Although at one level Jean-Pierre Jeunets "Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amelie Poulain" is a sweet, attractive film about a young Parisian doing good deeds, it also offers a compelling analysis of the role of technology in our modern lives. The film paints a world where machines and a mechanistic worldview are appealing because humans have a desire to…

The role of spectator is crucial for an actor, for there are "no actors without spectators." At times the success of the actor depends upon the role taken by the spectator. Thornton Wilder's "Our Town" depends upon an active, creative, involved audience. Other artists expect their audience to be passive, almost unconscious. Whether the medium of…

Why do people refurbish some historical tales from time to time, adding new versions to be displayed publicly? Powerful cultural elements can be invoked for many purposes, and the morals derived from the fables can be quite different. When individuals are blessed with a rich cultural heritage, they may delve into it to find wisdom for themselves…

South Africa, a country with the highest incidence of rape and child rape in the world, has the fifth highest prevalence of HIV in the world, with 1.1 million AIDS orphans. The UNAIDS Global Report reveals 370,000 AIDS-related deaths in South Africa in 2003. Given the numbers of people infected and dying, South Africa is regarded as having the…

Articles on the effective use of audiovisual materials to help improve instruction comprise this volume. Included are "The Changing Program in English;""Directions in Current Literature Teaching;""Trends in the Teaching of the English Language;""Trends in the Teaching of Reading;""Detroit's Multiracial Reading Program;""What Do You See?"--a…

Environmental information has been described as central to the issues of solid waste management and disposal. This study investigated the availability and accessibility of environmental information to the solid waste policy formulators and implementors with regard to the media/channels used for disseminating environmental information to the…

The argument for a pedagogy of input oriented learning for the development of speaking competence (Sharwood-Smith, 1986; Bardovi-Harlig and Salsbury, 2004; Eslami-Rasekh, 2005) has been of increasing interest in Applied Linguistics circles. It has also been argued that multimedia applications, in particular DVDs, provide language learners with…

InnerSpark is a residential summer arts training program for high school students established by the California State Legislature (California Education Code sections 8950-8957) in order to make it possible for "artistically gifted and talented students, broadly representative of the socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of the state, to receive…

This collection of essays takes the question of pedagogy into a variety of places, including film studies, psychoanalytic literature criticism, dialog, and readings of educational documentary films and web sites. Part 1, "Teaching as a Scene of Address," includes chapters 1-6. The chapters introduce the concept of mode of address and…

This paper examines the portrayal of shopping malls in the films of the 1980s and attempts to "narrativize" the trend found between the films as the story of a subculture as it adopts and develops a belief system based on consumerism. The paper begins with an exploration of the evolution of the mall as a modern meeting place and center…

An examination of key symbols and structures of the recent film, "Fried Green Tomatoes," reveals the nature of the process of coding representations of the real world and its effects. The movie depicts two parallel stories of female friendship. Changes and development of the characters are primarily portrayed through changes in their…

Children's emotional responses to films are the focus of the four articles in this issue designed for media specialists and educators. Following an editorial discussing the responsibilities of media as put forth by Bruno Bettleheim, the first article presents a methodology and rationale for using story films to encourage children's exploration of…

Rhetorical studies of the media during the past decade have tended to focus upon specific types of media such as music, television, film, and radio. Most recently, however, rhetorical studies such as James Chesebro's "The Media Reality" suggest that rhetorical critics are moving toward an examination of the collective influence of the media in…

Teachers often impose old, literary perceptual patterns on the visual arts. (JH)

Students who are learning techniques for producing television programs and films often require guidance in three areas: acquiring knowledge of traditional art forms, obtaining audience feedback to their productions, and assessing their own capabilities and creative potential. This paper describes a programmed course of self-instruction that may be…