More Relevant Research
How Films Teach and How Teach Films
It’s not a stretch to say that education is a vocation of film, and education has long been a subject and a project of cinema.39
Teaching is often about deriving something abstract from something concrete. It formulates, inscribes, circulates, and repeats sounds, images, texts, etc.–the artifacts of the practice.40 Film, like teaching, is adept at embedding signs that result in the hunt for meaning. The way film teaches audiences is by transmission, using symbolic messages that can’t be policed and that stick in our minds, assimilating deeply, integrating with one’s own experience.41 Like the storyteller, filmmakers listen to the voice of nature and resist using so many words in favor of images.42 Filmmakers reference their cinematic lineage using transmission as well, and citation of lineage is also a storytelling habit.43
There is much overlap between children in cinema and education in cinema. We can judge a country based on how it treats its children, and how we represent children in visual form is an indicates our commitments to what children are.44 Children, like film, show us the friction between fiction and the real world. Films cause us to revert to childhood because we, reflecting the beginning stages of development, are confronted with something new.45 Our perception becomes sharpened; we seek an earlier time. As we watch children on-screen, we get a sense of a more raw or basic form of humanity, an evolutionarily deep story that hits below the brain.46 Spectators want to protect a child on screen who seemingly is doing everything for the first time.47 In cinema, the child can symbolize the boundary between nature and culture.48 Children seem so natural and believable in movies, but what does it mean that they are put on display?49 What are the pleasures and anxieties that the image of a child solicits?50 The still image came to life in film, and because movement is life, people can live past their deaths on film.51 Children are symbols of the right to be and the promise of unforeseeable futures.52 They can function as victims or adults, and in both cases they tend toward resilience…but they can also make the familiar strange.53
We learned in our seminar that the Iranians are the best filmmakers of children, and Truffaut was the most intent on filming children. The activities below will reflect these histories. Educators are clued into the concerns of children, even though we must preserve the mystery of childhood and avoid pretending we can fully relate.54 But the child is the proving ground for whether education is working or not. The free and uninhibited development of children is a concern inseparable from education and often touches film through the Bildungsroman form.
Education in Society
bell hooks says that “children make the best theorists because they do not grasp social practices as inevitable.”55 We want our students theorizing about how films think, which will lead to how society thinks, especially about education.
What is the relationship and conversation between schools and society? Schools, like society, wrestle with the question: how can freedom and non-sovereignty co-exist?56 Actors (not the dramatic kind) in society exercise freedom, which is more about responsibility than about feeling free.57 We can’t seek an escape from the world; freedom needs the company of a publicly organized space of appearances where words are heard, deeds can be seen, and events are discussed, remembered, and turned into stories.58 Schools are part of this public domain in which we disrupt what happens automatically because for humans, freedom does not seem to be the norm.59 Schools can protect against sovereignty and tyranny as students communicate with each other and think the thoughts of others. What never leaves humans is a capacity to begin.60 The action of freedom is the same as a beginning, and actions will be required to sustain our beginnings, plateau our climaxes.61 We then ask: how do we learn what the new situation requires?62 As humanist teachers, we care because we remember how good it feels to be cared for with relational receptivity and engrossment.63 How do we encourage evolution that moves forward from mere functioning to expressing to intensity?64 How do we remove hierarchies from how students observe and act?65 School is in session.
