So, in order to practice this concept, I decided to use a filmic example that might evoke that familiar “don’t go in there!” feeling. In the scene I selected from The Birds (1963), though, we were instead urging Melanie Daniels to “turn around!” and see the murder of crows accumulating on the playground behind her. Because of the camera angle, we see the birds gathering, and we see that she doesn’t see the birds gathering. As Melanie’s peril increases, we are given long shots of her nervously smoking a cigarette, while a group of school children sing a strangely ominous and repetitive song from the schoolhouse. As the scene draws on, there are some “ohhhh”s and “woah”s, some seat fidgeters (hopefully from suspense and not from boredom). When the camera finally pans back to the playground, revealing hundreds of crows, there are audible gasps.
I am a big fan of putting texts in concert with one another, but this has proven especially helpful in teaching literary concepts such as irony, tone, mood, narrative, etc. These ideas and their vocabulary are essential conceptual pieces to constructing strong literary analysis, but they’re incredibly difficult to isolate and define using text alone--especially for a class with a wide range of reading levels. Film has a lot more weapons at its disposal--color, light, sound, music, camera angles, etc.--for creating narrative devices that also exist in literature. As a result, a film clip can often more vividly demonstrate a literary device, while also being more accessible to struggling readers and more visual learners--it builds and practices a rich conceptual understanding of the idea that can then be brought to the text (Golden, 2001). All with the added bonus of kids viewing the exercise as a treat.
My earlier conceptions of complementary text pairings were in the vein of problematizing ideas and narratives by juxtaposing them with alternatives. This lesson showed that this tactic can also provide potential scaffolds toward critical analysis by building fundamental analytical skills.
Works Cited
The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures, 1963.
Golden, John. Reading in the Dark: Using Film as a Tool in the English Classroom. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2001. Print.