TALK ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING
Teaching
Film
Timothy
Corrigan
Much of my first year as Director of Cinema
Studies at Penn has been spent learning about the remarkable
Penn students, faculty, and
staff, while at the same time working to shape a future
major in Cinema Studies. (In all this and more, I've been
fortunate to have the indefatigable assistance of Nicola
Gentili, the associate director of Cinema Studies). During
the last weeks of the spring semester of 2004, however,
three events stand out as climactic moments, each of which
has reminded me of why I love to teach and write about
film and why I am so excited about the prospects of Cinema
Studies here. Towards the end of March the Jewish Studies
Program organized a panel on Mel Gibson's The Passion
of the Christ, attended by about 150 people. Later
that week the Cinema Studies program ran a two-day symposium
called "Film Studies Today," featuring a screening and
discussion at The Bridge: Cinema de Lux, followed the next
day by a workshop on teaching film conducted by Professors
Timothy Murray from Cornell and Patricia White from Swarthmore.
And on April 8, the 2004 Philadelphia Film Festival opened
with an expanded presence in West Philadelphia and the
expanded presence of Penn faculty and students. Each of
these was more or less an extra-curricular event, but each
wonderfully blurred the lines between what goes on inside
a Cinema Studies classroom and outside that classroom in
ways that called attention to the remarkable excitement
and learning opportunities in the field of Cinema Studies
at Penn.
The panel on The Passion of the Christ was
clearly a response to the loud, public, and sometime strident
debates about that recent movie. The many different questions,
comments, and arguments seemed to multiply exponentially
as the evening went on: questions and arguments about the
historical authenticity of the film, about accusations
of anti-Semitism, and about the quality of the film as
a film and its place in film culture. In the end, I believe,
what was so important about this occasion was not some
resolution about the value, danger, or importance of this
film, but that it allowed people to articulate and debate
ideas and disagreements that were part of their daily readings
in the newspapers and part of their daily conversations.
Indeed, many films‹good and bad‹seem especially capable
of surrounding and infusing our private and public lives,
and people are rarely reluctant to have an opinion about
them. In the best situations (like this one), the familiarity
with and confidence about movies allows individuals to
test or articulate their feelings and ideas in a way that
so many other cultural experiences often cannot. As any
good teacher knows, this kind of engagement may not be
the goal of learning but it can certainly be a crucial
first step in that process.
The "Film Studies Today" symposium tapped some
of the same energy surrounding the cinema, but with a very
different perspective and aim. In this case the participants
were largely academics‹faculty and graduate students from
a variety of Penn departments (as well as from other colleges
and universities in the Philadelphia region). Although
many of those in attendance were seasoned teachers from
Romance languages, English, and other academic fields,
I had the distinct impression that what brought this group
together was the discipline of cinema studies. If one advantage
film studies has in the classroom is its unusually democratic
appeal and status, this group gathered to talk about what
is not necessarily self-evident about film. We were there
to talk about the tools and ideas that make this a particular
and demanding discipline with its own scholarship, critical
methods, analytical vocabulary, and pedagogical strategies.
Learning and teaching these as carefully and precisely
as possible is a very important way to develop the
field as a respected discipline, to demand more of students,
and, in the end, to relate film accurately and productively
to those many other fields on which it has an impact,
such as history, gender studies, literature, and so on.
That everyone seems to know about movies is a useful start,
but learning to think precisely (emotionally, visually,
verbally) about movies is a critical part of turning a
casual and familiar knowledge into a productive understanding.
With Penn's growing involvement in the Philadelphia
Film Festival, the teaching and learning associated with
Cinema Studies will move out of the classroom and off campus.
It has also moved outside an academic framework that tends
to look historically backwards at film practices. The festival
has, of course, been a major part of Philadelphia life
for many years, but its new proximity to Penn, both geographically
and intellectually, has meant that students and faculty
have more of an opportunity than ever before to experience
film as a contemporary activity with an extraordinary global
range. This spring I therefore required my film students
to attend several of the festival screenings. In part,
this was meant to have them participate in the cultural
energy (and sometimes frenzy) which surfaces at these events.
And it was about having them see films that most of them
would likely never have the opportunity to see: new films
from Denmark, Turkey, and Korea, a retrospective
of American avant-garde movies of the 1950s and recent
experiments in digital animation from around the world,
to name a few. Documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee screened
his new film Bright Leaves as part of the festival,
and before and after that screening he talked constantly
with Penn students. Whether they enjoy these festival films
or not, what counts about this version of "teaching film" is
that students encounter here new perspectives, young filmmakers,
and a large community of cinephiles as part of an extended
education in why movies matter today. Few Cinema Studies
programs in the U.S. have this advantage.
The heart of Cinema Studies at Penn is of course
the classroom and the curriculum. In that, much of what
teaching film at Penn means is not new: critical thinking
and analysis, writing and research, new ideas and expanding
perspectives. Like other disciplines in the humanities,
ours is a somewhat traditional program promoting rigorous
and imaginative thinking and distinguished by an unusually
strong and diverse blend of faculty with international
interests. Penn's Cinema Studies program has a distinctive
strength within this larger framework, however, by focusing
students on what I consider the living cultural dominant
of our times‹visual technology. Whether the specific object
is the movies or another of the continually extending branches
of contemporary visual technology (from television to digital
communications), teaching students to think analytically,
historically, and creatively about the images that permeate
their lives is what makes Cinema Studies so important today‹both
inside and outside the classroom.
Dr.
Timothy Corrigan is the Director of Cinema Studies and
Professor of English. More information is available
about Cinema Studies at http://cinemastudies.sas.upenn.edu.
This
essay continues the series that began in the fall of
1994 as the joint creation of the College
of Arts and Sciences and the Lindback Society for Distinguished
Teaching.
See www.upenn.edu/almanac/teach/teachall.html for
the previous essays.