Table of contents for No. 86 in Screen Education

Girl Asleep (Rosemary Myers, 2015) tells the story of Greta (Bethany Whitmore) as she struggles through school and home life in the lead-up to her fifteenth birthday. Receiving critical acclaim across the globe, the film offers a spectacularly refreshing alternative for Australian cinema through its exploration of the teenage fantasy narrative with an absurd yet enchanting Aussie twist. Girl Asleep is also the perfect Australian coming-of-age story to study with secondary students. The narrative explores, as writer Matthew Whittet comments, ‘a young girl’s journey into figuring out who she doesn’t want to be’.1 THEATRICAL PRODUCTION AND AUSTRALIAN TONE Girl Asleep was originally a stage play, also written by Whittet and directed by Myers. The film contains continuous references to the story’s original medium through the manipulation of production elements: close-ups…

Active for a large part of the twentieth century, and largely indebted to the socio-philosophical work of Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the Frankfurt School examined – among other things – the fallibility of capitalism as a politico-economic framework for society as well as the failure of communism to provide a viable alternative. Two of its key theorists, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were particularly interested in the way in which what they termed the ‘culture industry’ perpetuates the societal status quo by bombarding the ‘masses’ with pop culture products instilled with dominant-group ideology.1 These views echo the work of neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose notion of cultural hegemony posits that the lower sectors of society ‘consent’ to their subordination as they have internalised these ideologies and thus perceive…

In Richard Linklater’s timeless screen romance Before Sunrise (1995), its central paramours – having alighted from a train in Vienna, walking through the city discussing life and the universe – talk about the concept of documentaries that observe human beings going through their quotidian routines. Céline (Julie Delpy) wonders why anyone would be interested in ‘all those mundane, boring things everybody has to do every day of their fucking life’. Jesse (Ethan Hawke), however, calls it ‘the poetry of day-to-day life’. The poetry of day-to-day life is Linklater’s cinematic metier. Though singular works have explored genre or toured off in experimental directions, his filmography is filled with stories that are simple, relatable, human – free from contrived conflicts, genre tropes and violence. ‘I think I have a low threshold of…

There is no doubt that Media students are a creative bunch. As a Media teacher, I am always inspired by the mix of students that I am presented with at the beginning of every year. In almost all cases, they have chosen Media because they have a desire to create something, whether it be a thought-provoking photographic series, a short film or some other media-production piece. They are also fairly media-savvy as far as their use and consumption of the media goes – or at least they think they are – and are usually keen to discuss and share their opinions on anything media-related. Their media production is often their driving force and, after a wonderful few weeks in the world of ‘Narrative’, armed with their technical know-how and a…

Today’s teachers often need the same skills to synthesise the information for student delivery that students need to synthesise the information for their assessments. While this aspect of it is time-consuming, there is a lot to be said for this approach to education. There is a general assumption that anyone who attended university after the year 2000 has a very particular set of skills. Skills acquired naturally through being everyone’s favourite mid-2000s education buzzword, ‘digital natives’.1 That ability to be ‘good with technology’ or ‘know computers’. They’re often referred to as some portmanteau made up of a random technology term and a synonym for expert: ‘Let’s ask Kevin, he’s our resident whizputer; our digispert; our HDMI-cordoyen.’ And this assumption comes from the same place as Marc Prensky’s misunderstanding. These digital…

Passengers and the Specifics of Space First up: 2016 Hollywood space blockbuster Passengers. Just how realistic is this depiction of interplanetary travel? Is it possible for humans to hibernate? Could you really grow a forest in a spaceship? And why is Jennifer Lawrence’s hair immune to zero gravity? The erosion of the monoculture can make things tricky for a secondary school teacher looking to build student engagement by digging into pop culture. Take any sizeable group of teenagers and it’s hard to find anything they’ll all be intimately familiar with. Some might use Facebook obsessively; others might have never made an account. Some students might obsess over the Marvel Cinematic Universe; others might not know the difference between Captain America and Captain Marvel. This student plays videogames obsessively;…

