Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate

Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate maps the use of a documentary film as a main text in an undergraduate course, explaining its practices and elaborating its theoretical underpinnings before gesturing toward some of the more salient unresolved issues that offer avenues for further research. Based on the premise that digital technologies endow films with the same infinite patience that books possess—their segments, like pages, are constant and so can be analyzed in a sustained fashion—Filmic Texts maintains that in a highly mediated world, facility with all of the available semiotic resources is integral to the type of large scale literacy necessary for a flourishing democracy. This argument gains strength as its concepts are also enacted; it is created in Scalar, a platform that allows one to speak with rich media in addition to words.

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