Looking Back on an Intro to Film Class
The movies that we watched in their entirety during a weekly screening period were:
- Citizen Kane
- Manhunter
- Vertigo
- Zodiac
- 400 Blows
- Badlands
- Cabaret
- The Haunting
- The Shining
- Do the Right Thing
- The Living End
- Orlando
- Synecdoche, NY
Overall, this selection worked just fine, and it supported one of my basic goals for the class: showing the students a wide enough range of films to give them a sense of what cinema has to offer, while keeping the selection focused enough not to feel like a random potpourri of greatest hits. During class, I also showed extended clips of all sorts of things -- I was especially pleased when one of the students told me he'd really discovered he likes silent cinema, which we watched a lot of clips of, and which before the class he would have dismissed as old and stupid.
Clips worked really well, because they sparked lots of curiosity about movies the students hadn't encountered before -- the first 10 minutes or so of Hal Hartley's Trust especially got people writing in their notebooks and asking me if they could borrow my VHS of it (alas, it's not yet on DVD in the U.S.).
Some of the films worked better than I thought they would. The 400 Blows wasn't universally loved (each of the films had supporters and detractors, though there were clear favorites), but the students who loved it loved it in the way I did when I first saw it as an undergraduate -- as a kind of poetry that is immensely entertaining and then, in its final shots, emotionally overwhelming. Cabaret was the film that worked well for the largest amount of students, and it was a revelation for students who thought all musicals are sweet and silly. I expected a lot more pushback on The Living End and would not have been surprised if a student or two walked out of the screening, but though a number of them said they thought it was too explicit (which allowed us to talk about how hetero audiences tend to be oblivious to the explicitness of heterosex [that doesn't show a penis] and find even a same-sex kiss to be "too explicit" -- The Living End is definitely explicit, and certainly more explicit than just a kiss, but what is actually shown on screen is not more than in plenty of mainstream movies like Miami Vice or even Psycho, if we want to think about the scene that the students most focused on as too explicit: Jon and Luke in the shower. What is explicit in that scene is the way the characters talk to each other, which is much more specific than in mainstream movies, and welcomes the audience into imaginative participation. That's what can make the sex in The Living End unsettling for people, not the actual imagery.)
Orlando worked magnificently well, and led to one of my favorite class discussions, because it proved both entertaining and thought-provoking for the students. I'd previously thought of the film as somewhat superficial and light, but while it's certainly light, I have a new appreciation for the depths of its playfulness, given how well it caused my students to think hard about the world and their view of it.
Synecdoche, NY worked better than I expected, too -- I'd really been expecting about half the class to loathe it. But only one student said he really hated it, while a few others were just so bewildered by it they didn't know how to evaluate their experience. But many others said they found it fascinating and really powerful, and one student called it his favorite of any of the films we watched.
Do the Right Thing was probably the most divisive film for the class, with some of the students unable to see beyond an image they've acquired/imagined of Spike Lee, who some of the students sometime in their lives decided hates white people and therefore hates them and therefore they hate any movie he makes (except Inside Man, which they didn't realize he made). This was a difficult attitude to work through. We read an interview with Lee that many students quite obviously mis-read through the lens of their resistance to Lee, causing them to see only particular words, not even entire sentences. This all reinforced an experience I've continued to have with students of the type we tend to get, an attitude based on defensive liberal pieties of tolerance and niceness -- predicated on the ideas that 1.) discrimination is something that happened in the past, because I and all my friends are nice people who would not behave like the not-nice people back in the day; 2.) talking about race is not nice, because nice people are nice to everybody and don't point out their differences. Their educational experiences up to this point have not given them any vocabulary or templates for talking about difference in general and race in particular in any way other than "racism is bad" -- but "racism" is something that is very difficult for them to define beyond segregation. In my Feminism in America class, I once had a student say flat-out, "Talking about race is racist," and other students in discussion agree that everything would be fine as long as we didn't talk about it. I've had various conversations about this phenomenon with my colleagues in various disciplines, and they've shared similar stories. (All of this is another reason I'm looking forward to my Outsider course in the fall, because it will, among many other things, allow us to explore the constructions of certains stereotypes and attitudes.) I think I understand some of the reasons why so many students respond the way they do to the discussion of race -- not the content, but the fact of discussion itself -- since my background was similar to that of many of my students at least through 8th grade, but I'm still sometimes surprised when I encounter the fear, resentment, defensiveness, and ignorance that comes out when I try to get them thinking about some of the nuances, paradoxes, and complexities of racial discourse.
So yes, Do the Right Thing. Good choice, but not an easy conversation. College shouldn't be about easy conversations, though.
Only two of the films stand out to me as ones I will definitely replace if I teach the class in the future, though with one of them it's entirely a technical problem: Our classrooms are equipped with projectors that are ... less than ideal. This was annoying with all of the movies, but proved utterly destructive to only one: Zodiac. I was in pain watching it during our screening time, because what I most wanted the students to pay attention to -- the way the digital image represents night -- was exactly what the projector most obscured, turning everything less than twilight into flat black, and making entire scenes of the movie indecipherable. (I complained to our IT folks, who are very helpful and put up with a lot from me, and they said there wasn't much that could be done with these projectors, alas.) So unless there was other equipment available for a screening, I wouldn't -- couldn't! -- use Zodiac again, alas.
The other one I wouldn't use again is Vertigo, because my students' almost universal hatred of it led me to realize that it's really not a good film for the average undergraduate. A few of the students appreciated elements of it, but for the most part they just don't have enough experience of life and, particularly, experience of obsession to really access the film's power. I adore the movie even more every time I watch it, but I didn't myself really develop a love for Vertigo until I was in my late 20s or so (though my basic respect for it dates back to when I saw the restored print when it was released in New York in the 1990s). There are lots of other Hitchcock movies I could show.
If I teach the course in the future, I might switch out a few other films, just to keep things fresh for myself. The three horror movies worked well together, but I might want to play around with another genre, especially since I'd like to put in something by Howard Hawks, who I missed getting a chance to talk about at any length. (I'd be tempted to do something on westerns -- maybe Rio Bravo with The Furies, my favorite of Anthony Mann's extraordinary westerns, plus one or two others to balance things out.)
The Corrigan & White textbook worked pretty well, though I expect the students would mostly say it was boring. I expect they'd say that about all the readings I gave them, in fact. To a certain extent, you either like reading about film or you don't, and I'd bet the latter group is much larger than the former. The book worked well for our purposes, however, in that it provided them with ways of thinking, talking, and writing about film that they wouldn't otherwise have access to, and it helped expand their perception of what can be said about cinema. I'd also assigned the Village Voice Film Guide, which we didn't make as much use of as I thought we would, and I'd probably drop it in the future. The goal was for the students to have easy access to brief, informed writing on a lot of movies they might not have heard of, but there's enough out on the internet that I can point them to, and, in fact, I'd try to do more such pointing if I taught the class again.
Inevitably, there were students who didn't like the class and students who were indifferent to the class, but I was pleased with the many students who really did seem to get excited by what we were doing, and it was especially pleasing to see many of them develop really nuanced and thoughtful responses by the end of the term.
