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 Passionate actors, perceptive directors, witty screenwriters, and elaborate costumes bring dusty historical documents back to life through an immersive audiovisual experience.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.

In this activity, students will practice talking about time and movies. They will learn how to read the clock in Arabic, recommend a movie based on someone's preferences, and understand schedules.Can-Do Statements:I can understand the time when announced or shown to me.I can identify movies with the times they take place on a schedule.I can recommend a movie for someone according to his/her preference.

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

Even as cinema is an aesthetic experience, a commercial institution, and a social practice – it is first and foremost a mode of using machines. This course surveyed the history of cinema as technology from its origins within the machines of 19th century visual culture to its digital manifestations in the present. The moving image originally came into being from experiments measuring motion, before film technicians around the world (most prominently in Hollywood) created a language for narrating stories through techniques and tricks of camera, editing and eventually, sound. The post-World War II new cinemas and revolution in documentary would not have been possible without the miniaturization of cameras, better film stock, and ease of sound recording. As cinema moved from film to video, and now to digital, what has not changed is the urge to experiment with the means of production, that is the material equipment of movie making. In this course, we watched and read about movies where the story content was not so much our focus, but the technologies that allow us to experience the magic of cinema. We started the course with discussing the multiple origins of cinema, followed by watching and learning about early cinema. Next, we moved on to Classical Hollywood Cinema, where we discussed camerawork, lighting, amateur film, and the coming of sound and color. Discussions on documentary, television, and home video were also on our list. The course ended with materials central to contemporary times like videogames, Netflix, virtual reality and artificial intelligence. In wrapping up the course, students were asked to write short essays on any topic of their choice, related to media technology. Here they are, arranged alphabetically as per the last names of the authors. Enjoy.

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.

This is a text by Dr. Christine Gengaro to be used primarily for film music appreciation courses. Some of the materials are applicable to music appreciation, cinema studies, film studies, music history, musicology, and media studies. It attempts to provide a methodology for studying and analyzing film music without requiring the specific study of a particular set of films. It is appropriate for those with musical backgrounds and those who simply love film music. Suggestions are made in the instructor materials for assignments and assessments that empower students to analyze films in multiple ways, drawing upon cultural context, emotional viewing experience, historical milieu, among other lenses.

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.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.