Revisiting the Film History Survey
JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (2)
Edited by Paul McEwan and Allison Whitney
Table of Contents
Challenging Eurocentric Surveys: The Transnational Topic in Film Studies by Marcos P. Centeno Martin
Teaching Film History to Production Students by Chad Newsom
Creative Encounters with Film History: Thomas Edison Then/Now by Marsha Gordon
A Decade Under the Influence: US Films of the 1970s by Amelie Hastie
Unsettling the Canadian Film History Classroom through Sound by Randolph Jordan
Introduction
Paul McEwan and Allison Whitney
When film studies began to enter the academic world in the 1960s and 70s it tended, in general, to copy the style of its humanities predecessors, like art and literature. They had a history of masterpieces, so we had one too. They introduced those works with a lower-level survey and then moved into specifics in the upper levels. They assigned essays, often based on close formal analysis, and we followed suit. In recent years, though, many older disciplines, history itself very much included, have moved away from these introductory surveys. At the same time, many film programs have grown out of interdisciplinary minors, or communication departments, where surveys are not necessarily the standard.
As film studies evolves in response to new methods and approaches, as well as institutional shifts, this seemed a good time to re-examine the film history survey, and it was important to us that we presume neither that the survey is indispensable nor that it can easily be cast aside. Given the range of conditions in which film history is taught, we wanted to gather some ideas that could be useful to those who teach the surveys as well as those whose programs have moved away from this approach, but who are still confronted with questions of how to offer students a historical understanding of media.
Surveys are always haunted by an imaginary question: “what will happen if our students have never seen…?” That blank can represent an individual film, or an entire category. What if they never see a silent film? What if they never see a film made before 1950? What if they never see a French New Wave film, or an African Film, or a film made by African-Americans? Surveys give us pedagogical reassurance that at least the basics will be covered, that our future grads will at least be able to nod knowingly at a mention of Dreyer, or Varda, or Micheaux.
It is of course possible to have an in-depth two-semester survey that features none of these directors, except as a paragraph in a textbook or a short clip. We might wonder what the point of all these names and titles are. Literature surveys almost never have textbooks, and happily jump from masterpiece to masterpiece, skipping over entire decades and sometimes entire centuries, not to mention the literature of other countries or in other languages. Although US film surveys exist, most of us are tasked with covering everything—the whole world since 1895 (itself a contestable point of origin)—even if we inevitably run out of time sometime after the 1980s. Should a survey focus on the titles our students can actually see, or is the point to give them a sense of all major movements? How much context is enough, and what kind of context matters most?
These questions of breadth and scope are explored by Diana Anselmo, who points out that the film history survey can be a vehicle to introduce diversity to undergraduate students. Anselmo first encountered film history at FCSH-Nova in Lisbon in a time when it offered an intellectual openness that was unusual in the political climate of Portugal. Having been broadened by the experience, she describes herself “As a passionate advocate for the strategic potential of survey courses.” Lisa Patti’s entry continues the conversation about “the importance of situating questions about the status of film history survey courses in relation to transnational cinema.” Patti’s essay is a review of Teaching Transnational Cinema: Politics and Pedagogy, which was edited by Katarzyna Marciniak and Bruce Bennett and appeared in 2016. The review allows Patti to synthesize a wide variety of voices on the particularities of the “transnational turn.” The question of context is central to Marcos P. Centeno Martin’s essay on the challenges of broadening the film history curriculum. He notes that there is an inherent risk of exoticizing other film cultures, but that the benefits of a widened film vocabulary are worth it, if done carefully.
Other contributors demonstrate the value of a more in-depth examination of specific films and filmmakers of the past. Chad Newsom teaches film history to production students at the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he presents canonical films alongside more contemporary choices that carry their influence. Admitting that this substitutes depth for breadth, he finds that “spending increased time on individual films proves more rewarding than aiming for coverage.” Students in Newsom’s class also make short films in the style of early cinema, a type of assignment that Marsha Gordon elaborates in detail in her essay “Edison Then/Now.” Gordon has students produce creative remakes of Edison films that are then shown side-by-side with the originals in a public space at North Carolina State University.
The last two essays in the dossier both explore alternatives to the Film History Survey. At Amherst College, Amelie Hastie teaches in a program that does not offer a broad survey, but rather “electives, focusing on particular national cinemas and offered by faculty in language/areas departments.” This is a common arrangement in film and media programs, and Hastie designs her 1970s course to be a model of how to understand film history, using the microcosm of a single decade. Finally, Randolph Jordan responds to the challenge of trying to teach Canadian film history by designing a course that explores complicated and subtle links between film and place. Jordan links his course to sound studies, and to ecology, as a type of substitute for a silent era that does not exist in Canadian film.
