Message from rrobinson

[Anonymous]

I'd love to hear more from anyone who uses Hollywood movies in teaching Asia. I've often used native-grown movies in covering China, Korea, and Japan ('Throne of Blood', for example, illustrates Japan's feudal period pretty well, and has a wonderfully overwrought death scene to boot - 7th grade love it!), but I'm really wary of Hollywood.

So often, it seems, as educators we have to undo the misconceptions sown by blockbuster movies, often misconceptions that aren't apparent until a student makes a revealing comment or observation (my own favorite, though not from a movie, was when a tenth grader commented on my having lived in a grass hut - I was mystified as to what they were refering to, until the student reminded me that I had remarked, several weeks before, that I grew up in a village in the north of England... had I said "small town", all would have been well...).

In covering feudal Japan, we now have to deal with the errors and misconceptions created by "The Last Samurai" (which students have usually seen in its entirety and without anyone at hand to point out the fallacies behind the gritty "realism") and, most recently, in teaching sixth graders about ancient Greece, there's "300" to deal with (it's based on a comic book, for the love of Zeus!).

The opening scenes of "Gladiator" are a good example. On the one hand , it gives some idea of the violence and sheer mass of an assault by Roman legionaries, but, on the other, it's full of inaccuracies - from the stirrups which the Romans would not have known, to the whole notion of attacking in a forest (legion formations were rendered much more vulnerable - a lesson that Augustus learned after two legions were butchered by Germanic barabrians in the Teutoberg Forest). The rest of the movie, of course, is almost utter fabrication hung loosely on the barest framework of historical interpretation... or am I picking too many nits? (Sad to say, this movie - and "The Patriot" - won a award for historical accuracy from the History Channel!).

I have shown excerpts from Kenneth Branagh's "Henry V" to give students some idea of the reality of a medieval battlefield (lots of mud and not much glory), but I guess, as that's a British movie, it doesn't really count as Hollywood.

I'd really appreciate your suggestions.

Ray
[Edit by="rrobinson on Apr 4, 7:12:12 AM"][/Edit]