The Hermeneutical Analysis of the Soviet Fantasy Genre of the 1950s-1960s and Its American Screen Transformation in Media Studies in a Student Audience

Abstract

The main outcome of the media education hermeneutical analysis of the Soviet fantasy genre of the 1950s - 1960s and its American screen transformation in media studies in a university classroom is not just the audience's understanding of historical, political, social and cultural contexts and the stereotype formation mechanisms of the epoch, but also the development of the audience's perception of media culture, analytical and interpretative skills applied to media texts, critical thinking development. Keywords: Hermeneutical analysis; fantastic films; genre; media education; media literacy; media competence; universities; students; Soviet films of the 1950s-1960s; USA; USSR. Introduction. The hermeneutic analysis of cultural context stands for study of the media text interpretation process, of cultural and historical factors that may have an impact both on the media texts authors/agencies and the audience's viewpoint. The hermeneutic analysis is connected with the comprehension of a media text by matching with the cultural tradition and reality; penetration into the logic of a media text; media text analysis based on artistic images comparison in the historical and cultural contexts. The objectives of the audience's media education in this case are the following: development of the audience's media culture; their apprehension, analysis and interpretation skills applied to media texts; critical thinking. Since nearly all modern universities are equipped with networked multi-media one can make the best use of e-libraries and web-archives in media studies. Among them we can name the American non-profit Internet archive founded in San Francisco in 1996 (www.archive.org). Its aim is to provide anytime access for researchers and the public at large to various digital historic artifacts (print, visual and audiovisual texts). As the great bulk of media texts presented in the Internet Archive is open and free, it is very convenient for educational aims. We offer a study guide for using fantasy genre media texts in teaching the media. The teaching methods used at such a lesson are based on the combination of the hermeneutic analysis with the structural, narrative, ethical, ideological, iconographic/visual analyses, the analysis of media stereotypes and media texts characters. We thought it interesting to pursue the transformation of such a typical (and archival) fantastic media text as Planet of Storm produced by P. Klushantsev (1961) in the American films - Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) by C. Harrington and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968) by P. Bogdanovich. The comparative analysis of these media texts will enable us to touch upon not only the socio- cultural, historical, and ideological contexts but also the urgent problem of copyright infringement and counterfeit media products.