The essays collected here work in and around film history surveys, trying to fill in holes and figure out what is not being said. In that way, they have much in common with the writing of history itself, in which we examine the spaces between what we know, and encourage our students to continue the exploration.
Teaching Biographies
Co-Editors
Paul McEwan is Associate Professor of Media & Communication and Director of Film Studies at Muhlenberg College. He teaches courses in film studies and film production, from screenwriting and videomaking to Bollywood and the French New Wave. His primary area of research is the history of the reception of Griffith’s 1915 racist epic The Birth of a Nation, including a book on that film in the BFI Classics series and a forthcoming monograph. Other essays on Griffith have been published in Film History, and the recent Companion to D.W. Griffith. He is the author of a previous Teaching Dossier article on “Teaching Production in a Liberal Arts Context” and the editor of an “In Focus” section on “Teaching ‘Difficult’ Films” for Cinema Journal (47:1, 2007). He also edited the “Film Pedagogy” section of Oxford Bibliographies in Film Studies.
Allison Whitney is an Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. She specializes in studies of film technology, genre cinema, and the relationship between technological history and film form. Whitney has published on race and class in American maternal melodrama, colonial narratives in science fiction, contemporary horror films, religion and cinema, sonic literacy, and dance in Weimar film culture in such journals as The Journal of Film & Video, Music, Sound and The Moving Image, and Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies. She is currently working on a book on the history of IMAX film, and she is engaged in research on the representation of space exploration in cinema. She is also developing a project on oral histories of film exhibition culture in Texas and the Southwest.
Contributors
Diana W. Anselmo is an Assistant Professor of Film & Media History at Georgia State University. Her work on female fans, social media, and U.S. silent cinema has appeared in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Screen, Feminist Media Histories, Spectator, and several academic anthologies. Her research has been awarded grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the International Association for Media History, among others. She is currently working on a book examining the personal scrapbooks and suicide letters produced by the first generation of movie fan girls to emerge in the United States. Her parallel project surveys queer dialects, intimacy politics, and fan labor practices developed on Tumblr.
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.”
Marcos Centeno, PhD, is lecturer in Japanese Studies and Japanese programme director at Birkbeck, University of London, where he teaches Japanese cinema and other modules related to Japanese contemporary culture and society. Before that, Centeno worked for the Department of Japan & Korea at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS); there he convened the MA “Global Cinemas and the Transcultural” for several years, and taught its core course Cinema, Nation, and the Transcultural as well as other Japanese cinema courses. Centeno was also Research Associate at the International Institute for Education and Research in Theatre and Film Arts of Waseda University (Japan) and Research Fellow at the University of Valencia (Spain). At the latter, he taught media courses such as Modes of Representation in Cinema and Film Direction. His main research interest is transculturality and nonfiction in Japanese cinema.
Chad Newsom teaches courses on classical Hollywood cinema, film history, and film analysis in the cinema studies program in the department of art history at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA, and his research and publications combine his interests in film style, history, melodrama, and stardom. His essay on Shirley Temple and child stardom can be found in Film Criticism 39.3, and his work on melodrama and Since You Went Away appears in Screen 58.3.
Marsha Gordon has been a professor of film studies at North Carolina State University since 2002, where she has taught courses on film history (to 1940); the Hollywood studio system; Sam Fuller, Ida Lupino, and other independent filmmakers of the 1940s and 1950s; war films; documentary and orphan films, especially of the educational variety; and women directors.
Amelia Hastie has been teaching as a full-time faculty member since 1999; for eleven years she taught in the film and digital media department at University of California–Santa Cruz, where her courses largely focused on theoretical approaches to film and television. Her primary “survey” course at UCSC was an introduction to film theory, and her primary history course focused on the work of Ida Lupino in film and television. Since 2010 she has been at Amherst College, where she moved to start an integrated program in film and media studies. Her courses at the college vary between introductions to writing and film; foundations courses and seminars in film and television theory; and special topics electives. Many of her courses offer a history of theoretical production, but her course on US film of the 1970s is the only one she currently teaches which functions as a “history survey.” Given its structure and aims, it is as much an “intellectual history” of the period as a film history course.
Randolph Jordan has recently joined The School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Film Studies where his course roster will include Canadian cinema and sound media production. Prior to this appointment he has spent the last fifteen years teaching a wide variety of courses in cinema and media history, theory, aesthetics, and cultures at Concordia University, LaSalle College, and Champlain College in Montreal. Across these institutions he taught every level from pre-university certificate programs to introductory undergraduate courses, advanced specialization classes, and graduate seminars, and also designed and implemented courses on film sound and Vancouver film history. At all levels he makes use of his interdisciplinary training at the intersection of acoustic ecology and film studies to promote heightened engagement with the world through the media technologies we interact with on a daily basis.
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