JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (2)
Revisiting the Film History Survey
Lisa Patti, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Reviewing the recent edited collection Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy provides an opportunity to consider both the potential impact of media studies pedagogy scholarship on our teaching practices and the importance of situating questions about the status of film history survey courses in relation to transnational cinema. Teaching Transnational Cinema directly engages with pedagogical questions discussed in previous issues of the JCMS (Cinema Journal) Teaching Dossier, including New Approaches to Teaching World Cinema and Online Teaching in Film and Media Studies. Indeed, the individual chapters in the collection cover a broad range of topics that fall within and beyond the ambit of transnational cinema, from film philosophy to piracy. As a result, even readers who do not consider “teaching transnational cinema” to be a primary curricular or pedagogical concern will find chapters in the collection that are relevant to their teaching. In this review, I focus on the ways in which Marciniak and Bennett’s edited volume addresses film history, and I argue that an engagement with transnational cinema should inform the assessment of film history surveys that this dossier advances and the innovations to film history surveys it encourages. Film history courses that are tethered to a single nation profit from analyzing the ways in which the national film industries and cultures they explore engage with other nations, locating the nation as one point on a global cinematic map and tracing the overlapping vectors of national and transnational distribution. Film history courses that adopt a broader geographic and historical perspective, including those with titles as general and inclusive as “Film History,” benefit from transnational approaches that identify the aesthetic, cultural, and industrial connections between and among films.
Teaching Transnational Cinema guides readers through the challenges that the expansiveness of film history surveys entails. In their introduction, Marciniak and Bennett note, “If teaching cinema in any national context is a challenge, then zooming out to survey the world beyond the frame of one nation will inevitably place both teachers and students in a position of vulnerability vis-à-vis knowledge formation” (14). They approach this challenge not only as an issue of historical and geographic coverage but also and with far more urgency as a series of ethical questions that embed political values within pedagogical tactics. The essays in the collection respond to a series of questions that Marciniak and Bennett pose:
“What happens when our students encounter the ‘foreignness’ of various films, texts, and ideas in the classroom? How might a critical engagement with transnational films reshape our understanding of cinema more generally? How might teachers make the topics raised in transnational texts—national (un) belonging, historical change, abjectification of foreignness, trauma of borders, racial tensions, cross-cultural encounters, difference, intimacy and family, the politics of anger—relevant, even urgent to our students? How might we imbricate the transnational into our pedagogical practices so that issues of foreignness, migration, and dislocation begin to produce what we call ‘affective openings,’ that is, an ethical openness toward new ways of thinking about resistance to oppressive forms of phobic nationalisms and exclusionary practices of citizenship?” (21).
Below I highlight several of the responses to these questions that contribute to this dossier’s analysis of the film history survey.
In “A Pedagogy of Humility: Teaching European Films About Migration,” Alex Lykidis cautions against the temptation, particularly prevalent in film history survey courses, to teach as many films as possible “which sometimes leads our students to rely on their fleeting individual responses to screened films rather than understanding the historically specific subject positions that those texts carefully establish for their viewers” (75–76). Lykidis opts instead to spend two or three weeks teaching each film in order to “stagger the dissemination of relevant contexts and theories so that students are able to both occupy and then interrogate positions of privilege, culpability, and disidentification” (75). At stake in this approach is an opportunity to cultivate the “pedagogy of anxiety” where the histories of individual films and film industries intersect with the underlying national and global histories that shape film narratives in ways that may be elusive and alienating for students. While the swapping of breadth for depth may limit a course filmography in ways that might at first seem constraining (or even institutionally unsustainable if the film history course is designed to provide an overview of multiple historical periods, genres, and styles as a foundation for future courses), this approach compensates for limited coverage by providing students with an interdisciplinary framework for studying film, one that attends to history, theory, and politics.
