaging in critical and ideological analyses).

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

What happens when the very institution that was designed for the propagation of print literacy, for the transmission of encyclopedic knowledge, for the inculcation of industrial behaviours, for the development of the post-war citizen, for the domestication of diversity into monocultural identity – the technology of the modern state par excellence – faces the borderless flows and ‘scapes’ of information and image, bodies and capital? (Luke: 1993)

Each year the NSW Department of Education delivers a limited number of visual literacy programs for students from low socio-economic backgrounds. These aim to deliver ‘cineliteracy’ skills involving critical analysis and production skills (i.e. ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the screen) to impact positively upon low traditional literacy skills and low engagement in the learning and teaching process.

The programs are always successful, often well beyond the educators’ expectations and aspirations. Yet there has been no attempt to introduce cineliteracy permanently into the curriculum. It’s argued that such projects are regarded simply as ‘a form of temporary social service for young people who are disadvantaged or “excluded”.’ (Selwood: 1997)

Investigating the deeper reasons for this policy failure reveals a widespread reluctance to value visual literacy in formal education. Located in an inability to accept the role visual literacy plays in a generally misunderstood concept of cultural literacy, this is reinforced by the schools’ failure to acknowledge the value of informal learning, or ‘affinity spaces’. (Gee: 2004)

Noting that visual literacy in general, and cineliteracy in particular, focuses on the students’ individual experience and expression, this paper proposes relocating visual literacy education within the concept of participatory culture. Shifting focus to community involvement is imperative in the current economic environment to overcome the ‘Participation Gap’, ie ‘the unequal access to the opportunities, skills and knowledge that prepare youth to be world citizens’. (Jenkins: 2007)

In summary, I explore the interstices between traditional and new literacies, old and new media, and theory and praxis to propose a ‘culturescape’ (Appadurai: 1990) where young people require visual literacy education to participate in their community which is simultaneously local and global.