Cirrus@Austlit

Film and television are a major part of our daily lives and both project and help to shape people's understanding of the world and the way society and culture work. All too often fictional film and television are simply dismissed as 'entertainment', thereby minimising the very real impact that these cultural forms have in expressing and shaping the way people think and act in the world at an everyday level. There is, in particular, a need for teachers to engage with this area, given that much of the cultural consumption of their students outside of school involves film and television. This unit analyses and explores the way contemporary thought about society and culture emerges in fictional film and television. Although this unit can be studied as an independent unit, it is also designed to complement other units which focus on film and media and on media literacy and education.

Aims

This unit aims to equip students with an understanding of key concepts in socio-cultural theory and to increase their knowledge of the corpus of fictional film and television narrative. It also aims to provide students with the tools to critically analyse the way in which fictional film and television as cultural products, both perpetuate and help to shape ways of thinking and acting in the social and physical world and in institutions such as schools

Objectives

On completion of this unit, students should be able to:

1. gather, form and critique knowledge (or new configurations of knowledge) from a variety of film, television and textual sources (EPA 1.1);

2. retrieve, evaluate and present information using appropriate technologies and demonstrate personal proficiency in multiliteracies (EPA 1.3);

3. as a scholar-educator-researcher, adopt a problem-solving and inquiry-based approach to their own learning and that of others (EPA 1.4);

4. display a positive orientation to personal learning and teaching which foregrounds reflection on practice; such reflections will indicate a growing critical awareness of the multiple and often conflicting meanings within which they operate as they struggle towards increasingly ethical and socially just professional practices (EPA 1.5).

Content

This unit covers the following topics:

1. Overview of the history of film and introductory overview of some popular methods of film and cultural analysis..

2. Through the analysis of film and television texts, an introduction to key thinkers and major schools of thought including Plato, Marx, Foucault, liberalism, existentialism, critical theory, structuralism, postmodernism.

3. Specific ideas and issues that are examined in this unit via the medium of film include philosophical issues concerning the nature of reality and', self and identity, also history and propaganda, politics, gender, difference, ethnicity, definitions of art and culture, war and terrorism, science and technology, celebrity and fan culture, ethics, social surveillance normalization and teaching and teachers.