* Introduction: What is Media Literacy?
* Questions to Ask
* Viewing Film for the Purpose of Analyzing it
* Framework for Analyzing Film
* Scene Analysis of Malcolm X: "American Nightmare" & "Our Women"
* Sample Student Paragraph and Student Essay
* The Language of Film
* Theme
* Character
* Point of View
* Setting
* Mise-en-Scene
* Camera Shots
* Editing
* Sound
* Lighting
* Literary Elements
* Film Glossary (Dartmouth)
* Wit
* Unit 1
* Unit 2
What is media literacy?
Film literacy is a convergence of the interdisciplinary practices of literary and media studies, which both concentrate on the analysis of significance in all manner of texts: visual and written. Ushering students toward a more open notion of literary discourse and practice, critical media pedagogy begins with the assumption that visual images, songs, advertisements, and film are inherently ideological and political. The media enacts, as John Berger frames it, “ways of seeing” that can effectively produce and determine the meanings and outcomes of discourse itself and which, therefore, shape our cultural contexts. Our job as critics is to see these texts as a mélange of cultural archives, open to functionalist analysis and critique. What do these texts say about the human experience? How do they construct meaning? Whose interests do they serve?