4U Film Study

This unit is an adaptation of an original assignment posted by Kim Imdieke at Suite101.com. In this assignment students examine the social and cultural understandings implicit in the film, A Thousand Acres. At my school we study this film after having already studied Shakespeare's King Lear. Because the film is an adaptation of Jane Smiley's novel, itself an adaptation of Shakespeare's play, students are able more easily to identify the culturally specific assumptions. In addition to the obvious feminist issues, students have written about the rural/ urban binary in the film, the anti-intellectualism evident in the negative coding of the university-educated characters, and other interesting issues. It is not necessary, however, to have this kind of narrative pairing. I have in other years had students prepare a critical media analysis of the film The Mothman Prophecies.