Film Literacy: Media Appropriations with Examples from the European Film Context

The increasing development of new multimedia materials as supporting vehicles of film languages has raised some global literacy questions and problems within teacher training. These new literacy problems pose a specific curricular question: How shall different media, social and cultural contexts approach the specific training of teachers (and, in fact, media makers) in order to address those global problems of a common film language with the corresponding civic and curricular appropriations? The UNESCO MIL Curriculum for Teachers places media and information literacy at the core of lifelong learning for the acquisition of necessary civic competences within a universal perspective. A review of some European case studies helps us to understand some of the most contemporary interrelations between the predominant multimedia messages and their communication channels and social networks, taking account of the preservation of the collective memory of sounds and images as a form of cultural heritage connected to the audiovisual cultures of the world at large, since these processes never occur in geographical or cultural isolation. The aim of this article is to present the context of a possible inter-disciplinary and inter-cultural approach to a global film literacy process, taking some interesting European case studies that appeared in "Comunicar, 35" as a starting point.