Traces contemporary literary analyses of Latin American melodrama and the romance, looking especially at the work of Peter Brooks and Janice Radway. Suggests that the film "Lejania" produces a spectatorship of shifting positionalities, which mitigate against a passive spectatorship that would serve as a reactionary force. (RS)

Examines memory for visual narratives as a function of cinematic structure. Identifies two important principles (establishing shots and directional continuity) for restructuring real-world activities into coherent filmed sequences. (SR)

Describes the activities in a high school English class aimed at instructing students concerning films. Discusses how film study has been radically altered in recent years through the influence of theory. Gives numerous examples of how English teachers might utilize film by focusing on text, viewer, and context. (HB)

Examines the ironic "problems" of the 1989 Hollywood film "Fat Man and Little Boy" (portraying the construction of the atomic bomb at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II) to demonstrate the ideological operations of nuclear texts, and the role of the nuclear weapons organization as a symbolic form in cultural…

Discusses how films portraying the lives of young adults can serve as the basis for a "viewer response" study of film and filmmaking. Lists and summarizes 50 films found to be suitable for teaching to young adults. Provides criteria by which the films were selected. (HB)

Analyzes the way a specific narrative text (Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 feature film "The Big Chill") confronts the relationship between communal norms and political possibilities. Shows how the film enacts a complex disjunctive narrative argument endorsing a specific form of communal affiliation (what Hannah Arendt refers to as…

Gives evidence of how and why feature films are effective instructional tools, particularly when teaching concepts of human development to college students. Explains that use of films helps to dramatize and frame issues, generate discussion, and provide links with personal experience. Uses several examples from movies to help explain the…

Examines Cornell Woolrich's 1940 novel, "The Bride Wore Black," which Francois Truffaut scripted and adapted for the screen in 1967. Pursues the focus on audience receptivity, where an adaptation faces its ultimate test. Analyzes the novel from a reader response perspective, then moves to the film as Truffaut sought to…

Describes how graduate students at Regent University have experimented with the entertainment-education strategy to produce pro-social films and videos. Begins with a history of how the concept of entertainment-education evolved in popular films/videos; discusses examples of such films/videos. Analyzes a collection of short film/video productions…

Describes a course that addresses and relocates questions of representation and reconstruction in the context of reflexive explanations for ethnographic films. Examines questions of power/power relations; anthropological and media construction of the Other; and trends in visual anthropology. Contextualizes the course within the human experience of…

Argues that elementary language-arts teachers should expand their definition of "text" to include film, a valuable instructional material. Notes that today's elementary students come to class with a great deal of knowledge about films--prior experiences which teachers can tap into. Discusses the application to film of reader-response theories. (SR)

In this article, six Academy Award-winning movies about warfare and disability are analyzed by synthesizing historical information, characteristics of specific disability conditions, and disability-related social issues. Each film's content is examined, with emphasis on how each may potentially influence viewer understanding of disability.…

This article describes films included in the Native Forum of the 2000 Sundance Film Festival. The forum was created to give Native filmmakers a chance to express a Native point of view, with the hope that such a forum will eventually become unnecessary. The article includes background information, plot summaries, comments, and contact information…

Older citizens who are deaf or hard of hearing recall the years of silent films (1893-1929) as a "golden era" in the cultural history of the American Deaf community. It was golden for several reasons. First, this period represents the one brief time that deaf and hard of hearing citizens had comparatively equal access to motion pictures--a…

A brief description of the place of the feature film in a public library, followed by a list of interesting film series. (LS)