Watching a film by ear: An acousmatic approach to cinema

Sound film is commonly expressed as the interplay between the audio and the visual. Since the 1920s, audiences’ cinematic experience has been dramatically transformed owing to the synchronization of sounds and motion pictures. The silent film era highlights its narration performance mainly by the continuous alternation between moving images and intertitles (title cards) while its score is accompanied by a pianist or an orchestra. With more diverse sound elements (dialogue, music, ambient sound, sound effects, etc.) being synchronized to motion pictures, sound film delivers an immersive experience and strengthens its storytelling. Cinematic audiences are required to engage more intensively in the cross-modal perception of hearing and seeing. This progression appears as a breakthrough for filmmakers and, simultaneously, new advanced perceptual challenges for the audiences’ eyes and ears.

Competition and cooperation in Korean education

Education has become a principle duty for most of humanity. It is the major element for human growth and contributes to building a society. However, in the case of South Korea, social problems are coming from the current educational system, which is very competitive. Competitive education in South Korea has been influenced by neoliberal globalization, which has been spread widely throughout South Korea after the 1990s. Based on the neoliberal policies, markets should distribute the wealth efficiently and reasonably according to an individual’s effort.

"Coach Carter" and the lone quest for winning in life

One of the most powerful speeches of the 2005 American film Coach Carter was delivered inside a library, which may seem odd for a sports movie. The basketball team had been prohibited from playing and was forced to study. The one who made that decision, head coach Ken Carter, was facing the toughest challenge in his career: make his players study while pressure from the school and the community could have put not only his job but also his life in danger. It could be easier anywhere else but not in America, where high school sport is a dominant cultural event and the gym or the stadium is the sacred temple of not only the school but the whole community behind it.

Bilingual education and cultural identity development

Strong cultural identity is often perceived as vital for school adaptation in the psychology literature, as it strongly relates to students’ mental well-being and self-esteem. Addressing this issue, studies on acculturation have been conducted through observing behavioral patterns and perspective change of overseas students experiencing acculturation. The relationship between acculturation and identity is often discussed in terms of the complications between the need to adapt and the need to maintain one’s cultural identity.

Representations of Psychopathy in US Cinema

Ever since the early nineteenth century when Philippe Pinel described psychopathy as moral deficiency with no sign of mental impairment, scholars have taken an interest in the condition. The ensuing discussions emphasized the role of an unsympathetic environment in making an individual morally insane and on the society's responsibility in mitigating psychopathic behavior through moral therapy. A century later, scholars interpreted psychopathy from a sociological perspective, but which bore some resemblance to the nineteenth century moral discussion. For example, Harrington's Psychopaths (1973) and Smith's The Psychopath in Society (1978) suggest that an amoral society commending individualism and personal achievement provides an environment that rewards, and thus encourages, psychopathic behavior. They also suggested that psychopaths are more successful in adapting to such a society.