Movies and television make kids illiterate, say the experts. Don’t you believe it. Colin MacCabe on some amazing findings
Television and reading are opposed, right? What parent has not thought that a few episodes less of Sesame Street or Hercules would turn their children into veritable bibliophiles, at home with Dickens as well as Tolkien, devouring Jane Austen before Roald Dahl. My own memories of reading Oliver Twist and David Copperfield at eight are inextricably linked with staying away from school while ill and having nothing else to do. Our contemporary non-stop television would have kept even a bookworm like me away from our literary heritage.
For those who feel that some ability to read into our past is crucial to civilised society, the remorseless advance of the electronic media is cause for concern. As less and less of our information and entertainment comes through the printed word, it is condemned to fade away, so the logic goes.
But anybody who entertains such twaddle is simply not paying attention. Writing remains crucial to knowledge and power. In fact, it is central to the modern entertainment.
If you walk into a Hollywood executive’s office, you’re more likely to find him or her poring over the proofs of the latest hot novel than watching a movie.
But the interdependence between print and image is much more than a simple reliance on books as source material for films. At every stage of film-making, the written word is central to the production process.
Our culture encourages this promiscuity of media, and the computer mixes image and print in ever more complex ways. Yet in schools and universities, the study of film and literature is normally divorced.
This divorce is damaging. At the level of higher education, it is impossible to study 20th-century literature without studying film. From James Joyce’s involvement in early cinema to the relationship between Blade Runner and William Gibson, the most fundamental mutations of the written word this century are unthinkable without the cinema.
Looking the other way, many of the shorts that Joyce exhibited in the first cinema in Dublin were literary adaptations, while Blade Runner was taken from Philip K Dick’s classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The decision in the seventies to set up separate departments of film in British and United States universities makes no sense in cultural or educational terms. The situation in schools is even more disastrous. Media studies without literature is a contradiction.
One can visualise a future society split into those who are literate and therefore can produce more sophisticated audio-visual forms and those who are not and simply consume them. While the British government’s stress on literacy is welcome, its suggested methods do not utilise the possibilities offered by today’s culture.
My joint concern for traditional literacy and the study of the new media led me to formulate two years ago the hypothesis that audio-visual media could be used to improve print literacy. The School of Education at King’s College, London was interested enough to join forces with the British Film Institute to test the hypothesis, which was tested in different ways at primary and secondary level.
The primary project concentrated on integrating the making of an animated cartoon with the reading of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox. A control class simply read the book. The emphasis in the experimental class was the necessity of using reading and writing in the making of the cartoon. One part of the class would produce a summary treatment which would then be used by another part of the class to storyboard. This, in turn, would lead to further writing exercises until the final images were decided on.
At the secondary level, our pilot put the emphasis on adaptation. The pilot class was taught Oliver Twist with both David Lean’s version and Lionel Bart’s musical. The control class studied Dickens’s novel on its own. I used an old-fashioned comprehension test taken from a part of the novel that was not in either film version in order to compare the two classes. The results were almost unbelievable – in seven weeks, the children in the experimental class improved their reading by almost two years against the control class.
Of course, these results were unreliable. We were testing only two classes. If, however, these results can be sustained over a larger and more carefully monitored research project, the implications are considerable. I have been involved in two major institutional battles in my life. At Cambridge in the mid-seventies, I supported Raymond Williams and Stephen Heath as they argued that literature should be taught in conjunction with the moving image. In the mid-nineties, I led the argument at the BFI that the moving image should be taught in conjunction with literature. In both cases, I lost the institutional argument. But the culture moves on regardless, mixing text and image, word and picture in ever more sophisticated ways.
If we are to teach our children properly, then we will have to learn to teach traditional literacy alongside the ability to shoot and edit the moving image. .
Colin MacCabe was head of research at the British Film Institute from 1989 to 1998