Integrating Media Studies into the Language Arts Curriculum

If I were a teacher, I would make use of all the versions of “Hamlet” that are out there in the world. We’ve got versions with each of the following actors starring in the title role: Ethan Hawke, Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh, and Laurence Olivier (I suspect that there are still others. What’s interesting to me about having so many interpretations of the same text available, is that juxtaposing them really brings out the degree to which directors are interpreting the text through the use of setting, camera work, music, lighting, etc. I would present some basic film analysis lessons, and allow students to watch the same scene from “Hamlet” as portrayed in each of the film versions. They could be watch with the sound turned off, and write about the image work being done by each film maker: what kinds of shots are being used? What images are being juxtaposed? What time period is the film taking place in? What’s the cumulative visual effect/feel? Students could also listen to the music used by different directors for the same scene—I have soundtracks from the Branagh version and the Ethan Hawke version on CD. Students could talk about what kind of mood the music creates. They could then watch the different versions of the scene in their entirety. Maybe the final step in the process would be to integrate their “visual notes” and their “sound notes” into a larger piece of writing in which they describe how the meaning of a scene is changed by its filmic elements. We could also discuss the larger issue of how even though all of us are looking at the same text, we construct different meanings from it.

It might even be interesting to have students then film their own version of the same scene from Hamlet in their own unique way—maybe by this time they will have had too much of this scene and they’ll need to choose a different scene to film. By filming their own versions, they would be exercising the interpretive license that they had observed in the clips from the movies. Students could work in groups with each student playing a particular role on the “film team.” Casting director, sound person, costumer, camera person, director, editor.

We could also take the opportunity to read reviews of the different film versions of Hamlet from the newspapers (I can gather these of the net or at the library) and students could use them as models to write film reviews of their classmates’ films. The student authored film reviews (and the films themselves, via YouTube) could be posted in blogs so that students could comment on each other’s reviews. This might mean learning how to disagree with each other in a diplomatic way, and would surely mean students learning how to establish their opinion through careful argument—after all, their peers are going to read this.

I think a larger activity like this could in smaller pieces throughout a unit on “Hamlet,” or it could be used for another text that has been represented at least twice on film. It might also be interesting to add a radio drama version of the scene into the mix and talk about how radio directors use sound to shape meaning.

Ideally, the unit would end by going to a theater and viewing a version of “Hamlet” and examining the difference between the theater experience and the movie experience. It can never hurt to look at yet another interpretation of the same text and reinforce again the large degree of interpretation involved in re-presenting a written text.

From our exploration of media use to portray a “Classic,” we can then move to explorations of more contemporary texts: commercials, music, web content, games, comics…