One of the current challenges for educational and many other social sciences regarding the rapid digital revolution and constant emergence of new digital media phenomena is the need for methodological techniques in dealing with complex media architectures. Those media architectures today are mainly digital in nature, which means they're often centralized but interlinked commercial plattforms open to user generated media artifacts like images and video as works of popular art. At the same time those digital networks are also highly complex on the inside, covering a broad set of topics. They are however also based on commonly known assumptions about film or photography, often using artistic techniques and relying on artistic conventions established over a long time. This is specifically true for any film or video based artifacts found on YouTube and similar platforms. The paper argues that this very fact enables us to analyze a lot of them using existing methodology from film studies.
The paper introduces research that is part of an ongoing habilitation project on film analysis and transformative learning, which is trying to further develop the approach to filmanalysis proposed by Marotzki & Jörissen (2009) in a long-running research project named "Strukturale Medienbildung". Therein the authors propose a concept of transformative learning ("Strukturale Bildung") that is fundamentally tied to experiencing the world through (digital) media. They are key to reflecting on one's self-world-relationship and therefor can enable processes of Bildung (partly translatable as trans-/formative learning toward more complex world views). Qualitative methods to analyse media structures both on a micro and a macro level can show how media support those processes. Feature films and movies of any genre represent one mode of media for which the authors provide a methodological framework of analysis.

Since 1979 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson publish and regularly update their popular text book „Film Art - An Introduction“ (12ed, 2019) as an approach to analyse any kind of feature film or short film of many genres including documentaries and animated film. They base this approach on the short-lived russian formalist movement of the early 20th century (Erlich 1973). They focus on a historically informed way of reading and interpreting films as art, defined as a complex set of narrative and stylistic elements that can only be understood by an audience that is actively putting the elements of form into place to make sense of them. It is one of the basic assumption of the neoformalistic approach, that the story is not purely embedded in the film but is rather constructed individually by the viewers based on cues in the movie. This opens up the possibility of a variety of interpretations viewers may come up with and an integrated ambiguity that is part of every movie. In the research project of "Strukturale Medienbildung" Jörissen and Marotzki (2009) connect to this basic assumption and the ambiguity ("Unbestimmtheit") with the classic German educational concept of Bildung as a means to deal with uncertainty in modern societies. Movies in this context offer what the authors have named "Bildungspotenziale", which means elements on which an audience can reflect upon events (maybe even biographical experiences) without being personally attached or involved to a certain situation. Movie characters may act as a proxy for self and world relations which may then be questioned and potentially reconstituted. Educational film analysis can therefore reconstruct social diagnosis and commentary embedded in most movies to some degree. By looking at movies we may also find new perspectives about different historical time frames, because movies usually comment on the time they were made in as well as the times they portray.

In an exemplary analysis of a short film the talk will illustrate the methodological approach of neoformalistic film analysis as well as digital tools to create digital experiences to improve film analysis close to the actual material. It is shown that one doesn’t have to reduce the form of movies to literary texts as is common with many other rather deductive approaches. As new forms of movies and video have made their way into every day media, being able to analyse and being aware of common methods of staging information in moving images seems to be a key skill in the modern digital environment and should be part of digital literacy and a critical approach to media education. The presentation therefore argues in favour of neoformalistic film analysis as a methdology that could and should be included in a basic school curriculum. It further intends to build a theoretical bridge from Bordwell & Thompson's methodology to educational research questions with a method specifically applicable to questions of Bildung.

Bordwell, D., Thompson, K., & Smith, J. (2019). Film Art - An introduction (12 ed.). McGraw-Hill Education. Erlich, V. (1973). Russischer Formalismus. Suhrkamp. Holze, J. (2017). Digitales Wissen : bildungsrelevante Relationen zwischen Strukturen digitaler Medien und Konzepten von Wissen. doctoral thesis, Otto-von-Guericke-Universität, Magdeburg. Holze, J., & Verständig, D. (2018). Film und Bildung. In A. Geimer, C. Heinze, & R. Winter (Eds.), Handbuch Filmsoziologie. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. Jörissen, B., & Marotzki, W. (2009). Medienbildung - Eine Einführung: Theorie - Methoden - Analysen (1 ed.). Stuttgart: UTB. Thompson, K. (1988). Breaking the Glass Armor. Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvzxx93s