Watching Books and Reading Movies

            Your children will soon be taught something they definitely need to learn: how to watch a movie!  And I’m going to explain why that matters.  “Literacy” used to mean the ability to read books.  Then came Apples and Windows and the computer revolution made educators talk about “computer literacy.”  Even before the eighties, though, we were defining “literacy” as having the skills one needs to make a living.  For most of history, people were farmers and few of them had to learn reading skills to survive.  For them, “literacy” was knowing how to plow fields, make tools, and manage resources.  So what happened to make learning how to read the definition of a “literate” person?  The printing press.  It was this wonderful piece of technology that redefined what people had to learn by making books and, eventually, newspapers readily available.  Before hand, books had to be painstakingly hand produced and so were few in number and very expensive.  With the printing press, however, books could be cheaply mass produced.  The result was that society began to rely more heavily on the printed word till, eventually, every productive member had to be taught to read.

The New Old Way of Thinking

            Technology determines what we have to learn in life.  But changes in technology also change the way we think.  Have you noticed how much faster TV commercials and movies are these days?  They cut from image to image, from one angle to another much faster than they used to.  This is just one example of how technology is changing the way we process information.  Books require a kind of thinking that depends on extended amounts of time.  They reveal their information slowly and in a “linear” (i.e. down a line) fashion.  When you read the sentence, “The tomb in which they laid the body of Jesus was empty,” it takes you a second or two to read down the line of the sentence and understand the information.  But if I showed you a picture of the empty tomb, you would understand it even faster.  This kind of immediate communication is what images do and can be described at “wholistic” because the whole thing is presented all at once.  As we turn more and more to film, television, and graphics-heavy computers, we are becoming a people who learn wholistically and process more information more quickly.  Books and reading will not disappear.  My point is simply that movies and television are changing the way we think.

            Another way we think differently now involves knowledge being more personal than ever before.  I’ve noticed this in my Sunday School classes.  People show the lesson in their own lives, talking less of ideas and theology and more about biblical truths as illustrated in their own life stories.  As a lover of ideas and theology, I get frustrated by this approach, but I also see the benefits.  After all, Christ modeled it in His own teaching!  When we talk about the parables in Sunday School, we frequently read one, then we ask what it means, then try to put the meaning into a sentence everyone can understand.  But, though Christ sometimes explained His meaning, He frequently did not.  When the publican asked, “Who is my neighbor?”, Christ could have answered, “Your neighbor is whoever you see in need.”  Instead he told the story of the “Good Samaritan” which actually teaches even more than just what a true neighbor is.  It teaches about prejudice, anger, pride, and self-righteousness.  All of these meanings come all at once and are intensely personal, experiential.

            My point: when we learn from or think with stories, we do so differently, more personally, than when we think about abstract concepts, ideas, and theories.  It’s not necessarily a better way to think, but it’s the way of thinking we’re using more and more thanks to mass media, and it’s also the approach God emphasizes in the Bible!  Though God sometimes reveals Himself in words, through the Giving of the Law, through the prophets, or through Paul’s letters, He primarily reveals Himself through actions: miracles, a pillar of fire, an encounter with Elijah in the wilderness.  Film and television, whatever their disadvantages to books, are making us a culture that loves knowledge that comes more personally, more intensely, more like the knowledge we get from stories.  Our strategies for teaching (both in schools and churches) will have to adjust accordingly.

How Film Communicates

            Film, television, and other mass media are certainly dangerous and many good Christian writers have taken up the task of pointing out their dangers.  But here I want to show that learning how to “read” film and television can overcome many of their dangers and turn them into useful tools for teaching and learning.  The primary quality to notice about film is that it communicates on multiple levels at once.  Though this can be dangerous, it can also be beneficial because it can say a great deal in a small amount of time.  The secret to how we read film, then, is to do so on multiple levels by focusing on the variety of techniques film incorporates in its text.

