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Film flunks the test
Going to college increasingly means going to the movies. Students can study film qua film--which is reasonable enough, given film's enormous artistic power and impact. But students can take courses that use film to deliver other material as well. As ACTA has shown, literature courses frequently rely on film to dramatize works that--presumably--are now deemed less accessible than they once were. "Shakespeare in Film" courses are a common instance of this trend: Rice, Wesleyan, Bryn Mawr, and Purdue, among others, all offer such courses. And, as Ohio University history professor Kevin Mattson has found, film is increasingly being used to bring history to life.
In the current issue of the Common Review, Mattson describes how he found himself teaching a large upper-level course entitled "History Through Film." Initially reluctant ("Too often when someone says they're showing a film in class," he writes, "what they really mean is, I have a conference to attend that day"), Mattson eventually agrees to the assignment because he feels it is his duty to help teach one of his department's major service courses; a flexible course, History Through Film varies in content from term to term, and is geared toward, as Mattson puts it, getting "butts in seats." After accepting the assignment, Mattson must talk himself into believing that a history course based on movies is a viable idea.
First, he convinces himself that showing movies in class is not necessarily a hallmark of pedagogical laziness, that it might instead be a timely and useful teaching technique. Saturday Night Fever (1977) strikes him as a memorable way to introduce students to some of the defining aspects of the 1970s, while Casablanca (1942) amounts to an important historical document in itself.
Mattson then asks his colleagues how they approach teaching film. Some treat film, with all its inaccuracies and creative license, as a foil for historical analysis: "you use film to tell a story about the past--sometimes even a myth--so that you can then unmask it and expose its ideology." Others use film to set the tone for a historical lesson plan--one of Mattson's colleagues uses The Patriot, a 2000 Mel Gibson flick, to introduce the American Revolution. Still others use film to illustrate historically specific national moods: "Films can offer the same sort of insights as novels, speeches, and essays," Mattson writes; "This was the approach that most appealed to me as a historian of twentieth-century America."
Thus does Mattson develop a theory about how one might teach history through teaching film. But, in teaching as in other applied arts, theory is not practice. Mattson's account of actually teaching History Through Film is a devastating indictment of what he terms "the postmodern academy," which he defines as
... a place where consumerism and entertainment seep in. It's a place demanding--and these are real cases--that universities build Jacuzzis and water parks for students. It's a place summed up by the omnipresent student center that looks like a megamall replete with food courts .... It's a place where the term democracy is not about self-knowledge or citizenship but rather about impulsive consumer ratings about what you like and dislike in the classroom. It's a place where a course like History Through Film makes perfect sense.
One reason History Through Film makes sense in the postmodern academy, Mattson observes, is that students have a tendency to treat every course as a course in film. Regardless of the class, discussion frequently takes the form of students volunteering comparisons between the assigned reading and movies they have seen: "I remember very well a student trying to use The Matrix to explain to his fellow students Platonic theories of knowledge." Popular culture is today's students' frame of reference; films are the lingua franca of a generation reared in front of the screen, so much so that students are sometimes unable to understand the material they are studying except as footnotes to their favorite films.
And that's the good news. Too often, Mattson finds, films fail to stimulate even the kinds of solipsistic reflections described above, in which everything may ultimately be explained in terms of individual students' personal viewing experiences. Mattson describes what it was like to show movies to the 150 students enrolled in History Through Film:
... students were having a difficult time extricating themselves from the silky power of entertainment. Over and over I saw this played out: once the film started to roll in class, the pens went down, and the students' eyes glazed over. I could almost hear the critical circuits in the brains snapping off. One time, I could swear seeing, even though the lights were turned down, a student literally drooling.
This repeated response should tell us something: Entertainment doesn't teach. It entertains. It shuts down analytical skills and makes us feel warm inside. Watching a movie is comforting, as is the conversation that typically follows a movie screening--which inevitably concerns little more than a person's likes or dislikes. And opinions comfort us in a way that arguments--supported by evidence and logic and resulting in conflict--seldom do.
