Michel Condé, Vinciane Fonck, Anne Vervier, A l´école du cinema. Exploiter le film de fiction dans l´enseignement secondaire (At the cinema school. Using fiction film in secondary education).
Editions De Boeck (collection « Action »), 224 pages.

Unfortunately only available in French.

Started by the Grignoux team in 1983, the programme Ecran large sur tableau noir expanded over the years to other cinemas in Francophone Belgium, and now reaches 150,000 children and adolescents every year. The pedagogical team at the Parc and Churchill cinemas create dossiers for teachers participating in these screenings, aimed at helping them integrate the films into their curricula. A l´école du cinema collects the best ideas resulting from this work, offering a wide spectrum of activities for incorporating films into classroom teaching.

"How can viewing a film be used pedagogically? What will the film help accomplish in class? Will it be the subject of discussion, appreciation, reflection or analysis? And finally, how can young audiences be encouraged to go beyond simply enjoying the film and learn a lesson - in the strongest sense of the word - from what they´ve seen?

No doubt there is no universal method for analysing films, as cinema is such a broad, diverse medium. For this reason, the book seeks to describe different ways of approaching a fiction film. Far from privileging a single point of view, it proposes different uses of fiction cinema in a school context. All these approaches are no doubt not suited to every need: teachers must select the approach based on their objectives, the pupils and the film chosen. But it is hoped that at least one approach could be useful for every film suited to school purposes.

Eleven lengthy chapters allow discussion of such diverse aspects as the type of film (narrative, descriptive, explicative…), the storyline, the characters´ intentions, the author´s style and the film aesthetic, reconstructing implicit meaning and identifying themes. Each chapter proposes a general reflection followed by one or more examples of a given approach. These examples are each based on a different film, which may be viewed by a large group of adolescents."

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