Film-as-Film Again
People, especially young people, like what they like, and if you are unable to flex your own power in learning, then TV and popcorn cinema, ever seductive, socially obligatory, and quickly obsolete because of overuse, will always win the moment.66 One goal is to provide opportunities for students to take charge of their visual lives. A place to start to stimulate film awareness in students is: what films are essential for your relationship to cinema?67 These formative films are an example of how timing is everything: “whatever is not seen in time will never truly be seen.”68 Our goal as educators would be to curate films for students that are one step ahead of their current cycle of development and relationship to life.69 We can’t guarantee that students will be moved, but positive learning outcomes are likely using films about education, an immediately accessible and applicable topic that creates a text set.70 Bergala postulates that cultural knowledge comes from connecting pieces of art to a network of others, and so inside the classroom we simulate accumulating cultural knowledge outside the schoolhouse walls.71 This network connects films to films, films to film history, and films to the entertainment world. As we connect films, the attention we consent (exertion plus goodwill–Bergala’s definition) to bestow is a risk, but we become more ourselves in the world in the process because we start to expect something to happen around us.72
As alluded to previously, educators lead with their own taste because any other approach is intellectually disingenuous.73 We choose films that are developmentally appropriate without worrying too much about offending student sensibilities.74 Art should jangle our paradigms and rearrange homeostasis; art is the exception to the cultural rule.75 For this reason, students might find films strange and difficult, leading to resistance.76 Good. We honor resistance, and art’s strangeness is what challenges the status quo. Sometimes we first resist what eventually matters to us most.77 We want students rebelling against what has gone before them, so we provide a larger viewing culture to rebel against.78 Whitehead says teachers prevent waste, and Bergala says that pedagogy can save time on the natural rhythms of learning.79 Yes, teaching is a simulation; in this case, teachers help the juxtaposition between films and film clips happen.80 Teachers learn from their students by choosing a topic in cinema studies (for instance filmed space vs. real space) to explore through excerpts.81 Students can add clips from films they know to the learning sequence.82
Hardcore Creative Analysis
Goethe, calling education self-culture in service to others, nods to action as a creative imperative: “In the beginning was the deed.”83 This is how we culture ourselves, how we form our character in the world, and we are trying to produce creative spectators with the cultural capital of our classrooms. We read films and the creative act of filmmaking, becoming spectators who “experience the feeling of creation itself.”84 This is a mindset that transforms the spectator into a participating, active member of any society. Films are experiments with a problem without knowing the ultimate solution, which positions them as situations presented for groups of people to dialogue about. We start with films because then we’ve shared a series of experiences, and our anecdotal responses are a great place to start. Watching films whole, like reading whole novels, teaches us how the medium works, but the film clip or fragment is useful for shot by shot comparisons and re-watching to notice, for example, how painterly a shot’s composition can be. We postpone ideology as long as possible in favor of reading what is in front of us.
Bergala importantly takes us to “the final moment where the possibilities were still available, to that instant still vibrating with uncertainty” where the filmmaking decision occurs.85 This frame for reading a shot shifts my spectrum. The “unnatural” amount of imagination it takes to conceive of all that was possible before the final decision is indispensable for teachers and students of film to note.86 The director’s job is to keep each day’s work serving the story as a whole, so these irreversible decisions add up to a cumulative effect that puts the director’s original vision for the entire film in the audience’s mind.87 Director decisions rely on rationality, intention, intuition, instinct, and reflex, but as analysts and connoisseurs, we honor the “permanence by chance” of cinema by relating fragments of films to whole films.88
We want our students to hold aloft the tensions of where the original idea meets rugged reality in the domains of choice, placement, and approach, to appreciate the “glorious constraints” of filmmaking, “the listening conditions of reality.”89 The best filmmakers end up with a product that is reasonable and new, not quite the plan, but an actualization that takes the resistance of reality into account. We are focused on space for this unit, but actors are the most resistant part of reality.90 We can enter the reality of filmed reality as watchers, but also we find pleasure in understanding what Bergala calls breaking the toy.91
Artistic observation can achieve a sense of wonder, maybe because art doesn’t need a purpose, as nature-based cultures remind us. I do not want my students overwhelmed by the prospect of making even a short film because filmmaking is particularly difficult to estimate the time and energy needed, but I do want my students to have direct and personal experience with the process of filmmaking, a pursuit that requires solitude and risk-taking.92 They have engaged with something: their efforts hold together, and they have put some choices to a test.93 Bergala insists that cinema can be present in a single shot, and by paying attention to the “small music” that is the life in a shot, we cannot fixate on control because then we are not paying attention.94 The activities below are about helping students refine their perceptions, and as your classes balance the self-confidence of action with watching films and reactions to films attentively, community is built through trying similar filmmaking activities and dialogue in the commons.
Wisdom Always Sticks the Landing
Finally, film aesthetics belong alongside the theme of education as in the unit at hand. The more we specialize, beyond the amateur mastering of routines, the more we bring an intimate sense of power, beauty, and structure of ideas to a body of knowledge which is oriented to who we are as people.95 The moves of critique produce virtue! We gain a sense of style by achieving what we expect to happen. With style, we can fashion power and hold power back, and we begin to calculate with some foresight the effects of our activity.96 We’ve arrived at wisdom which is there to handle knowledge, selecting it and employing it to add value to immediate experiences.97 Whitehead calls wisdom “the most intimate freedom available.”98 We crave what has value, which is determined through wisdom, in order to experience Whitehead’s Romance afresh.
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