On the shelf

10th May 2002, 1:00am

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On the shelf

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/shelf-37
READING FILMS: Key Concepts for Analysing Film and Television. By Jackie Newman and Roy Stafford. BFI Education, pound;14.99.

The 1998 film Pleasantville features two American teenagers who travel back in time to the Fifties, taking with them the manners and morals of contemporary society. In what becomes a sharp satire on the US now and then, their frank references to orgasms and erections meet with mixed amazement, embarrassment and horror. One way and another, the film suggests, we’ve come a long way. That such a film should be included in Reading Films, a resource aimed mainly at GCSE students, shows the distance covered by education in recent years. Past coyness, circumspection and censorship have largely been replaced by a frank acceptance of adolescent and adult sexuality in literature, art, on the stage and in film. In their choice of films for discussion and deconstruction - there are Clueless, Pretty in Pink and the wonderful Kes (plus a section on TV soaps) - the authors wisely concentrate on texts in which the sexual content can be discussed as openly and productively as, say, narrative form or the representation of character.

Well-organised and thoughtful, Reading Films offers informative notes for teachers along with notes and photocopiable worksheets for students. Everywhere there are intelligent, probing questions and tasks on, most obviously, theme, character, setting, sound and colour.

Plaudits all round? Not quite. Page design could be better - one still from Clueless printed six times hardly makes the resource look irresistible. Glossing, too, is uneven: why “satirise” but not “radical” and “naturalistic”? Minor faults, though, in what looks like a major asset.

CONTINUUM GUIDE TO MEDIA EDUCATION. By Pat Brereton. Continuum, pound;14.99.

The reductive nature of entries in most reference books makes them a little like film trailers: the main plot points, the star players and a few action highlights. With its alphabetically-ordered outlines of assorted concepts, institutions and ideas, Media Education is, overall, a useful example of the form. Good, straightforward entries on central issues like cultural imperialism, male gaze and effects theory will help many, and tidy summaries of the basic ideas of the likes of Brecht and Foucault should at least get many students started. Then again, several entries will stop less advanced students in their tracks. Post-modernism, for instance:

”...helping to unfold and stimulate new openings and fractures within conventional discourses alongside the break-up of existing stultifying metanarratives such as Marxism.”

If less obscure, some more straightforward entries are still a little puzzling. For instance, does any student really have to be told what an examination is? Or what GNVQ means? Madonna fans will be delighted by her inclusion, ditto Marilyn Monroe devotees, but do they really deserve the space that might have gone, say, to the French New Wave, J Arthur Rank or John Birt?

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