The theoretical grappling with transnational cinema’s place in film studies curricula—and with the so-called “transnational turn” more generally—preoccupies the essays in the collection in different ways, but they share a commitment to grounding their theorization of transnational film pedagogy within specific teaching contexts and through practical teaching strategies. In one of several co-authored contributions to the collection, “Understanding Context, Resisting Hermeneutics: Ways of Seeing Transnational Relations,” Matthew Holtmeier and Chelsea Wessels present two different assignments and reflect on if and how those assignments could be adapted for different institutional settings. For one assignment—the “current event connection”—the students in “300-level/third-year undergraduate General University Requirement (GUR) courses at a four-year US state university” participate in a sequenced project that invites them to “borrow the perspective of a global film and use it to think through a familiar topic in a new way” (88). The assignment involves the selection of a reading and a film from the course as the critical foundation for analyzing a more familiar issue or event, by “focusing on a unique aspect of a historically situated moment from the course,” for example, “drawing a connection between André Bazin addressing Italian neorealism and contemporary reality television in the United States” (89–90). Holtmeier and Wessels describe their assignments with an accessible blend of precision and flexibility, but in their essay’s conclusion they “acknowledge that the efficacy of these assignments depends on institutional structures and student dynamics” (93). They address the different pedagogical scenes of instruction generated by varying class sizes, institutional structures, disciplinary and interdisciplinary formations, and curricular levels. Their reflections on the ways that pedagogical contexts inflect the incorporation of the “critical pedagogy” approaches their assignments model is one of the most direct articulations of an attention to institutional and practical factors that is maintained throughout the collection.
A similar emphasis on institutional contexts characterizes Anita Wen-shin Chang’s essay “Altered States for a Critical Cosmopolitanism,” in which Chang outlines her chronological approach to a course filmography that includes “Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943), L’Avventura (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960), Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutierrez Alea, 1968), Bedevil (Tracey Moffat, 1993), The Hole (Tsai Ming-Liang, 1998), Divine Intervention (Elia Suleiman, 2002), Ararat (Atom Egoyan, 2002), Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002), The Night of Truth (Fanta Régina Nacro, 2004), and Citizen Dog (Wisit Sasanatieng, 2004)”(137). Chang explains, “The course films were arranged chronologically in order primarily to compare how directors from different countries responded cinematically to the changes wrought by various forces such as rapid globalization” (141). She notes that the class was conducted in English with “nineteen undergraduate students at a public university in Taiwan during the fall 2009 semester” (136). Like the essay by Holtmeier and Wessels, Chang’s chapter places the reader in a specific scene of instruction and examines how the course invokes “critical cosmopolitanism” as a pedagogical framework that enabled students to “respond to the pressing issues of the time in Taiwan (e.g., political and economic neocolonialism, environmental degradation, rising unemployment) and to make connections to other global cinemas’ efforts to combat similar issues” (137). For example, Antonioni’s L’Avventura “offers an entry point to engage students on the impact of Taiwan’s economic miracle that began around the same time as Italy’s” (144). Chang foregrounds her background as Taiwanese American to “contribute to the collective oral history that such course content and a classroom environment enable” (139), and she draws attention to her curatorial agency in designing the syllabus, which “opens up discussion on canon formations and curricular ‘neutrality’” (137). This approach is vital for film history survey courses as a critical countermeasure, explicating the rationale that informs each film selection and making visible the omissions that a syllabus might otherwise conceal.
Teaching Transnational Cinema should be of great interest to readers who are reconsidering their approaches to film history surveys. The collection fuses a theoretical engagement with film studies pedagogies with practical approaches to syllabus and assignment design and recognizes the ways in which the ideas presented in the collection emerge from different institutional vantage points, thus inviting us to recognize our own. Many of the films cited in the book—for example, Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005), Tom McCarthy’s The Visitor (2007), and Danny Boyle/Loveleen Tandan’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008)—are relatively recent films, but even when the essays focus on contemporary films, the authors position those films within clearly defined film histories and approach them as portals to investigating the national and transnational histories that their narratives document or reflect. The volume reminds us at every turn that the transnational turn frames not only those films that have accompanied it but also those that have preceded it.
Lisa Patti is an Associate Professor in the Media and Society Program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is co-author (with Glyn Davis, Kay Dickinson, and Amy Villarejo) of Film Studies: A Global Introduction (Routledge, 2015) and co-editor (with Tijana Mamula) of The Multilingual Screen: New Reflections on Cinema and Linguistic Difference (Bloomsbury, 2016). She has co-edited two issues of Cinema Journal Teaching Dossier: “Teaching (with) Social Media” and “Paratexts and Pedagogy.”
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