Teaching with moving image media

Moving image media are exciting, meaningful and accessible, an artform in their own right, and can be explored on many levels. In order to maximise its potential for learning, it's important to recognise that the moving image has its own language and complexities which can be read and interpreted to develop deeper understanding.

This section introduces teaching techniques and questions which will help teachers and pupils to develop new skills in interpreting moving images as texts, allowing access to the important issues within them and, with particular reference to the issues of disability addressed in this pack, insights into other people's lives and experiences.

In films portraying disability, the filmmakers' gaze can often give you a clue as to how they view their subject. For example, in Coming Home (1978, Hal Ashby, USA), about a wheelchair using veteran who becomes empowered, the cinematographer, Haskell Wexler, devised a special camera dolly. This meant that the camera was at the same height as the wheelchair users, not looking down on them from high camera angles, instilling a sense of powerlessness. By contrast, in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962, Robert Aldrich, USA) and Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954, USA), the helpless wheelchair victims are made to appear even more powerless by high-angle shots with the camera looking down on them.