Children and Education in World Cinema

Activities: The Order of Films

Our 10th grade curriculum emphasizes writing analytically and persuasively, yet this unit will explore other modes of writing, including creative writing. This unit may be used in a class that explores world literature, our 10^th grade focus, or creative writing. Keeping in mind limitations of time, this unit may last 4-5 weeks for a creative writing class, or 3-4 weeks for an English class, in which case, some films will have to be omitted.

The long-term project is for students to produce a short film. Alternatively, students may revise their journals into a cohesive whole, or elaborate on one journal into something longer, for instance, a personal statement. Framing the unit will be “La rivière du hibou” (Robert Enrico, 1962), an adaptation of Ambrose Bierce’s “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” that will be seen in the first and last sessions of the course. We will also read the story after the first viewing. This film will set the expectation for the final project, with the help of a graphic organizer that details shots, effects, and concepts in the film. In between, we will watch both documentaries and fictional films, and students will write in response to each film with a journal prompt and/or assignment. Toward the end of the unit, they will begin writing and filming their ideas. The goal will be that the film will aspire to around 35 shots, half the amount in “La rivière du hibou.”

The first feature length film we will begin to watch is “Hoop Dreams” (James, 1994). This film provides a hook to which students can relate. Students, particularly males, identify strongly with basketball as players, spectators, fans, and even historians. Moreover, this film features two African American high schoolers who excel at basketball (See Image #1 for one of the students) and see this as their way to a better life, and most students will identify with the setting and conflicts. That the documentary takes place in an urban setting (and also in public and private high schools) will remind students of their own problems: personal, social, and academic. We will watch the first 15 minutes, pausing while students answer a series of questions related to their own lives. We will then read the flash fiction piece “The Teacher’s Son” to encourage students to think about character and conflict. Students will then write 2 paragraphs of Narrative in the role of “Chronicler,” responding to the prompt: Write the order of the events, including potential obstacles, that will lead you to being successful at your dream. Include a setting and conflicts. Write as if explaining your path to a middle school student.

Time at the end of classes and during state testing will be used to see this long documentary through to the end.

(Image # 1, Hoop Dreams (James, 1994): a young Arthur Agee looks onto a basketball game.)

The next assignment will introduce filmmaking. Students will view the “I Like/I Don’t Like” scene from the The Class (Cantet, 2008) and complete this as an assignment. In the film, students write down three or more things they like and three or more things they don’t like. Students will download a film-making app on their phone. We will then record and share student presentations, and with permission, post these for all classes to see.

As a follow-up to the realism of Hoop Dreams we will take a turn to the mythic, as a way to analyze society at large, with the West African folklore inspired Kirikou and the Sorceress (Ocelot, 1998). This animated tale develops an allegory where a newly born child takes on the evil embodied in a sorceress (see image #2). The film is much shorter than Hoop Dreams, so we will read two flash fiction pieces, and nonfiction on African myths, to complement our viewing. The flash fiction called “Inherited Tastes” has a hint of allegory around a family that consumes themselves. This will precede our viewing. “Three Things I Never Did After That Summer” is quite short, introducing a woman who believes her uniqueness attracts benign monsters. Students will be asked to write in imitation of the flash fiction pieces. They will be asked to play the role Barnouw calls “Poet,” working with symbolic meaning, allegory, and developing Creative Writing skills: Begin with a moral (i.e. good and evil, kindness, justice) and create a fable, a story with a lesson around this. Make sure you have two characters and a problem that is resolved, or well developed.  

At the end of the first two assignments, students will write reflectively a brief statement on what they’ve learned from their written efforts so far. We will then watch “I Could Tell You About My Life”, a short film by a student director (Michael Martin), to set students up for planning and writing their own film.  More student films are available at this website: https://bykids.org/our-films/.

(Image #2. Kirikou and the Sorceress (Ocelot, 1998): Although an infant, Kirikou often asks the sorcerous why she is so “mean and evil.”)

Flash Fiction will also help us make transitions between films. “Greetings from Tel Aviv,'' a flash fiction piece about terrorism in the Middle East told from one person’s point of view, will lead to viewing Turtles Can Fly (Ghobadi, 2004), an Iranian film rich in symbolism and character development, but very troubling. The teacher will make students aware of the issues of suicide and rape in the film before viewing. “Prodigy” by Charles Simic will help us think about the difficulties and memories of war. The film is set in the north of Iraq among the Kurdish people in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq by the United States, and presents, or even adopts, the lives of children trying to survive economically and prepare for the war. To lighten the mood, we will watch an animated short, “The Small Shoemaker,” after starting Turtles Can Fly. Students will be asked to describe how to tie their shoes in preparation for the journal in order to practice the logic of exposition. After completing the film, students will be asked to focus on expository writing in the role of Reporter: Tell the story of a conflict you’ve been through as if you were a news reporter. Be sure to include the who, the when, the what, the why, and the how as journalists do.

Additional flash fiction pieces may be relevant: “Corporal” and “Thud” will remind students of the theme of thinking about war in everyday life, and reflections on mortality, respectively. Because this is about half way through the unit, this will be a good time to introduce students to screenwriting: we will read pages 36-56 in Screenwriting from the Soul, and both view and read important scenes from Rushmore (Anderson, 1998) and Do The Right Thing (Lee, 1989).

