JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (2)
Revisiting the Film History Survey
Chad Newsom, Savannah College of Art and Design
How does teaching the film history survey change when instructing production students? When I first began to teach history surveys to undergraduate and graduate production students—whose majors ranged from screenwriting and production design to performing arts and film production—I taught the content traditionally, moving chronologically from the Lumière brothers to the French New Wave in a ten-week quarter. After several quarters of making slight adjustments, I decided on an overhaul and began to rethink what I believe this course should accomplish: I was not teaching future film scholars, but future sound designers, television producers, and animators. In what ways could I cover the necessary content, yet deliver it in a form that would influence their production work? I began to organize my survey classes around the idea of influence: how certain films, filmmakers, and film movements influence other films/makers/movements. Ideally, that influence will then extend to my students as well. My initial attempts were fairly conservative and ineffective: I continued teaching the same survey material, but merely added a discussion at the end of a given lecture about, say, the influence of German Expressionism on Hollywood horror or Soviet montage on Hitchcock. Gradually, I discovered that merely mentioning influence was insufficient; I needed a method. In what follows, I survey three ways in which I changed my film history curriculum to create a more engaging classroom experience.
Course Design
I structure the course around pairs of films: a canonical film and then a film influenced by the filmmaker or movement under discussion. For example, I pair the Lumière brothers with Stranger than Paradise, Battleship Potemkin with Do the Right Thing, His Girl Friday with The Hudsucker Proxy, and The 400 Blows with The Kid with a Bike. On the one hand, breadth must be sacrificed for depth, as film pairings will cut down on the total number of film movements that can be covered; but I find that spending increased time on individual films proves more rewarding than aiming for coverage. On the other hand, however, this course design allows for felicitous pairings that in many ways provide a broader, not narrower, view of film history. Pairing Brief Encounter with In the Mood for Love, or Stolen Kisses with Rushmore enables one to cross temporal and national boundaries in a way that wouldn’t be possible in a standard survey class.
When I teach the left side of the pairing—the canonical film—I still provide the necessary historical content students are expected to learn in a survey course and supplement those screenings with appropriate readings. But as we move on to the issue of influence, I encourage students to think of how a given canonical film is not merely a relic, something they need to know because it’s historically important. Instead, in what ways can we see the film as alive, as full of aesthetic possibilities? My first pairing is always a wide sampling of the Lumière brothers’ actualities with a Jim Jarmusch film, and I emphasize how Jarmusch’s style and subject matter—long takes, precise framing, stationary camera, and a focus on place and everyday life—show what the Lumière style looks like when applied to a narrative feature film. We then discuss the context of Jarmusch’s career—American indie cinema—which only increases the resonance of both the Lumieres’ and Jarmusch’s practices; these films offer valuable lessons in economical, yet formally rigorous, filmmaking for students who themselves are beginning, budget-strapped, independent filmmakers.
Assignments
Not only in course design but also through my assignments, I want students to interact creatively with film history. When we study early cinema, we watch several dozen films by the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès, and my first assignment is the Lumière/Méliès Project. As we watch the films, we make a list of their aesthetic parameters, which then becomes the students’ filmmaking guidelines as they create their own sixty-second Lumière- or Méliès-style film using their smartphones. They make short films featuring novel views, curious sights and spectacles, or simple tricks and gags, and in some cases, attempt remakes of well-known films (our town’s numerous pedicabs prove irresistible to those inspired by the “Namo Village” film, shot in Vietnam with the camera in a rickshaw). The students then present their video to the class and submit an artistic statement that discusses the rationale behind their choices—both in terms of content and formal characteristics—and what specific aspects or films of Lumière/Méliès prompted those decisions.
