My Book and Heart Shall Never Part-- Blog on film

First of all, I would like to say how much I enjoyed the film. I was having a bad day, so I came to the Emerson with a little baggage about having such a bad day. After I watched the film however, I felt relieved of all the stress of school and work. It was just really nice being able to watch an educational film that was fun. On that note I believe that the film functioned at achieving it's most basic goal-- to entertain.
To move on, I would like to talk a little more about the production of the film. The elements that went into the film were fantastic. I especially enjoyed the soundtrack of classical guitar compositions. Like the pamphlet said, it was a traditional sound yet had room to play amongst the images. The cinematography was also very well done. I was very impressed at how the books were filmed in an interesting way. The film of the children at play was also very good.
Now onto an examination of one of the most fundamental parts--the educational value of the 'text'. I found that the film seemed to be aimed at a introductory level audience to this type of literature. However, I felt that somebody who had a deeper sense of the educational aspect could also enjoy the film. This aspect of the film appealing to both introductory kinds of people and advanced kinds of people was one of the strongest aspects to it's production.
One of the claims I felt the movie was making that by gaining literacy, a child was entering into the discourse of humanity. This could be viewed as thus being able to both listen to and adopt the human narrative and also contribute and add to it. I would like to talk a little about the role of 'narrative' in the lives of people. I just finished reading an article by Fisher about how narrative is one way in which people construct morals, values, and other things of the ethical nature. This idea seems intricately connected to the idea of how children's literature was supposed to construct morals and teach the children life lessons. Also, this claim seems to rely on the fact that each story is the retelling of other stories that came before. Although origins and originals are banned talk in this class, it could possibly be asserted that each child who learns their first letter is at the moment of eating of the tree of knowledge-- at the origins of their entering in to the conversation of the human narrative. We could possibly assert then that not only does narrative assist in the construction of morality, but it also hand in the construction of identity-- both collective identity and personal identity.