Cross-Cultural Film Study: Seeing Inside Out.

This article focuses on approaches for teaching free speech in cross-cultural context in the U.S. Freedom of expression is limited by one's ability to hear a speaker as much as by a speaker's ability to formulate and deliver a message. Dense cultural, economic, and political contexts of communications systems limit that ability to hear, no matter what the legal promise of the First Amendment. In the U.S., highly centralized, national, corporate mass media provide a narrowly constricted worldview that in practice narrows the worldview of those whose common link with others in local, national, and global societies are the images purveyed by the mainstream media.