Films like Casablanca are part of Film history, an area Tracy points out is ill served by the education system below third level.
Students study poetry from Shakespeare to Durcan but the curriculum is slow to think of film in such wide historical terms. The reason for this can simply be that teachers aren’t inclined to show students films that are ‘too old’. Yet if they are being exposed to these films from early in their education than the problem will slowly disappear.
A film like Le jardinier et le petit espiegle, 1895, is a great way to start and can easily be compared with a similar gag with a fire extinguisher in Wall-E. From there the world of Film will become endless, far richer in cultural breadth and reference, and no longer consist of The Fast and the Furious movies, the modern day Pokemon.
Bergala also warns against picking films simply because of their ‘artiness’, films that flaunt their production values with ‘luxurious décor and extravagant lighting’. He sees these ‘hartistic’ films as the ‘enemy of cinema as a real or specific art form’. Similarly, he denounces films with ‘big subjects’, films with an important message. The inclusion of these, he says, while understandable ‘in terms of general and civic education’ ultimately shows a lack of ‘respect’ for Film ‘as an art’. Instead he wants students to simply ‘encounter good film(s)’.
However, if film is to be used across the school timetable than such films will, eventually, find their own place.
Whatever one’s feelings about what films should or should not be taught in school the message is clear in that it can’t be arbitrary, it must have Film studies at the centre of the decision making. Film studies to a particular cohort.
It is important to mention here that the films chosen for the Junior Cycle and Senior Cycle consider all the above. Of concern to some though is how film is used at Primary level, where it seems to have remained firmly in the ‘treat’ part of the week, and how film is used outside of curriculum study at second level.
But this question of curriculum study remains. How should we teach film studies? Tony Tracy wants students to be able to ‘write about (and) describe film style’ by the time they get to third level. But how to do this?
As ever the question of how a teacher approaches the task of teaching is raised.
Bergala targets the teacher that ‘clings to a few scraps of rigid knowledge and who begins by giving the definitions of camera movement and types of shot, as though the film makers first step is to think in words about choices, whereas in reality these words translate those choices’. He doesn’t want a teacher spouting out information, spouting out notes, spouting out the ‘answer’ at the top of the class. Instead he wants a dialogic classroom where film is discussed. He notes that some teachers do not have the requisite training in film studies to comfortably run such a class, but that would be the ideal.
But this is the problem in Irish educational reform. Teachers are often asked to teach something that they are unfamiliar with, that they lack expertise in. This gap in a teachers learning is never acknowledged nor is there a solution found. Film has been on the Leaving Cert since 2001 and I have seen one one-day course offered in all that time. One day in sixteen years.
Bergala wants us to think about how the film makers made their films. What choices did they have available to them? Where could they have placed the camera, considering all the constraints of location, actors, story etc? What were they trying to say? How did they go about saying that? He wants us to go back to the ‘dubious and uncertain context of their origins’.
This reminds me of how we approach poetry. No longer do teachers simply hand out notes with ‘this is what the poet means’ and ask students to learn them off. Now we look at what the poet was thinking about when she/he wrote the poem. What are they trying to say and how did they choose to say it? Were they successful? Critical analysis of the work follows. Here we talk about the poem, we discuss the choices made and the options available. We debate, based on our knowledge of poetry built up over the years of schooling, our thoughts on all the above.
14 CinÉireann / January 2018
Le jardinier et le petit espiegle
WALL:E