Educational Media Reviews Online

The Art of Communicating consists of four programs: Language, Writing, Modern Myths, and Comedy. All four attempt to cover their topics with a strongly global perspective.

The first tape, Language, illustrates how human spoken languages have evolved. There is discussion about the origins of language, and analysis of the major language groups, and how they spread throughout the world. The development of European languages from the Proto-Indoeuropean root language is traced, with examples given for the evolution of current Romance languages.

Writing is examined on the second tape. The earliest writing is shown to be a shorthand for Egyptian hieroglyphs. The need to record business transactions in a reliable and permanent way is shown to have served as the driving force behind the development of the simpler alphabetic method, which made writing more efficient and easier to learn.

The tape makes the point that the number of languages in the world is getting smaller as time goes on. Not every language is written, and some of these are being lost. Linguists are concerned about completely losing those languages if there are no written forms in which to preserve them.

Modern Myths is the third program in this series, discussing how the concept of the myth is used to join cultures together. Myths traditionally offered explanations of how the world was created, the purpose of existence, and the meaning of life itself. But there is additional discussion about modern myths, such as the myth of "progress" and "science," in which these concepts are held by many to hold the final answer to the world's unanswered questions. The myth of celebrity, the "star," is also discussed, as the person upon whom society can project its ideals.

Comedy is explored in the last tape of this series. While some modern comedic concepts are discussed, the emphasis of this tape is a broader, more historical viewpoint of comedy. Aristophenes is mentioned as the writer of the first "comedies," and it is shown that the same pompous, self-important characters that he wrote about show up in modern TV sitcoms. Powerful churches and governments recognized the danger of humor, particularly satire, by banning and censoring comedy.

The tapes are narrated scripts, accompanied by a constant flowing visual background that serves to highlight what is being said. While the relentlessly moving visual background might get the attention of "MTV generation" young audiences, they were sometimes distracting and repetitious. The tapes were well made, with good production values.

A number of experts in various fields are interviewed throughout the tapes. A majority of the interviewees are French-speaking and there is voice-over translation into English. Others are from Canada and United States. Since Films for the Humanities & Sciences intends to explore the topics globally, it would have been even more interesting and convincing if they could have interviewed people from more varied nationalities.

These tapes are recommended for students in middle school or high school, but it should be noted that the information presented here is not done in any great depth. The purpose is primarily to introduce these topics to a young audience, and particularly to emphasize the multi-cultural nature of the topics discussed.