Slavery by Another Name (Pollard, 2012) will be our next film in a return to documentary. Pollard’s film reminds the viewer of the exploitation of African American workers in post-Reconstruction history, and will be used to teach argumentative and persuasive writing, asking students to write as Prosecutor: Research five parts of a given social issue and put the culprits on trial. Research at least three of these aspects and write an annotated bibliography for three articles you find. Argue about how to fix this problem and end with an indictment to say what we could do better, a call to action.

“The Flowers” by Alice Walker will be a grim reminder of the brutality of this time. Another flash fiction piece, “History” will remind us of the importance of evidence and details in academic writing. All of the flash fiction pieces can be found in the two collections listed in the bibliography.

Perhaps the least important film could nonetheless provide a break from the realism of the preceding films and remind students of the openness of cinema for poetic and not narrative focus.  Students will be asked to play the role of Painter in this descriptive writing challenge. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) is an avant-grade short film with dream logic in the place of plot development. After viewing, students will be asked to write a journal: Write the story of an afternoon out of school, your perfect day, or a dream sequence, using at least five objects or things you see that correspond to your mood. Write as quickly as you can. Before writing we will read “I Would Like to Describe” by Zbigniew Herbert and the flash fiction “Imitation of Life” which will help students think of an object that creates a mood for descriptive writing.

We will continue the unit with a Frontline documentary set during the Covid pandemic: “Love, Life, and the Virus” (Oscar Guerra, 2020), (see Image #3.) Students will be asked to play the role of Catalyst and to practice Analytical Writing. The response will take the form of a college level memo in which the students advocate for improving a given social issue. Students will: Write about 5 problems in the world, or in our communities, and how they intersect. Write a memo about a hypothetical organization that addresses all of these problems. 

The flash fiction pieces “Wanting” and “The Quinceanera Text” will remind students of the urgency of the Covid quarantine and the importance of culture in all stories and analysis. “No Wake Zone” tells the story of immigrants. “Undocumented in the Pandemic”, another documentary from Frontline, may be shown to complement students’ understanding of the importance of how analysis fits in with narrative.

(Image #3, “Love, Life, and the Virus” (Oscar Guerra, 2020): Zully contracted Covid, then gave birth, and is here seen recovering.)

“Half Sleep” is a flash fiction piece about drug use and young people. “Last Cuts” tells the story of a young man who hopes to make a basketball team. Completing viewing of Hoop Dreams with these flash fiction pieces will give students closure on the unit, and space to continue thinking about their own stories. We will also re-watch “La rivière du hibou” to remind students of how narrative writing can lead to film, and how film can help us understand the complexity of writing.

Transiciones

The book length study Transciones provides a way to think about high school student writing that will benefit students as college writers. The basic idea is that students at a particular high school were asked to do only two types of writing (narrative and analysis) in high school, and so were overwhelmed by the types of writing they were asked to do at 4-year and community colleges.¹⁴ Students at this high school wrote narrative essays, indeed they focused on narrative a lot, due to their state test asking for this mode. Likewise, in Virginia, there is much focus on persuasion, as our state tests for that mode of writing. The problem in the book is that the students were not prepared for more complicated writing assignments in college.

Ruecker also develops the idea of “cultural capital” that shows how students were more or less likely to have the support they needed to succeed in college (see image #4). Ruecker’s students, those from another study, and our students’ identities are often not academic: “the multilingual students in her study grappled with very different identities moving through the environments, labeled as excellent students by high school teachers, but considered slackers in college.” Ruecker’s thinking about cultural capital, the strengths and resources students do have, can be applied to this unit in the sense that they can build through writing a combination of their home and personal identities, including class and cultural identities, with an academic identity.

(Image #4, Bianca’s cultural capital is given with strengths within the Venn diagram, and challenges outside.)

To reiterate, an understanding of the complex challenges faced by these students will suggest how we develop identities, thus we will talk about and complete an activity on Ruecker’s use of the notion of cultural capital. As well as aspiring to college level writing, students will be asked to complete their own cultural capital “maps”, like Bianca’s, towards the end of this unit. And, if the dynamic daily writing habit proposed by this unit can be combined with specific writing tasks that the colleges in the study asked for (see image #5), the unit will accomplish getting students prepared for college writing, and implicitly for college in general.

(Image #5, Bianca’s first year college writing assignments.)

Further detail from Transciones also guides this unit.  In college, one student was asked to make a short documentary on an iMac. Students in the study appreciated receiving feedback, being asked questions rather than receiving lectures, and appreciated strict and methodical teaching both in high school and college. This unit may be useful for students who aspire to attend college in that they build ideas over multiple writing assignments, as in a college research paper. Cultural capital was also developed through assignments that asked them to engage problems in their communities, and to complete a writing assignment based on interviewing their parents. One of the more successful students complained of being unprepared, lamenting “the fact that she wrote more during her freshman year than all of high school.” College level assignments often ask students to “connect themes”, rather than just developing one. The present unit asks students to connect themes and to write daily. One college professor emphasized freewriting and encouraged students to mix genres, allowing that a descriptive essay “needed to be informative but explained that it could have some personal elements and personal viewpoints, and could also be persuasive in some ways.”¹⁵ As influenced by Transciones, this unit will focus on the blurring of genres and modes, and researching the writing regime at our local universities and community colleges may help.