**1. Introduction**

To argue for the distinctiveness of moving-image media as a cultural form, with its own codes and conventions for the creation of meaning, is to confront the folkwisdom that moving images simply provide a "window on the world" that anyone can understand. However, the relationship between these two perspectives is a paradoxical one. Between 1895 and 1929, the film industry extended the initial appeal of very early films by evolving what many film scholars and teachers call "film language" and Noël Burch calls the Institutional Mode of Representation: a highly complex system using the many new technologies that emerged in the 1885–1929 period, such as moveable cameras, editing equipment, colour systems and sound recording [1]. Despite the complexity of this language, it was developed precisely to enhance the new medium's appeal to mass audiences by intensifying the illusion of reality that it presented, while continuing to ensure that reading this "language" was a skill that could be learned at a very early age – so early, in fact, that most of us do not remember learning it. Hence the general assumption – or folk wisdom – that nobody has to learn how to understand moving-image media.

In this chapter, for brevity's sake, I will refer to moving-image media as "movies" – by which I mean all the moving-image forms which use similar codes and conventions, including, for example, computer games, YouTube videos and advertisements, as well as cinema films and TV broadcasts. I begin by describing the folk wisdom's contribution to an ideology that underpins theories and even policies concerning child management as well as informing the status of movies within hierarchies of cultural value. This frames the central argument of the chapter: that by recognising the distinctiveness and complexity of movie language, we can study and interpret children's movieviewing behaviour as a learning process, rather than as evidence of passivity or mesmerisation.

Scholars who wish to engage with this argument face considerable ethical and methodological challenges, when it becomes obvious that for most children in industrialised countries this learning must start in their second year of life and be sufficiently complete by the age of around 3 when they start being able to follow and enjoy some mainstream feature-length movies with other family members, and to play increasingly complex games on smartphones or tablets. This chapter discusses the challenges that have led to this age-group (which I will refer to as "toddlers") being significantly under-researched, and it proposes potential solutions to the challenges of trying to understand their early learning about movies. For illustration, I draw on my research experience of studying toddlers within my own family, and on using embodied cognition perspectives in the analysis of video data.
