“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”
— Werner Herzog
Students of the new liberal arts will need to learn to WATCH and LISTEN all over again. Basic literacy—reading and writing text—is no longer enough. Now, all media is transmitted through the window of a glowing screen. Television and web video have become dominant modes of communication and even print news media rely increasingly on video to show us “truth.” Understanding video is essential to participating in modern society. Studying video literacy, students will gain the tools to analyze the full spectrum of audiovisual media.
HOW DOES PERSPECTIVE SHAPE MEANING? Everything begins with a frame. From telephoto lenses to tilt-shift video, find out how lens length directs attention and contextualizes an image.
HOW DOES EDITING CREATE NEW LAYERS OF INFORMATION? Context is everything. Find out how news editors “spin” seemingly-neutral video footage, and how editing choices shape an on-camera interview. From Vertov to YouTube, study the evolution of montage.
HOW DO SOUND AND IMAGE WORK TOGETHER to create something far greater than the sum of their parts? Study silent cinema and music videos. See how sound can sell an image, and vice versa.
From webcams to IMAX, how does TECHNOLOGY SHAPE what we see? Learn how production values can signal qualities like “authenticity” or “the future.” How is TV influencing web video, and vice versa? How does viral distribution inform how we think about video information? How is piracy changing the entertainment industry and its products?
Then, there’s history. How did analog media shape the formats we see today? How are digital media breaking out of these formats? Consider the importance of narrative structure to the moving image and the rising significance of database structure.
From Fox News to Al Jazeera to Google in China, explore news media around the world to find out how cultural values and political objectives shape news. Investigate news as storytelling and news as spectacle. How do narrative and musical clichés trigger emotional investment in an event?
The moving image has the power to entertain, inform, and manipulate a mass audience. In the new liberal arts, the exploding global language of audiovisual media demands a NEW LITERACY.
Leave a Reply