Editor-in-Chief
Today, society regards movies as vessels for entertainment, not enlightenment. We ignore the fact that many movies and TV shows are produced to comment on an issue or topic that may be hard to describe otherwise. We must give movies the credit they deserve, not just as entertainment pieces but as art installations with inherent educational value as well. To do this, we must begin to teach film analysis in high schools.
While there are hundreds of movies that exist in the cultural mainstream as pure entertainment, most movies, just like most literature, possess critical depth that interacts with themes and ideas that audiences might not consider entertaining outright. Taking Star Wars III as an example, the movie is full of action-packed sequences featuring starfighter chases, duels on volcanic planets, and even a full-scale invasion of an alien world. But buried among these dramatic moments is a plot about the fall of a republic and the seizure of power by one individual. We also witness manipulation and grief, and I would argue that it is this storyline that makes the movie so interesting and so relevant today.
Most texts in high school English classes speak to similar themes. Ideas of power, control, personal values versus the values of a society, and so much more. Think about Albert Camus’s magnum opus, The Stranger, the fictional story of a man who refused to conform to society. We spent a month reading, analyzing, discussing, and writing about this book in my AP Literature class. But for some reason, films have yet to find their way into our English classes in any meaningful way. Students spend months learning to analyze poetry and its devices, even learning how the shape of stanzas can contribute to a poem’s message. Why do we not analyze films with this level of scrutiny? Observing the positioning of the camera, analyzing the audio cues, and paying close attention to how dialogue and action contradict are all strategies students must learn because we encounter these things every day.
For a medium that holds so much power and influence on popular culture and student interests, it is concerning that we do not study film with the same effort as literature. There are hundreds of thousands of movies to analyze, from Star Wars to Sinners and everything in between. If we want students to be prepared for life after high school, teaching them critical analysis of film is sure to set them on a path to recognize rhetoric, satire, emotion, and intention in ways that classical literature simply cannot teach. English teachers must work to incorporate film into their curricula, not as supplements to other works, but as the works themselves.
(Sources: Chicago Academy for the Arts, CRHS News, The English Journal, The Guardian, PHS Journal, The Week)