Thankfully those days are over. Well, just about.
Now, with Film at second level education firmly rooted within the English curriculum, from 1st year all the way up to 6th year, this should change.
English is compulsory and so Film studies is compulsory, to an extent. The depth of study depends on the expertise of the teacher. If the teacher is not comfortable with film than the study of film will be limited. And even then, because it is part of the English curriculum, Film will only be studied along relatively narrow lines. Plot, character, imagery, themes etc. Headings that can be transferred across any number of the genres studied be it novel, short story or drama.
Film as film, with all its variations and subtleties, with all its music and painterly qualities, with its visual poetry and acting styles, its blocking and framing, its textures and immediacy, its relative brevity and cohesion, is not being studied.
Where is the equivalent in fiction of Jimmy Stewart playing a wheelchair bound photographer doubting his relationship with Grace Kelly? How can there be any equivalent? Jimmy Stewart is at once the star, the war hero and the character all at the same time.
Film is a hybrid of painting, photography, editing, drama, poetry, orchestral music, pop music, sound effects, silence, mime, method…… but this glorious fusion of art forms is stripped down to what is most common across the curriculum. The ambiguous, fluid, spectacle comprised of all those possibilities of sound and vision is being pealed down to something more manageable, like the student that wants to write a short story without the shackles of formal structure.
This isn’t down to any governmental interference. There’s no big conspiracy here, it’s just that with Film where it is this has become inevitable.
Alain Bergala’s book ‘The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching Cinema in the Classroom and Beyond’ was recently translated from the French by Madeline Whittle. Here Bergala talks about a project he undertook to see how Film might be taught in French schools.
The discussions around creating ‘taste’ in students involve imbedding film in all aspects of their school life. But, he stresses, they must be good films. Films from the canon.
This idea of using films from the canon is repeated by Alicia McGivern, Head of Education at the Irish Film Institute, Dublin. ‘They should be introduced to canonical films and understand why they are so viewed.’ While McGivern argues for an introduction to the canon Bergala goes much further, arguing against showing students what the students like (he gives the dated example of Pokemon) and that instead ‘the role of schools…must be to provide a cultural “ski-lift” out of these pseudo-tastes created by marketing’.
Tony Tracy, Director of Film Studies at NUI Galway sees the study of the classics to be important but broadens it out from ‘M to the Breakfast Club’ by way of an example.
The notion of a cinematic canon is still relatively new and quite fluid. Even discussing what is a classic and what should be in the canon can cause arguments. (Even discussing what a film is can cause difficulties these days. Twin Peaks? VR?) But the idea of quality is one with which we can come closer to agreement. Whether or not Casablanca is a simply a classic film or one with enough artistic merit to be included in the canon becomes moot when we discuss whether we should introduce teenagers to the film. Of course we should.
CinÉireann / January 2018 13
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