What Kind of Film History Do We Teach?: The Introductory Survey Course as a Pedagogical Opportunity

An introductory survey course in international film history is potentially laden with practical and intellectual difficulties: how to cover every nation or movement in one term, the difficulty of selecting representative canonical and/or noncanonical (or even anticanonical) film texts, and the choice of a methodology by which to investigate history. This essay will focus on the latter problem--what kind of history we teach--in an effort to establish that different professors, textbooks, assignments, and lesson plans all emphasize different approaches to the study of cinema history. Indeed, the methodological terrain can be divided into five paradigms: (1) aesthetic/textual history, (2) technological history, (3) film industry/economic history, (4) sociocultural history, and (5) historiography. When only one approach is selected as the primary paradigm, that initial determination often structures most subsequent curricular decisions and thus proffers a one-note viewpoint on a highly complex subject. As a result, students are limited to seeing the cinema and its history as a one-dimensional field of inquiry.

After laying out the five various (and varying) methods, this essay proposes a synthetic sublation as the solution to the historiographic morass. The essay then concludes with specific practical proposals of ways to organize such a dialectical film history course. In this final section, decisions such as the choice of textbook, additional readings, assignment topics, and week-to-week lesson plans are discussed. (Anyone interested in obtaining a copy of my sample syllabus can contact me at <cj@cinemastudies.org>.)

I do not hold this History of the Motion Picture survey course up as a model. For one, my honors version of the course was only offered every other year. For another, it was offered as an honors seminar, with ten to fifteen elite students (GPAs of 3.5 and above) at Georgia State University, a large urban public institution. Almost none of the students in the class were film/video majors, although I sometimes made some converts. Other instructors at GSU teach the course (for non-honors students) to 120 to 240 students each term. It is one of the most popular choices from among several humanities electives that all undergraduates need to take to satisfy core graduation requirements.

This essay discusses the methodological approaches that implicitly and explicitly structure so many of our curricular decisions in planning cinema history survey courses--from textbook selection to the films to be screened to the kinds of research and writing assignments and quizzes to the focus of classroom discussions. For instance, a film history course can emphasize aesthetic evolution, technological development, industrial/economic formation, sociocultural significance, or historiography, what Hayden White calls "metahistory." ¹ Each of these pedagogical paradigms carries with it a set of theoretical implications and practical ramifications for the study of film history.

Furthermore, each of these five methodologies can be approached from a different critical perspective: ideological, feminist, auteurist, semiotic, formalist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, cultural studies, or cognitivist; mainstream or Third World; canonical or anticanonical. Emphasis can be placed on classical narrative cinema, experimental film, animation, or documentary.

So, how do we choose? Probably most of us structure film history classes on the basis of our individual scholarly predilections. If you're a Marxist who specializes in economic analysis of the film industry, you'll probably pick a textbook, perhaps Tino Balio's The American Film Industry or Robert C. Allen and Douglas Gomery's Film History: Theory and Practice, that emphasizes that approach. If you're a formalist semiotician who sees the history of the medium as the evolution of an artistic language, you might choose Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin's A Short History of the Movies, whose operative principle is that "the primary historical documents are [the] films themselves." According to Mast, all the rest is "secondary material," "background information." ² David Bordwell, Louis Giannetti, Jack C. Ellis, Robert Sklar, Thomas Bohn...