Primary source documents serve as the bedrock of all reliable social studies. They provide firsthand facts, descriptions, opinions, and accounts which illuminate the distant world of the past while allowing us to better understand the present. To many students, however, primary source documents are foreign, verbose, and tedious.

In order to reach out to these students, a history teacher’s best weapon is often adaptation, especially through the medium of film. Passionate actors, perceptive directors, witty screenwriters, and elaborate costumes bring dusty historical documents back to life through an immersive audiovisual experience.

Yet with a bit of inspection, these cinematic adaptations of history can reveal much more than secondary historical details. By analyzing these films as primary source documents themselves, audiences can gain insight into the time period in which the movies were made.

This curriculum unit considers the story of Spartacus—the celebrated hero of ancient history and the 1960 film directed by Stanley Kubrick—as both a primary and secondary source of history. How does Spartacus compare to the ancient sources recorded before the common era? And how does Spartacus reveal the political and social turmoil which afflicted the United States throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s?

Al-Bab is a portal website designed to introduce non-Arabs to Arab culture by providing links to news sources, country profiles, articles, and a blog on Middle East current events. There are also specific links related to learning Arabic: dictionaries, language classes, textbooks, and other information pertaining to the study of Arabic. A free e-book, The Birth of Modern Yemen, is available for download.

Students who are authentically engaged in reading ask questions about the text, make their own interpretations, and connect the stories they read to their own lives. Moving from written works to their film counterparts opens the original piece to different kinds of interpretations. My unit focuses on creating a space in which students read through different lenses, produce different meanings, outcomes, and understandings in order to strengthen critical thinking skills and to build an infinite capacity for meaning. By examining the underlying embedded themes and then seeing how those ideas are adapted into other media, students will be better positioned to make higher ordered inferences. What impact might a documentary, movie, or animated version have on the readers? What might students notice that they otherwise may have missed in the text version? What connections can students make between text and film versions? Adaptation, the transformation of text to film, is apropos to this unit tentatively titled Adapting Literature to Capture Authentic Understandings as it seeks to present strategies to help students use select literary devices in order to help them understand implied universal themes.

a recent revision of the film text
the revised text has altered margins deemed more helpful for printing the text....
fourth Amazon revision for printing

Students will be choosing and defending their opinions on a variety of cinematic topics. Students will also practice discussing opinions other than their own.

Academy award winning Director Oliver Stone talks with UC Berkeley's Harry Kreisler about Vietnam, his movies, and the art of cinema. (26 min)

This is Volume 2 of a textbook for a Fine and Performing Arts survey, an introductory course. It covers Theatre and Cinema.

In the face of renewed competition from Hollywood since the early 1980s and the challenges posed to Europe's national cinemas by the fall of the Wall in 1989, independent filmmaking in Europe has begun to re-invent itself. European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood re-assesses the different debates and presents a broader framework for understanding the forces at work since the 1960s. These include the interface of "world cinema" and the rise of Asian cinemas, the importance of the international film festival circuit, the role of television, as well as the changing aesthetics of auteur cinema. New audiences have different allegiances, and new technologies enable networks to reshape identities, but European cinema still has an important function in setting critical and creative agendas, even as its economic and institutional bases are in transition.

When to teach this lesson plan?If you are looking for a speaking lesson to use with intermediate-level students, then this is a perfect lesson to use. This lesson plan on cinema is designed to use with students that are looking to increase their fluency in speaking English. This lesson should not be used to teach beginner-level students that are still learning to form basic sentences in English.What does this lesson plan on cinema include? This lesson plan does not include a reading activity. Rather, it it designed to help introduce students to cinema-related vocabulary words. This lesson includes several speaking prompts and questions to help students engage in useful and interesting conversation. These questions allow students to share information about themselves. In addition, this lesson plan on cinema includes several images, quotes, matching activities and new vocabulary words. The lesson ends with a fun activity where students prepare nominations (in the style of the Academy Awards)  for different categories of films.If you want additional lesson plans and support, including teachers’ notes, be sure to register for a free Off2Class account.

Guinea Bissau Conflict. Program examines the guerilla warfare underway in the African country of Guinea Bissau as part of the campaign for independence being waged in that country. Program is divided into two segments: the first consisting of an on-location British film about Guinea Bissau guerilla troop B-30 as it proceeds to an attack site, the second of an interview with Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) representative Gil Fernandes, who discusses his work, background, and the state of the war. Film contains commentary by PAIGC founder Amilcar Cabral. Produced by John Slade. Directed by Russell Tillman.

Too many of our teenagers were not read to when they were little and therefore have no nostalgic attachment to nor any interest in reading now. Simply telling them that reading is important to their success will not help these students form the socio-emotional connections to literature they did not make when they were younger. We have to give them the skills to make comprehension and complex literary analysis more gratifying than the mindless consumption of whatever easy entertainment their televisions and computers offer. If we can get them to need stories, and poems, and essays in the same way they seem to need the applications on their cell phones, then we can restore what was lost to the distractions, shortcomings, and traumas of their less than perfect childhoods. To do so, we must make reading feel fun and meaningful again (or for the first time) – rather than something that tortures our students and exposes their ignorance. This unit offers a multicultural exploration of the classic folktale “Little Red Riding Hood” as a path toward nurturing the bonds that literature creates between people and communities, giving us a sense of security, belonging, and purpose.

If words are creativity, then they are art. This is where the discipline of creative writing comes in, as well as that of screenwriting and therefore film-making. The two forms of media, while wholly different, are inextricably linked by that foundational, historic art form – storytelling. In a modern educational landscape where screen is preferred to page, it may be advantageous to stress the importance of both. There are lessons we can get from reading words that no screen will show us; as there are artistic things that can be done with images that could never be accomplished on the page. It is imperative, therefore, to make it clear for students that it is not better to see the movie, but to see the movie too . The simultaneous study of original, written story and its film adaptation can be a powerful learning tool, especially when the film in question is a vast re-imagining, paying concrete due to the original classic story while updating it for the modern imagination and culture. This curricular unit explores this consideration for several classic stories and their modern, reimagined film counterparts, with the intention of allowing students to apply their study of adaptation to their own independent reading.

The research project of this Ph.D. in Digital Media has as objective the creation of a tool (object of learning) for pedagogical aid in teaching the production of visual effects in audiovisual productions, more specifically in the interactions between real and virtual images (match moving).

The prototype created during the research has the purpose of assisting teachers and students in the practical exercises of interaction between real and virtual images.

The tool has the ability to assist in data collection at the time of live-action filming, given the large amount and complexity of these data, and its vital need for the reproduction of real conditions in the virtual universe later.

In addition, it has the ability to generate a script (in Maxscript language) for its use in 3DS Max graphics software, automating part of the production process.

It is also part of the research, besides the conception and creation of the tool (learning object), its validation in the pedagogical and design bias (user experience and user interface).

This list presents a basic set of vocabulary words that deal with categories of media and the arts, including verbs and nouns that deal with cinema, song, dance, plays, and film criticism. The list also contains verbs and nouns that cover key aspects of broadcast media. The majority of words contained within the website are nouns, and some verbs are interspersed. The words and verbs are presented in both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial. All words feature Arabic script and transliteration.

This ebook provides the outlines for a course on world cinema since 1965. Goals, assignments, topics, and online resources are all provided. Another textbook could be used in conjunction, but this could work by itself.