In teaching the course, Mattson learns that film cannot spark intellectual insight if it is not seen in reference to something else--and students, he realizes, typically bring with them neither historical knowledge nor even knowledge of historical myths. Second, Mattson learns that students' lack of knowledge ensures a lack of analytical distance; because they cannot think critically about what they are seeing, they tend to become passive consumers looking for entertainment. Faced with a screen, they zone. Faced with a screen showing material that does not enable them to zone (because the film is older, or subtitled, or both), they simply snicker and dismiss.
Finally, Mattson learns something about himself: that, despite his misgivings, he'll agree to teach History Through Film again if asked--not because he thinks it works, but because he feels an obligation to teach his share of large departmental service courses. History Through Film, he notes, is a "butts in seats" course of pivotal importance to his department's overall enrollment figures. The conflict he describes is a classic one: when student needs and departmental desires do not align, students lose out.
Sharp, insightful, and frequently funny, Mattson's essay is a rueful look at how the academy can perpetuate practices that are substantially at odds with its educational mission. Courses that use film to feed students watered down versions of knowledge, Mattson notes, are, along with megamall student centers and elite athletic facilities, part and parcel of how the postmodern academy attempts to attract and keep students. It all amounts to a form of "slumming," a word Mattson uses to evoke the academy's collective, unspoken assumption that students will not rise to the occasion of higher education, and that, therefore, colleges and universities must lower their expectations while pretending that students are smarter and savvier than ever.
Posted by acta online at July 11, 2007 06:22 PM
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Comments
How ridiculous! The idea that film is somehow more inherently anti-analytic or entertainment-driven than other arts is simply wrong.
I wonder what films Mattson chose. Did he use Passolini's *Canterbury Tales* to introduce students to medieval character types? Did he use Herzog's *Aguirre, Wrath of God* to teach about colonial exploration in Latin America? Did he use Kubrick's *Barry Lindon* to show 18th century lifestyles? Did students view Sembene Ousmane's films about railroad strikes in Africa? Did they view classic silent films such as Chaplin's *Modern Times* or Lang's *Metropolis*, both of which paint a clear picture of their historical presents? Or read Fredric Jameson's critique of filmic history in *Postmodernism*?
No, it sounds like he stuck to Hollywood crap. So what did he expect? It would be like teaching a "Novel and History" course and only using those sensational historical romances from the Harlequin division.
And did he teach the intricacies of film analysis, insisting on students actively viewing the films for their formal construction? And why did he screen the films during class time? The film studies courses I took all involved a substantial investment of time in screenings outside of class meetings. Along with the films, we were required to read criticism and other texts that supplied materials for critical consideration and historical context.
(Finally, I wonder how the alumni ACTA represents will feel about having their megamall student centers and Class of 1978 Memorial Juice Bar mocked. Alumni fund these travesties -- they often come up with the ideas themselves. Because what's more natural for an entrepreneurial alum after building a megamall where once was some forest than donating money so that one's alma mater can build a megamall too?)
Posted by: Luther Blissett at July 12, 2007 11:38 AM
Luther Blissett -- Got a good laugh out of your comments about the megamalls and the alumni. At the state university where I work, the student center is a pretty modest affair, I wish the food courts were better -- when Panda Express is the best chow, I think action is called for, especially with the paucity of eateries near campus. But the athletic facilities are primo. The administration, alumni, locals, certainly the donors are immensely proud of them. Whenever some of the faculty grumble about the ongoing athletic glorification and academic decline, nastiness is hurled forth from all the above-named groups.
Interestingly, the students are less obsessed with athletics than the putative grown-ups. (I'm old enough that it's hard to think of the students as adults, not the undergraduates, not until they prove it).
I can't say much about the use of film. As an occasional supplement, it seems like it would be useful. I don't teach history or literature, I teach science. There aren't many film dramas about quantum theory, thermodynamics, the genetic code, or chemical bonding. There have been a couple of amusing films about Einstein. "Young Einstein" was about a rock star, I think. A slightly more historically faithful film had Meg Ryan as his niece and Walter Matthau as the aged scientist. There were a few other characters such as "Podolsky" who would get a chuckle among the cognoscenti. I can't really say I would recommend these films for classroom use, however, not even for Physics for Poets. (An interesting teaching assignment, by the way).
