Film and the Layers of Literacy Affordance

Introduction

While typographical texts might be prominently centered in literacy instruction and assessment, this chapter hints at the possibilities for instruction that focuses on texts that work in multimodal fashion. Such multimodal construction is endemic to the filmic text. Grammatical features of film entail possibilities for their use as texts for study in literacy instruction across a range of layers that work in juxtaposition to one another, often in brief glimpses offered by the construction of scenes. A filmic pedagogy focuses more explicitly on these elements in both their singular expression and their co-constructive work, and acknowledges the multiple layers of artistry that are contained in film. This is not to suggest that all textual engagement, or even that dominant textual engagement, should take place with videoed/filmic content. Rather, a reconsideration of film as complex and intricate, with possibilities for a range of practices in a range of contexts in proximal to this aim. There are nuances to explore here in terms of the ways that texts are defined and the ways in which texts are valued.

In the same way that prose works through a linear design and twenty-six characters, and poetry works through a series of stylistic devices, so too does film operate with a view to particular conventions, including camera angles and lighting. Notably, film is a text that is relative to image, movement, sound, and the continuation of a chronological element of viewing. To engage with a film is to consider some span of time. The viewer is bound by certain expectations, including the sequence of the images in a film, and the amount of time that the viewer is able to linger on an image, unless an additional element of fast forward, rewind, or pause is employed. This viewing experience might be compared to engagement with typographical texts in the movement of the eye, which in some cases might be more transfixed with a screened representation; the eye must yet travel in viewing/reading a film, even if the characters that are presented are physical and performed, rather than represented by alphabetical figures. Similarly, educators who use film actively engage in process that stimulate thinking alongside/through the showing of film.

Often, films are compared in instruction to another form – most often, the original work or prose version of a story. Domke et al. (2018) have noted the prominence of this approach to film, while also noting the limitations of such an approach. The work is comparative, rather than illustrative of the medium itself. This becomes an exercise in adaptation theory as students take note of the ways that directors and writers reshaped a story to fit the prose adherent to the next expanse of chronology, often noting their own preferences. Activities in textbooks sometimes make use of this preconceived method by asking students to share their dream casting choices for a filmed version of a work that does not yet exist. Given the prominence of media, such approaches are limited in that adaptations of written works are profligate. Along with this adaptive takeaway, students might note other design choices in the narrative and compare those chosen elements to the imagined/visualized elements they constructed for themselves in the reading process. While such approaches lend themselves to a number of steps in teaching, this chapter will focus more intentionally on the use of film in and of itself relative to its own ontology, rather than as a basis of subjective comparison.

While film has been used as a scaffold or entry point for other types of reading and engagement, critical analysis and meaningful, affective classroom encounters can be fostered by an active awareness of the elements of film apart from other types of texts, as teachers in this chapter will speak to. It is in defining film as a text that the author notes some sense of compositional unity, while also recognizing that additional possibilities exist based on the affordances of the medium. Put another way, film can accomplish meaning-making work in ways that other texts simply cannot, and the same is true for any number of texts. While English classrooms often serve as a central location for much of the analytical work of film, only a small number of teachers in the study network were English/language arts teachers, speaking to the affordances of film in content-focused classroom/learning spaces. This span of educational and professional identities speaks to the implications for film not simply as a text within the expanse of literary analysis, but for the potential to provide literacy instruction within content areas and across disciplines.