Cary Bazalgette Book Launch

The launch of Cary Bazalgette’s book “How Toddlers Learn the Secret Language of Movies”  was held in The Blue Room at the BFI Southbank, June 2021.

This new book takes a radically new approach to the well-worn topic of children’s relationship with the media, avoiding the “risks and benefits” paradigm while examining very young children’s interactions with film and television. Bazalgette proposes a refocus on the learning processes that children must go through in order to understand what they are watching on televisions, phones, or iPads. To demonstrate this, she offers unique insight from research done with her twin grandchildren starting from just before they were two years old, with analysis drawn from the field of embodied cognition to help identify minute behaviours and expressions as signals of emotions and thought processes. The book makes the case that all inquiry into early childhood movie-viewing should be based on the premise that learning–usually self-driven–is taking place throughout.

The discussant for the evening was Professor David Buckingham, speaking about both Cary’s book and the wider topic of young children and the moving image.

Cary is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Culture, Communication, and Media at the UCL Institute of Education, UK. Previously, she was Head of Education at the British Film Institute. The event is jointly presented by the BFI, the Media Education Association, and ReMAP.