Why Visual Literacy Is Important
When I was in grade school, there was no attempt at teaching any kind of visual literacy. Today, our society and our world are saturated with visual stimulation. The visual image has taken over, in a sense, for better or for worse. But the reality is that if one wants to reach younger people at an earlier age to shape their minds in a critical way, you really need to know how ideas and emotions are expressed visually. Now, that visual form can be video or film, but it still has the same rules, the same vocabulary, the same grammar.
The grammar is panning left and right, tracking in or out, booming up or down, intercutting shots, lighting, the use of a close-up as opposed to a medium shot -- those types of things -- and how you use all these elements to make an emotional and psychological point to an audience.
We have to teach our younger people how to use this very powerful tool. The world is now at the point where they are exposed to the visual language sooner than the verbal, and I think there's a danger of visual language having more of an effect on kids than it used to. We have to try to deal with this and teach them to interpret the power of visual language.
You have to make room for film in curriculum. What you are doing is training the eye and the heart of the student to look at film in a different way by asking questions and pointing to different ideas, different concepts. You're training them to think about a story that is told in visual terms in a different way, and to take it seriously.
It is so important, I think, because so much in today's society is communicated visually and even subliminally. Young people have to know that this way of communicating is a very, very powerful tool.
Violence in Films