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November 2004, Week 2

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Subject:
From:
"Holberg, Amy" <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Mon, 8 Nov 2004 20:12:35 -0500
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Mike --
On the one hand, I appreciate your predicament and your desire to help your students "read more about it" (I live in DC -- the Library of Congress just springs to mind). On the other hand, you've set an impossible task.  You're not asking your students to understand the history of film, film technology, the studio system, development of film language, or any of the other topics you listed based solely on a current text which summarizes, in plain, jargon-free language the state of these topics today.  While "discourse" and "post-structuralism" and "post-colonialism" may certainly be unfamiliar, complex terms, "3-point lighting," "subsidieries," and "rack focus" are no less specialized, field-specific terms. And like the theoretical ones, they are developed within a historical system, and make a lot more sense when they are placed within that system than they do as a list of vocabulary.  It sounds like your course, Mike, will focus more heavily on material you know well and have an affinity for; my own version of intro to film concentrates heavily on film styles and expressive techniques on the one hand, and cultural studies and theoretical approaches on the other.  They'll read portions of the original texts (Bazin, Eisenstein, Mulvey, Deleuze, Fanon, maybe Metz or Butler) for some historical grounding in the theory, and then it's up to me to define and illustrate terms with the same films I'm assigning to illustrate Murnau's "unchained camera" or the influence of portable film cameras on film form.  (BTW -- I particularly like the selection of texts in "The Film Studies Reader" for a nice introduction to the field -- the section summaries are also useful).

One of the great challenges of teaching any field is the intro course -- every film ever made? in any language? of any length? in any style?  And, as you pointed out, this not being a clearly demarcated discipline, each set of students will have areas of more and less comprehensive knowledge, and a motivated student may very well be able to finish film school without ever knowing how to edit, who Muybridge is, or what "voyeurism" really means to psychoanalytic feminist film critics. And those same students may have a decent working knowledge of film production, history, and theory (in general).  

I wouldn't hire somone who didn't know how to edit proficiently to teach editing, however, no matter what a cv claimed, or how many crummy editors (or, in their places, historians, theoreticians) applied for the job.

In fairness, I should reveal my complete love for and bias toward teaching and reading theory, and my absolute committment to its usefulness; the distinctions among signifiers (terms) are what make meaning in film as well as in theory. Not all the terms are useful (or necessary), but a student can't know that until she knows what they mean, and that requires the same process as we'd expect for competence in any field: a series of intensive courses with experts in the field which takes many years from freshman to PhD.  You want the (competent) PhD to know what to teach the freshman, so that he does know what Marx has to do with film theory (and Italian neo-realism, and New Kazakh Cinema, and etc) before he moves forward. Or, at least, you want one around when the book you suggested still doesn't answer all of his questions.

Amy Holberg


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