Film as Text
Applying critical literacy to Alan Parker’s
Mississippi Burning
Functional Literacy with Film
How do filmmakers expect us to ‘read’
film?
 By making sense of the story they tell
through the various layers of its medium
of communication…

Film depends on Narrative

It contains traditional elements like:
 Setting
– where and when a story occurs
 Character – who have roles in the story
 Plot – what happens in what order
 Genre – conventions of a story type
 Realism – devices to make a story believable
 Parallelism – repetition for contrast or change
 Argument – the point of view an author encourages
an audience to have on their story
Narrative is shaped by Film’s Form

Creating and using a world through which
meaning is produced by:
 Montage
 Time
– the juxtaposition of images in a
scene’s sequence of shots
– manipulated by the shortened,
lengthened or simultaneous
presentation of events
 Space
– created by moving characters/objects
in/out of frame and using camera
angles, shot montages & sounds
And reshaped through Film's
Language

A combination of codes and conventions
that directly convey meaning:
 Technical


Framing (camera distance; lens choice; camera angle)
Shot duration; Choice of film stock; Lighting; Special effects
 Symbolic

– codes of presentation
Performance; Setting; Costumes; Colour / Lighting
 Audio

– codes of filmic construction
– sound codes
Music; Sound Effects; Dialogue
 Written
– titles; credits
But what is Critical Literacy?
You taught me language, and my profit on't
Is I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!
Caliban from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest
If literacy is the ability to read and write using a
wide range of communication to help us “know”
and “learn”, “critical literacy” is the ability to look
critically at how language influences and shapes
what we know and how we learn.
The Power of Grammar: 101
“Mummy, the milk was spilt on the table”
 “Bombs were dropped on Bagdad”

What do these two sentences not tell us?
The use of passive syntax removes agency
from a statement
“The Mokusatsu Tragedy”

On July 26, 1945, the United States, Great Britain and China issued
the Potsdam Declaration. In terms more lenient than had been
expected, the Allies called upon the Japanese government to proclaim
unconditional surrender of its armed forces. In essence, the Allies
were calling upon Japan to surrender and end WWII without further
bloodshed. Two days later, President Suzuki of Japan met with the
press and said that his cabinet was holding to a policy of Mokusatsu.
The translator at the Domei News Agency translated his message and
from the towers of Radio Tokyo the news flashed to the world that
Japan had decided “to ignore” the Potsdam Ultimatum.

The result of this rejection is the well-known tragedy of the modern
world at Hiroshima –Nagasaki.
“The Mokusatsu Tragedy” from The Power of Words by Stuart Chase, 1953
“The Mokusatsu Tragedy”

There is strong evidence to suggest that the main cause was the
misinterpretation of one word Mokusatsu. Mokusatsu has no exact
counterpart in English and in fact is even ambiguous in Japanese.
What President Suzuki meant by the use of this word was that he was
withholding comment for the present time, the equivalent of a modern
politician saying “no comment”. Unfortunately the official translator
took the other meaning of the word “to ignore” which was taken by
the Americans as the outright refusal to comply with the Potsdam
Declaration. The fault lay as much with President Suzuki for choosing
such an ambiguous word as it did with the translator. Mokusatsu has
two characters in Japanese moku, which means silence, and satsu,
which means to kill, literally to kill with silence. To Japanese this can
mean either “to refrain from comment or to ignore”
“The Mokusatsu Tragedy” from The Power of Words by Stuart Chase, 1953
The Power of (a) Symbol(ic code)
This is also called a paradigm
ess
= progr
Critical ‘readings’ of Hollywood

A 2003 book Screen Saviors: Hollywood
Fictions of Whiteness studies how white
identity is imagined in Hollywood movies by
white directors featuring white protagonists
interacting with people of another colour.
This collaboration by a sociologist and a
film critic studies the way in which race
relations are fictionalized and pictured in
the movies… [arguing] that films are part
of broader projects that lead us to ignore or
deny the nature of the racial divide in which
Americans live. Even as the images of racial
and ethnic minorities change across the
twentieth century, Hollywood keeps
portraying the ideal white American self as
good-looking, powerful, brave, cordial,
kind, firm, and generous: a natural-born
leader worthy of the loyalty of those of
another colour.
Critical reading questions to ask

How does Mississippi Burning ask to be
read?
 What
features of its story and film language
(its narrative) encourage us to read it in
particular ways?
 What paradigms are used to frame its story?

What doesn’t Mississippi Burning tell us?
 What
gaps or silences does it leave out?
Genre

Crime thriller investigation
 Mismatched

Western
 Outsider

Buddy flick
Identify the
paradigms that
these genres use
to make meaning
cleans up isolated corrupt town
Romance
 Handsome
stranger saves unhappy wife
Argument

Civil Rights movement



What point of view
does the film offer on
this historical event?
How is it represented
in the film?
What paradigms of
race, gender and
politics are used?
Narrative & Filmic Techniques
Combined…

Parallelism – the
repetition of situations
or events to use
contrast or change to
tell the story

Montage – the
juxtaposition of
images in a scene’s
sequence of shots
Critical Reading of a Key Sequence
Focus question: “How does Mississippi
Burning argue that Civil Rights were
achieved by lone white men acting as
maverick heroes?”
 The analysis of a key sequence should
answer this by examining in detail how the
narrative is shaped by the film’s language
and form
