Introduction and Rationale
Uniting the children of the world? What kind of clichéd and simplistic dream is that for an urban public school teacher to sustain for 30 years? Merely saying the words recreates for me the idealism that nudged me toward a career in public education so long ago. It's the same innocence that caught me holding hands with humanity in 1985, the year of Stevie Wonder and Harry Belefonte's "We Are the World" benefit concert to aid victims of the Ethiopian famine. I was attempting that day to make my own children part of a global community. Children of the world united — is this possible?
Of course it is not. But frankly, the need for promoting global understanding is greater now than it was in 1976 or in 1985. In the year 2006, with the world turned flat as Thomas Friedman 1 has pointed out, if American children do not begin to sense the oneness of all humanity and embrace a world view, then our nation will continue down the path of isolation and separateness that it is currently on. As teachers and parents we must at least attempt to influence our children in this regard. A desire to make U.S. children members of a world community and respectful of differences among the people of the world is the strongest goal for this unit, but other objectives are met along the way. In fact, this unit is a huge pot into which many goals, some instructionally concrete and some less tangible, have been thrown. If nothing else is accomplished, a door will at least have been opened, students will view films they otherwise might never see, and the idea of foreign film may not be so foreign to them in the future.
The seeds for this unit were planted when I viewed films as a part of a seminar titled "Stories Around the World in Film," offered at the Yale National Initiative Intensive Session. Dr. Dudley Andrew, the seminar leader, carefully chose films about children for this seminar for pubic school teachers. I found the stories of the children in each film to be endearing and magical and immediately wanted to share them with the children that I teach. Each film provided a sense of common humanity and at the same time supplied clarifying and important images of local landscape, cityscape, family interactions, religion, and a whole host of cultural information. The films presented profiles of children with fortitude, courage, and strength of spirit. These visual glimpses into the lives of children in Ireland, Iran, China, Africa, and Australia suddenly seemed of utmost importance.
Although I have rarely used film in my classroom, relying more on literature as a valuable vehicle for expanding the global awareness of my students, I am well aware of the love my students have for movies. I began to realize the obvious; that my students' interest in film can easily be connected to my personal passion, the perpetual struggle to make my very parochial Pittsburgh students more globally aware. While watching these films, I realized the power of the visual image and the instantaneous opportunities for increasing empathy and understanding that they provide.
The more films I watched and the more connections I began to make to other curricular areas, the possibilities for a film festival expanded rapidly. I limited these expansive ideas to a small unit that could be taught in a variety of ways, depending on the number of films used, and the emphasis that the teacher chooses to place on various aspects of study offered. The five films are Children of Heaven from Iran, Not One Less, from mainland China, Into the West from Ireland, Rabbit Proof Fence from Australia, and The Little Girl Who Sold the Sun from Senegal, Africa. Each film will be examined in five ways. The first mode of response will be to reinforce literary terminology that middle school children must know for our state exam, the PSSA. Terms like theme, plot, tone, mood, point of view, and characterization are viable for analysis of film as well as literature. The second mode of viewing will encourage children to observe, articulate and discuss cultural traits present in each film. Closely connected to this cultural observation, students will be asked to think about childhood and what is universal about being a child. A fourth mode of looking at each film will be an actual analysis of some technical aspect of filmmaking such as cinematography, editing, and sound. Finally, some attention will be paid to observing and discussing variations of storytelling methods or literary styles from each country and an effort will be made to see if these literary modes translate to the films of that country.
This unit will add to the wealth of practical advice already available to teachers regarding the use of film in schools. Although the unit is planned for students in a middle school for the creative and performing arts, parts of it are suitable for a film studies class, world cultures class, or any curriculum studying one of the five countries covered in this unit. Parts of the curriculum might be valuable to Language Arts teachers interested in reinforcing literary concepts and terminology.
What is Foreign Film Today?
The term foreign film was in vogue in the 1960s. To sophisticated American viewers the word conjured images of the exotic, the experimental, the "art" film, as pointed out by A.O. Scott in an essay called "What is a Foreign Movie Now?"2 In a contemporary discussion of foreign film the terminology has changed and, in fact, the change in language points to an altered meaning of that 60s concept. Terms like globalization, cross-pollination, world film, cross-cultural fertilization, and transnational formations are used to articulate what is going on today world wide in film.
Dudley Andrew makes a point of adding a fifth period to the traditional four periods of cinema history. To the categories of Early, Classic, Modern, and World, he names Global. For Andrew, this period begins in 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall symbolizing the end of the Cold War and the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.3
Though the films in this unit are presented for the very reason that they do depict cultural differences in contemporary societies as well as visual strategies and storytelling linked to specific cultures, the fact that our world gets smaller every day cannot be ignored. Thus the term cross-pollination is significant.
Filmmakers everywhere are cognizant of Hollywood and its far reaching influence. Although filmmakers all over the world are struggling to create their own national schools of film, many of them grew up watching Hollywood films. Djibril Diop Mambety, the director of The Little Girl Who Stole the Sun, spent much time as a schoolboy attending local movie theatres in Dakar that showed American films. Today in Ireland, 80% of the screens are playing American films.
Another aspect of cross-pollination and the globalization of film is that directors, writers, and cinematographers from more than one country often work on a film. The director of Rabbit-Proof Fence is Australian, but he had spent twelve years working as a director in Hollywood. The director of the Irish film, Into the West, Mike Newell, is British.
Often those involved in the production of film have actually trained in another country. This is especially true in Africa. Many of the most prominent names in the African film industry spent time studying film in the Soviet Union. Ousmane Sembene, the most highly respected African filmmaker, spent a year in Moscow early in his career. Sembene's peer, Souleymane Cisse, studied there from 1963 to 1969.
So although this unit places emphasis on naming differences, it does so with the realization that when studying films from other countries, and especially nonwestern countries, the curious viewer must wonder what is representative of the region's culture and what is a result of cross pollination.
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