The discipline of film studies often engages in analyses of the functions of filmmakers' decisions in terms of their effects on viewers. Behavior analysis uses a similar, functional-analytic approach toward understanding the relationship between individuals' behavior and the environmental effects that maintain their behavior. Given converging…

Hollywood blockbuster films have long attracted not only mass audiences but also scholarly attention. In line with contemporary applied linguistics interests in telecinematic discourse, the present study draws upon concepts and techniques in corpus linguistics to describe the language of American mainstream film scripts. The concept of lexical…

Environmentalist voices like the Earth Liberation Front have been labeled "eco-terrorists." The 2011 documentary film "If a Tree Falls" explores how "eco-terrorism" troubles the unstable border between activism and terrorism. This essay offers a textual analysis of the film's negotiation of the activism/terrorism…

In a market dominated by Hollywood, it is easy to overlook that the number of films (and televised productions) which are not in English is actually by far greater than those in English. However, although some non-English language film industries are vast, only a comparatively small number of productions are screened outside of their country of…

This article demonstrates how educational film in interwar China served the dual purpose of mass recreation and political indoctrination. It places educational film in China in the context of Chinese tradition and the predominance of utilitarian scholarship. On the one hand, China has a long history of using mass-recreational tools in order to…

This paper argues that an Arts-Based Research (ABR) methodology, drawing on the Ethnofiction work of filmmaker Jean Rouch, can facilitate new ways of researching mathematics, science and education more generally by: (i) making past learning experiences more accessible and (ii) considering the affective engagement of the audience as interrogator of…

This article examines the construal, cross-cultural relay and comprehension of misunderstandings by filmmakers, translators and audiences respectively of "Bridget Jones's Diary" (2001) and "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" (2004). It reports on findings of a case-study on implicatures in these two romantic comedies (Desilla…

The purpose of this study is to explore the responses of young members of the audience to media narratives that portray gay men positively with particular emphasis on the extent to which film appreciation reduced homophobia. One hundred and fifty college students from a Serbian university (M[subscript Age] = 21.58, SD = 2.199) completed a…

This theoretical paper adopts the point of view of the audience of subtitled films and outlines a theory of subtitles as communicative agents within the participation structures of film reception. Based on examples from three Swiss fiction films -- "Heidi" (2015), "Heimatland" (2015) and "Der Goalie bin ig" (2014) --…

As critical study of adapted texts moves away from a focus on fidelity to explore questions of adaptive practice, picturebook to film adaptation offers unique opportunities to redirect discourse related to the value of adaptive changes. Because feature-length films made from children's picturebooks "require" filmmakers to add substantial…

This article explores how the Disney Company scripts what it is to be a tween through the "High School Musical" trilogy. While children's perspective is of pivotal concern within childhood studies, it has traditionally left out the material aspects and rather focused too narrowly on the subject and the social. I found that the trilogy…

This paper discusses the main aspects of an ethnographic approach to the Occupy Poble Sec Cinema Forum in Barcelona, Spain, and the difficulties of using participant observation, in which vision is still dominant, in this setting. The methodological challenge stemmed from the 'native' position of the researcher--a member of the Forum's organising…

In the summer of 2016, the Staten Island Museum was challenged with developing an audience for its new building and location. With exhibitions that change infrequently, programs became the way guests accessed museum resources. Museum staff reinvented the personality of museum programming while putting its new location "on the map." The…

While humour and laughter create conditions that are conducive for learning, different forms of children's humour have been given little attention in research on digital media, literacy learning, and multimodal design. Applying a Bakhtinian lens, we analyse carnivalesque videos created by elementary students as part of the formal curriculum. We…

Narratives have a unique ability to grant listeners emotional and cognitive space in a way that encourages them to choose how they will make sense of a story. This effect, called narrative distance, also has the potential to help create transformative learning experiences. This article is a qualitative research study of experts who regularly…