For the course’s major assignment—the Cinematic Influence Project—students connect film history to some professional skill they have. They work with films screened for the course, selecting some aspect of the film to update, appropriate, or adapt—remaking a scene, recreating an iconic shot, doing sound design for silent films, adapting a film into a graphic novel, etc. Students begin by doing traditional research: they choose a film and a topic and draft a project proposal that includes an annotated bibliography of scholarly sources. Along with their project, they submit a short paper as well. The proposal, annotated bibliography, and essay provide an essential grounding for these projects, requiring students to learn about their topic and explain their approach with a concrete rationale; these related assignments help prevent simplistic or lazy projects. (Earlier versions of this assignment without the research component resulted in scores of mediocre movie posters.) Recent projects have been as surprising as they are sophisticated: shot-for-shot remakes of moments from M and The Kid with a Bike; an Odor-rama version of City Lights (complete with scratch-and-sniff cards) that developed from a study of the history of scent and cinema; screwball comedy–inspired fabric patterns, erasure poetry, and movie posters; and short documentaries on the 2016 election and on a local housing project inspired by Soviet montage and Spike Lee.
The First Week: Setting the Tone
Even with a course design and creative assignments in place, I have found that one last step is required for this method to work when teaching production students: Instead of launching directly into lectures, slides, and notes during the first week of class, I establish a method for how we will approach the study of film history and our class film discussions. While I have no production experience, I came to realize that I do share a common ground with production students: We both equally value filmic details. So that’s where we begin. In the first week, I teach students the basics of close film analysis, i.e., how film studies scholars talk about films in ways other than the purely evaluative or technical, discourses in which they tend already to be well versed. As part of this lesson, I then explain how we will move beyond details of narrative, mise-en-scène, editing, or sound, and understand those filmmaking choices as existing within an historical context, perhaps indicating something about the studio that produced the picture, the way technology influenced the film, or how sociopolitical events and pressures impacted its production. The list could go on, but the basic method remains in place: a move from specific to general. I prefer to begin with a film in which that move appears fairly obvious, and I’ve had success starting the class with Modern Times and using the film to illustrate how its style connects with wider concerns: the arrival of sound and Chaplin’s response, the effect of sound on visual comedy, the Depression-era context, and how Hollywood broaches political subject matter. After the first week, this method continues throughout the quarter as each student must deliver a scene analysis presentation at the beginning of one class; they pick a film from the syllabus, highlight meaningful details, and design a presentation in which they connect those details to course topics and readings. These presentations serve to initiate class discussion for the day.
It took me several years to discover what now seems so simple, but making the course a film-focused class and then building outward from there to any historical or theoretical issue radically altered the course and how students perceived it. Setting the tone in the first week leads to film discussions throughout the course remaining not only more concretely grounded, but also more insightful and lively. I work to demonstrate the relevance of the course to what they already care about—filmic detail—and once we’re speaking the same language, students become more open to film studies’ disciplinary rigor.
While a major assignment like the Cinematic Influence Project works best with production students, the basic design of this course is widely applicable and lends itself to a level of personalization often missing in survey classes. Creative or idiosyncratic pairings allow one to cover the “essentials” while tailoring the secondary film to a special topic, one’s research interests, or a recent release that proves amenable to analyzing in terms of cinematic influence (Moonlight and Wong Kar-Wai, mother! and Repulsion). When this method works, it’s invigorating: a classroom of screenwriters, costume designers, storyboard artists, editors, and cinematographers all bringing their own disciplinary perspectives and skills to focus on the film at hand. Teaching production students has not only challenged me and changed how I teach for the better, but has encouraged me to see familiar films anew and enriched my appreciation for the creative possibilities of historical study.
Resources for Teaching
The following are resources I regularly draw upon for my survey classes—texts that work well with my overall pedagogical approach.
The Cine-Files. “Dossier on Teaching Film” Accessed Oct. 15, 2017. http://www.thecine-files.com/dossier-on-teaching-film.
Fabe, Marilyn. Closely Watched Films. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014.
Geiger, Jeffrey and R.L. Rutsky, eds. Film Analysis: A Norton Reader. New York: WW Norton, 2013.
Greene, Naomi. The French New Wave: A New Look. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
Kaes, Anton. M. London: BFI, 1999.
Maland, Charles. City Lights. London: BFI, 2007.
Perry, Ted, ed. Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006.
Roberts, Ian. German Expressionism: The World of Light and Shadow. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Shiel, Mark. Italian Neorealism: Rebuilding the Cinematic City. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006.
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.
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