Accessible Instructional Multimedia (AIM): Critical Film Analysis
Author informationLilly Buchwitz |
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Resource description
The resource is a three-week module on film criticism, including lesson plans, support materials, writing assignments, and a grading rubric. The materials are all available here, either as web pages (HTML files), Word documents (DOC files), or Powerpoint presentations (PPT files). All the materials are designed according to principles of accessibility. All the materials in this module are linked from this page. A complete list of the resources follows.
This instructional module can be used in any post-secondary introductory course in mass communications, media, or film studies, but it was specifically designed for a lower division course called Mass Communications and Society (MCOM72), a survey-style media course with a focus on critical analysis of the media in the context of the society that produced it. Mass media communications include books, recorded music, newspapers and news media, magazines and image communications, film, radio, television, and the Internet, and as students in this class progress through the term, analyzing each form of media, they are also engaged in a term-long project of creating and maintaining a blog, and submitting their critical writing assignments as blog posts.
The module described here in this AIM is a critical analysis of film, and is designed to take place over six 90-minute classroom sessions. It includes classroom activities and strategies, support materials, a written assignment for the students, and a rubric for grading the assignment. The students will watch three films, learn about the issues of the day that influenced each film's storyline, then be guided in a critical analysis of each film. The students will study the form of writing required in a movie review, then will write a review of each movie in the voice of a reviewer who lived in each time period, and submit their reviews as blog posts.
Note: a blog is a form of website that is easy (and free) to create, however, it would work just as well to have the students submit their work on paper. To give you an idea of how this works, here is my blog that I created for the course, with links to each of the students' blogs.
Resource materials
The three films used in this module are widely available on DVD. They can be purchased inexpensively from Amazon.com. (Each movie title below links to its corresponding page on Amazon.com.) Students can buy or rent their own copies, and watch and re-watch the movies at their own pace. All three DVDs have English subtitles, making the films accessible to the hearing impaired. Some also have other language soundtracks, and other language subtitles, making them even more accessible to those for whom English is a second language.
- Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (ISBN 7678-2148-3) with English and French soundtracks, and with English and French subtitles
- Kramer vs. Kramer (ISBN 0-7678-4880-2) with English and French soundtracks, and with English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, Korean, and Thai subtitles
- Brokeback Mountain (ISBN 1-4170-3032-1) with English and French soundtracks, and with English, French, and Spanish subtitles
- Student assignment (web page)
- Student assignment (downloadable one page Word document)
- Module plan (for the instructor)
- Lesson 1: Writing a movie review (Powerpoint file)
- Lesson 2: The role of movies in society—Brokeback Mountain (Powerpoint file)
- Lesson 3: The social climate of the 1960s and 70s (Powerpoint file)
- Grading rubric (Word doc)