5) UNIT FIVE: FILMS AND A SENSE OF PLACE

An E-Learning Module for Art of Film Students

By the end of this session, you will be able to draw conclusions about how a sense of place in film transmits messages about society and identity.

Introduction

So far this semester, we have been exploring the ways that film is a literary art form that filters aesthetic and cultural meanings of a time period and its people. In doing so, we've been learning to read the world through visual signification, drawing upon narrative structure/ rhetorical devices, cinematography, and ideology to inform us.

Now you will begin to conduct research that will synthesize these three dimensions in a way that will isolate how a sense of place --- that combination of geographic, topographic, and cultural features ---- reflects a collective identity of people in a particular region. It will also offer you further insights into how film texts categorize, marginalize, and idealize certain people and regions, and, in doing so, you'll find the tools to take critical distance from pervasive media messages, thus leading you to awareness and transcendence. The information you compile will ground an eventual multimodal presentation that you will teach to small groups in the class.

In our next steps, you'll become much more knowledgeable about how a sense of place has influenced U.S. society. You'll see how contemporary institutions like the Tribeca Film Festival honor films that have "soulful and searing images, a daring use of composition and light, and an evocative sense of place with a strong sense of place." You'll see how people's identities often continue to be tied to place in ways that inspire fear, longing, belonging, or even placelessness. And you'll meet Common core standards to write information/ explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

E-Learning Module Overview

You are an scholar whose responsibility it will be to deconstruct one particular film text and to situate it within the contexts of a sense of place in order to account for the real lives of people and their communities. You will reveal how a sense of place in film shapes the course and meaning of what it means to thrive, become alienated from, or make a tenuous peace with layered human systems and institutions.

To prepare, you must go through a series of learning events to better understand these and other elements of a sense of place in film. You will create a Web page on your own Google website that captures the important information you locate during each step of "The Process" below as well as your own deconstruction of one particular film text.

You must do each step of the Process below. Create a Google Doc and title it, "E-Learning Module: A Sense of Place." When you are done, you will show your work to Dr. Carolyn, who will give you a grade based on your thoroughness and insights. Afterward, you will choose a particular film text and compose a Product: an expository narrative. Each student in a class must choose a different film to investigate, and you must register your choice of film with Dr. Carolyn.

E-Learning Module: Process

In each step of this e-learning module, you will read, view, or listen to a text. Then you will compose a response based on a series of directions that follow. Please open a Google Doc and title it, "E-Learning Module: A Sense of Place." As you work through the E-Learning Module, please title each step: for example, Step One: Definition, Please.

Step One: Definition, Please

Read over these definitions of "a sense of place." Afterward, define it in your own words in 1-2 sentences.

"Sense of Place" --- Wikipedia

Step Five: Blogging about Place in Novels and Film

Here are two blogs that capture a sense of place. Survey each list, and, afterward, write your own Top Ten List of Qualities Necessary for a Sense of Place. The first describes ten films for placemakers, and the second is a list of ten novels with a keen sense of place.