Marvel filed for bankruptcy in 1996 due to ‘a confluence of over-extended investments, costly development of films that were never produced, and a downturn in the comics industry’.1 While one key factor for this downturn was a plunge in overall sales in comics in the second part of the 1990s, companies such as Marvel was also divested of their share of takings because of the rise of independent publishers who, since the 1980s, had been eating into Marvel’s and DC’s market shares of sales. Under the stewardship of figures such as Avi Arad, CEO of the company Toy Biz, which first became associated with Marvel in the early 1990s and then merged directly with it in 1998, a new ‘programme of property licensing’ began ‘with the goal of rebalancing the…

The STEAM-focused learning principles encompassed by this unique resource certainly make it full of great contemporary educational opportunities. BLOXELS http://www.bloxelsbuilder.com Cost: US$49.95 (starter kit) from US$250 (classroom packs) There are a number of great game-making and gameplay resources out there for you to utilise in your classroom, but Bloxels is the first of its kind: it brings physical block designs to life in the digital world. The Bloxels Video Game Builder Starter Kit contains the blocks, the gameboard, a challenge poster and a guidebook, while the Bloxels Classroom Packs are a cost-effective way to purchase multiple kits. The Bloxels Builder app – which is free to download as part of either purchasing option – is available for download on iOS, Android and Kindle devices. The STEAM-focused learning principles encompassed by…

Directed by German émigré Billy Wilder, Some Like It Hot (1959) is perhaps most distinctly memorable for its final line, ‘Nobody’s perfect.’ Across his five-decade catalogue of work as a writer and director, Wilder is renowned for such punchlines, something that was likely learned from his mentor, fellow émigré Ernst Lubitsch. As a pithy response, the final line channels many themes of the film, most notably the acceptance of the role of performance in gender and identity. It could also be seen as a commentary on the structure of the film itself, which plays with genre and character conventions. Some Like It Hot follows two musicians, Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis), on the run after witnessing the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago, who disguise themselves as women…

Although The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is often classified as science fiction, the most alluring quality of Mamoru Hosoda’s 2006 feature animation is its representation of the rhythms of everyday existence. The premise of time travel functions as a narrative device to facilitate protagonist Makoto Konno’s (Emily Hirst) discovery of what is important in life, rather than as an opportunity for escape or adventure. Loosely adapting the story told by Yasutaka Tsutsui in his celebrated 1967 book of the same name, Hosoda reimagines it in a twenty-first century context in which ‘young people have individual pictures of the future, not collective visions overall’.1 Hosoda has commented that Tsutsui, who has seen many adaptations of his classic tale, considers Hosoda’s film to be a sequel to his story.2 The basic…

The place of documentaries in English classrooms has a rich history. This form provides educators with a cache of excellent source material that allows students to access a range of reader and analytical perspectives that they may not have seen before. The documentary turns the classroom into a hotbed of inquiry where a plethora of biased viewpoints are waiting to be unpacked by minds coming to terms with the idea of looking outside themselves and their own experiences in order to engage with the complex world around them. It is this very access to the broader world, this opportunity to push students beyond passivity and towards questioning and critical analysis, that can ignite excitement in the teacher who sees such an area of study approaching in their syllabus. They plan…

It is a John Ford film and it stars John Wayne, and these two names are both potent in any study of the western – and nowhere more significantly than in The Searchers. John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) is so rich a film that it is hard to know where to start – or what to include and what to omit, given that this study is of finite length. Some of the matters that seem crucial to consider include: the western as a genre; Ford as perhaps its most famous exponent; the star persona of John Wayne, protagonist of Ford’s and other directors’ westerns; the film’s narrative patterns; and its ideological content in relation to the times of its setting and of its production. It won’t be possible to cover…

The naturalistic aesthetic of Carol taps into the politics of the McCarthy era; by grounding the look of the film in period details, we are always reminded that Carol and Therese are ensnared by their surroundings. A look is worth a thousand words in Carol (Todd Haynes, 2015), in which sparse, often oblique dialogue is knowingly relegated to the periphery. Furtive glances loaded with unvoiced longing drive the narrative, and counter the oppressive male gaze associated with 1950s America and patriarchal control. The film plays on the idea of circularity, to suggest a figurative closed loop that traps women and strips them of agency. The act of looking is repeatedly mediated by windows, mirrors and other diegetic surfaces until, eventually, a female gaze emerges. This disrupts the cycle and offers…