By the time students leave second level education they will have encountered many of the greats of literature: Yeats, Heaney, Shelly, Bronte, Orwell, Steinbeck, Plath. The list is endless. Added to this is the fact that if they studied Higher Level English the students had to have studied Shakespeare, most likely they will have studied two of his plays, at least, by the time they leave school.
This acknowledgment of the place of canonical writers is not, as yet, similarly represented in the films that they will have studied. Welles, Kazan and Hitchcock are the only recognised canonical auteurs to have appeared on the Leaving Cert list. (Has Clint Eastwood made the list yet? Or was he on it only to be removed again?) The Junior Cycle text list includes Spielberg. No Lang, Hawkes, Kubrick, Scorsese, Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa, De Sica, Ozu. No John Ford.
How the students view film is affected by this imbalance. Whereas they will understand that novels can be both literary and entertaining, often at the same time, they often view films as simple entertainment without any real artistic integrity beyond clever story telling. Poetry has the reverse problem. Students frequently view poetry, by the time they leave school, as the home of depressed, self-indulgent writers that can’t just speak clearly. They see poetry as overly complicated, overly ‘clever’ writing that has no bearing on their lives and is not in the least bit entertaining, in fact poetry is just hard work with little reward. Although, it has to be said, over the last few years this attitude is slowly changing.
Film, though, is just entertaining.
Last month I looked at how E.T., one of the most entertaining films, is also a film with an intellectual and artistic ballast that requires multiple viewings. This month it is the turn of Hitchcock.
Words: Conor Murphy
EDUCATION COLUMN
16 CinÉireann / March 2018