From Word to Image: Challenges for Screen Literacy
When cinema entered the English Language and Literature class, screen literacy became one of several literacies in a multimodal age that students were expected to possess. The notion of literacy, however, evokes and promotes the insistence of the letter and print culture. The ensuing struggle for primacy between word and image echoes the warnings of Paul Willemen that the linguistic turn in Film Studies erases ‘the revelatory powers… of the image in movement’ and of Sylvia Harvey that an emphasis on language results in ‘extreme mistrust of the fruits of the camera’s labours.’
This paper explores the impact of a pedagogy –one that is the norm in high school screen literacy learning in the UK, Australia and elsewhere -framed and limited by certain prevailing logics of written text and narrative, language and literacy. It asks if, when applied to the moving image, a linguistic analytical paradigm results in an unnecessarily limited knowledge and understanding of film as an affective experience. It argues that a love of cinema is deeply implicated in the erotics of visualising in ways that a love of literature may not be and, further, that this could lead to a reframing of how film is taught.