Movies with actual science content don't seem to be very available. Perhaps they would be useful, but probably only as an occasional supplement. Woo-woo only goes so far in learning science.
Posted by: Mike at July 13, 2007 12:25 PM
Chaucer's CTs are infinitely superior to the infantile Passolini's, but the former, unlike Passolini's flicks, require more prep than just leaning back and watching the scenes go by. LB should perhaps peruse the philosopher Roger Scruton's characterisations of film and photography as entertainments more than arts and why this is so. For they aren't full arts in the sense that painting and poetry are. And he might perhaps leave the super-annuated Stalinist crank Frederic Jameson and his post-modernist rantings alone. Herzog's Aguirre is entertaining for its stark Galgenumor, not its supposed description of colonial exploitation a la Junk Marxism. And I think Thackeray would've split his sides at the notion that "Barry Lyndon" "depicted 18th century lifestyles", though the Kubrick film's always been a favourite of mine.
Posted by: Jacques Albert at July 13, 2007 12:41 PM
Jacques, you really cannot read closely, can you? The whole point of this "film and history" course is to compare filmic representations of history with actual historical records and scholarly historical accounts. No one would pass Passolini or Kubrick off as accurate history -- and that's the point. The point of the class is to interrogate how history is deployed by non-historians. Similar courses are frequently organized about the historical novel's version of history (spoiler alert: historical novels aren't accurate either).
And no: plenty of students can read Chaucer or Thackeray with the same glazed over attention as your imaginary film viewers. (Research suggests that film audiences are far more active mentally than they're given credit for, anyway.) The point is how you *teach* these materials. Screening a film is like assigning reading -- neither takes "prep." Prep work enters when you start teaching, whether you're teaching how to analyze a film or a poem. Some great film teachers will break the screening up, forcing the students to consider, discuss, and analyze each key scene after viewing it.
And Scrunton's attack on film and photography is sophomoric. As the great Sir Ernest Gombrich once wrote, there is no such thing as "art." There are only artworks, human-made things so striking in their construction that we are forced to consider how and why they were made. If you don't think *Solaris* or *Modern Times* are works that meet this criterion, I'm afraid we simply cannot hold an adult discussion.
Posted by: Luther Blissett at July 13, 2007 03:47 PM
"Did he use Kubrick's *Barry Lindon* (sic) to show 18th century lifestyles?"
The words are yours, LB! Forget a negation there? Or a term like "simulacrum"? Or should we correct your first statement to read something like: " . . . to show 20th century movie depictions of supposed 18th century lifestles"? Perhaps with some such statements of LB's I've read, the post-structuralists may have a point in saying that language is speaking through him!
So according to your sagacious prescriptions, LB, we may best learn history by watching repeated examples of what it is not. Curious! Of course film's part of popular or social history of the last century or so, but these days many more significant areas of history have been ignored for these . . .
Can't think of a more sophomoric riposte than simply "declaring" an accomplished and subtle aesthetician's ideas "sophomoric". OK, so go back many years and try Arnold Hauser's description of movie audiences in his social history of art.
Posted by: Jacques Albert at July 15, 2007 10:49 AM
Jacques is right; I should have stated that idea more clearly. All art is representation; all representations are distortions, etc.
And yes: one way of studying history is to study our ideas about history. Research in information processing suggests that you can only really begin to teach the truth once you identify and alter misconceptions. A history course that examined the differences in representational techniques in film, academic prose, popular history, fiction, etc. would seem interesting and useful to me.
Finally, Scrunton argues that film and photography aren't arts because they capture the world as it is -- they don't represent it. That's simply wrong. It's a bad and unoriginal argument.
Posted by: Luther Blissett at July 16, 2007 03:15 PM