Tabla de contenidos para No. 89 en Screen Education

Spider-Man is one of the most popular heroes of all time, as evidenced by his cinematic persistence. Much like that pesky spider you can’t seem to scare out of your bedroom, Spider-Man just keeps turning up on the big screen no matter how many times you shoo him away. Over the last decade, the character’s been portrayed by three different actors in big-budget blockbusters: Tobey Maguire in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films (2002–2007); Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man (Marc Webb, 2012) and its sequel (Webb, 2014); and, most recently, Tom Holland in Captain America: Civil War (Anthony & Joe Russo, 2016) and Spider-Man: Homecoming1 (Jon Watts, 2017). While, as a high school teacher, you can’t guarantee your students will have seen every one of these films, you can safely bet…

The rapid advance of the internet into all aspects of our lives has brought with it near-ubiquitous access to pornography, and ever younger viewers of it. While there are good reasons to be concerned about the impact this may be having on the development of young people’s sexual attitudes and self-image, CATHERINE MANNING argues that attentive, sex-positive discussion remains the best remedy. Whether you liked it or not, you’ve no doubt been exposed to some form of online pornographic material. Inadvertently or otherwise, so have a substantial proportion of thirteen-year-olds.1 In the early days of the internet, the ‘expert advice’ was for parents to install a filter, and keep children’s devices in the lounge room where parents could peer over their shoulder. Unsurprisingly, and particularly since the proliferation of smart…

The energy is palpable. When the four members of 1960s Aboriginal Australian girl group The Sapphires step onto the stage of a Saigon nightclub in front of a crowd of expectant marines, they know the stakes: an unconvincing show will cost them their Vietnam gig and put them back on a plane to Australia. Before this, the four women – Gail (Deborah Mailman), Julie (Jessica Mauboy), Cynthia (Miranda Tapsell) and Kay (Shari Sebbens) – have been told that they need to clean up their act for the show. Manager Dave Lovelace (Chris O’Dowd) has ushered them to various Vietnamese street vendors to purchase the sparkly new dresses that add the gloss necessary to meet international expectations. It’s no surprise that The Sapphires pull it off, winning over their American audience…

A portrait of a dystopian world not entirely removed from our own, this disturbing, compelling television series has brought Margaret Atwood’s classic feminist novel to new audiences. As SUZIE GIBSON argues, the series serves as an allegory for the gender oppression not only inherent in repressive theocracies, but also lurking under the surface in the liberal West. The 2017 television adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale has been widely acknowledged as a success. The first ever program produced by a streaming service to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series,1 it features high-quality production values and an impressive ensemble of actors. The viewer’s experience of The Handmaid’s Tale is largely channelled through likeable chief protagonist Offred, played by Elisabeth Moss, whose fragmented thoughts and memories…

An adaptation of one of Charles Perrault’s lesser-known fairytales, Jacques Demy’s Donkey Skin is a classic French musical that is equal parts dark and playfully surreal. Analysing the film’s subtle commentary on age-old romantic narrative tropes, JOANNA DI MATTIA explores its subversive undercurrents. ‘Have fairytale princesses all disappeared?’ the Blue King (Jean Marais) wonders. He’s looking for a new wife, and the portraits of women presented for him to choose from don’t meet his standards. ‘Sadness. Boredom. Pride,’ he declares, cataloguing their defects. It is only when the king is shown a final image, of his daughter, the princess (Catherine Deneuve), that his interest is aroused. ‘Who is she?’ he asks, unable to recognise her. Even when the prime minister (Sacha Pitoëff) informs the king of…

Nearly all filmmakers get their start by shooting short works, and doing so is an excellent way for secondary Media students to learn about story structure, visual language and camera equipment. BRETT LAMB provides a handy guide for students on the techniques to follow and the mistakes to avoid as a first-time short filmmaker. So you want to make a short film? Before picking up a camera, sharpen your pencil, grab a stack of index cards and start crafting your story! Great filmmaking isn’t dependent on technology. It’s not about the dynamic range of your camera or the sophistication of your editing software. Instead of investing your money in equipment, invest your time in studying stories. You can also start by watching short films – hundreds of them. Checking out…

When it comes to sorting out movie genres, we need to be both more flexible and less flexible than the usual categories allow. More flexible, because labels like ‘thriller’, ‘fantasy’ or ‘adventure’ specify very little beyond a very vague, general subject matter, setting and tone. To properly classify any given film, we often have to think about a particular cycle or subgenre that gave rise to it, the elements from other genres with which it crossbreeds, and the types of confusions it has caused in viewers and reviewers who couldn’t figure out exactly how to label it. (What is the genre of Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), for example? It fits at least half a dozen niches.) Less flexible, because sometimes all this microscopic hairsplitting of labels and categories obscures…

The first movie adaptation of the wildly popular children’s book series is as zany as its title promises, with all the pranks, shrink rays and marauding toilets a primary schooler could ever hope for. Yet, amid all the silliness, CAROLYN LESLIE finds that the film can also enable more serious discussions about bullying, authority and friendship. Adapted from Dav Pilkey’s much-loved series of novels, Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie (David Soren, 2017) is a film in which two inventive fourth-graders from small-town America find a way to turn their school life upside down. Like Soren’s previous film, Turbo (2013), which revolved around a super-fast snail who has to leave his home and find a community that accepts him and his speedy attributes, Captain Underpants is also about an ordinary…

As both artists and consumers, girls and women have important roles to play in the world of videogames. Issues such as gender imbalance, poor character representation and online abuse, hower, have long conspired to make the to five local creatives about how gender inequality in gaming can be addressed, both in the classroom and beyond. Videogames are becoming more and more embedded into teaching practice in both primary and secondary schools. With a revised Digital Technologies curriculum and a number of professional learning opportunities now available, videogame analysis and development has become a core component of our teaching. However, there appears to be a gap in the education of our students when it comes to understanding the experience of identifying as female in the gaming landscape. Women play an integral…

I recently had the pleasure of attending ATOM Qld’s Looking Forward state conference, presented by QUT Creative Industries and an amazing team of experienced and enthusiastic ATOM executive members. The two-day conference included extremely insightful keynote speeches by industry guests Julie Eckersley, producer at Matchbox Pictures, and Nathan Mayfield, chief creative officer and co-founder of Hoodlum, as well as a range of informed, interactive and very useful panel discussions, presentations and workshops. The ‘looking forward’ theme was inspired by current trends in Queensland’s Media Arts and Film, Television and New Media educational areas. Many new and exciting opportunities are presenting themselves as Queensland teachers work creatively to implement the Australian Curriculum–aligned Media Arts strand – likewise, as we prepare for the transition into the senior assessment and tertiary entrance system…

Set in 1921, James Gray’s The Immigrant (2013) can be seen as something of a prologue to the filmmaker’s four previous movies – Little Odessa (1994), The Yards (2000), We Own the Night (2007) and Two Lovers (2008) – in that it goes several generations back to around the time when those stories of immigrant families might have originated. Polish sisters Ewa (Marion Cotillard) and Magda (Angela Sarafyan) arrive in the United States, escaping from their country’s war-induced misery. At Ellis Island, Magda is diagnosed with tuberculosis and put in quarantine. Ewa does not pass the control point, either: she is informed by an officer that she’s been labelled ‘a woman of low morals’ due to an incident that occurred aboard the ship, and that her family’s listed address in…