            1.  Good movie watchers pay attention to and ask questions about a film’s images.  For example, good directors will use lighting and shadow to highlight key places and people on the screen, or to communicate something about the images like, “Here’s a shadowy villain,” or “there’s an angelic hero.”  Color is often used as a theme in a movie or for identification.  In Star Wars, the evil forces of the Empire dress in artificial/dead colors of white, grey, or black while the heroes are found in earth tones, or pure white.  Frames and spaces are also important to reading film images.  A good director is like an artist with a canvas: though there is a principle subject on which to focus, the director fills his camera frame (as the artist his canvas) with as much information as possible and even makes good use of spaces that are outside the frame.  One of the things I loved about the movie Signs was its classical approach to thrilling the audience.  We weren’t frightened by grotesque imagery and violence.  Instead, Signs thrilled us with good use of sound, lighting, and off-screen space.  We were scared more often by what we didn’t see than by what we did.

            2.  There is also much to look for in editing.  Editing is first of all used to regulate the emotional pace of a film.  Scenes that are action packed will be edited with short sequences or cuts so that the camera angle is constantly changing.  This fast pace helps the audience experience excitement, suspense, confusion, or fear.  Sometimes editing will be used to connect separate images together.  Using a device called “parallel development,” the editor of The Untouchables adds suspense to a train station shootout by cutting back and forth between a gun battle and a baby carriage careening out of control down a stairway in the midst of blazing guns.  Suddenly the scene is not just about defeating criminals; it’s also about saving an innocent life.

            3.  Sound is also very important to film.  First it provides realism (as opposed to old silent movies).  Secondly it helps establish context: if we see a darkly lit room but can hear ocean waves and sea gulls, we know where the room is.  The other key sound element is the music track.  Its purpose is to enhance the emotional effect of the images.  Every good war film from Sergeant York to Saving Private Ryan relies heavily on the music track to put the audience “into” the action on the screen, to make us feel the events more intensely.

            If we can learn the techniques and production methods used by film makers, we can become more conscious and critical in our film viewing, we can gather more meaning from a film text, and we can overcome the danger of being manipulated.  This is exactly what the next stage of educational literacy will teach our children.

The New Literacy

            In the future, schools will teach students to be proactive, not just reactive toward film, television, music, computer games, and the internet.  Such a revolution in literacy only took a decade for computer education.  The need for film literacy curriculum is about forty years behind us!  It will come in two forms.

            1.  Technique Analysis and Interpretation: Current approaches to media literacy emphasize the analysis of particulars.  Teaching students to be aware of techniques—color, sound, lighting, editing, camera angles, movement—makes them more conscious, critical viewers.  Informing students about propaganda techniques, marketing methods, and the way the film, TV entertainment, and TV news industries are structured is also important.  Additionally, English teachers are more frequently including instruction on the application of literary interpretation techniques to film.  Students are learning to analyze plot, character, symbol, theme and other literary elements in film.  In churches, using these tools, we can further teach our children to recognize biblical themes in film and television, to find the kernels of God’s truth in rags of secular art, to be critical of the falsehoods, and to see the relevancy of God’s word in the world today.

            2.  The trend on the horizon is video production—not elective video journalism classes where a handful of students learn about production.  These already exist.  The best way to learn how to read a movie is to have to make one.  If film literacy becomes the job of language arts/English teachers, production will become a part of the curriculum.  Your high-schooler will one day tell you he has a research video documentary to produce on Macbeth instead of a research paper.  Reading and writing, of course, won’t disappear, but, as video production becomes cheaper and easier, students will be taught (hopefully in a variety of courses) to do script writing, pre-production problem solving, camera operation, and post-production editing.  Students will produce research based videos as well as creative projects for a variety of classes in the future.  A few schools are paving the way already because the widespread use of video production is finally cost effective.

            A video documentary produced by my students in the mid-nineties cost $1200.00 in editing time at a professional studio.  But my film class produced three creative video projects last spring, 2002, for less than $200.00, thanks to revolutions in computer technology.  For about a thousand dollars more than you would spend on a computer today, you can purchase a hardware and software system capable of doing almost anything with video you want it to.  The future of media literacy will include such projects.  So will the future of church instruction. 

            Even small and medium sized churches can now afford systems that will allow them to use video clips as sermon illustrations or discussion texts in Sunday School classes.  And more churches will create their own video projects to use in classrooms, VBS, sermons, to show the work done by church members on short term missions trips, and even to introduce new members to facilities and programs. 

            Does the Church need to adopt every trend, change, and fad that arises?  No, but film has been with us now a hundred years and television for fifty.  They’re not leaving.  The only difference is that now we can take more control of them.  Doing so will help us build our children’s literacy, and further the work of God’s kingdom.