Introduction

This third forum under our editorship follows our predecessors' example of sponsoring essays on innovative pedagogical approaches to the teaching of French history. What follows are three articles by scholar-teachers who have developed sophisticated methods for introducing students to films as historical documents that require specific critical tools for incorporation into the study of history. The intent of each author is to highlight issues raised by the use of film in teaching history and to suggest to teachers with similar curricula strategies for analyzing these issues in the classroom.

Sarah Hanley sees the introduction of films as an opportunity to broaden the cognitive arena of historical reconstruction and deepen students' understanding of historical methodology. In designing a thematic course on "Community and Identity" in France since the sixteenth century, she has developed a pedagogical strategy that pairs full-length films with historical texts, features elements of visual literacy that empower students to analyze films critically, and compares criteria for judging the historical integrity of films with those for evaluating the veracity of written documents. Using examples from each of the five films that she shows to students in her course, Hanley discusses cinematic techniques such as constructing moving images, using sound and color, applying editing techniques, and communicating meaning. She also examines the subtle relationship between cinematic invention and historical knowledge with scenes from the most well-known film in her course, The Return of Martin Guerre. In an appendix, Hanley describes each of the case studies in her course, thereby illustrating how to apply general principles for integrating films and texts in the teaching of French history.

In his course on the Occupation, Brett Bowles presents films made subsequent to the period they depict as studies in selective memory that are themselves situated in a particular historical moment. Films made during the Occupation he presents as primary sources in their original historical conjuncture. To all films, he brings the insights of semiotic, structuralist, and psychoanalytic methodologies associated with the textual analyses of film studies as well as historical questions related to conditions of production, distribution, and reception of the film. The latter approach seeks to explore the historical value of film as a site of cultural expression and conflict with the potential to influence cultural change. Bowles analyzes specific films from the postwar period to illustrate his argument that film provides an ideal means to introduce students to the history of collective memory about the Occupation. He also suggests ways of integrating films and texts in topical courses on the history of the Occupation. He concludes his essay with practical suggestions about locating French films and film reviews, and he provides appendices that list separately postwar fiction films and documentaries about the Occupation and that provide information about film vendors in the United States and film archives in France.

Alison Murray pursues two strategies for using film clips in her course on French colonial history. She explores changing representations of the colonial enterprise in French films from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century, the results of which she briefly summarizes here. She also employs film to explore key themes in recent cultural and social histories of the colonial experience and its aftermath in France. In doing so, she positions film and the filmmaking process within recent studies of how scientific knowledge about the empire and colonized peoples was organized and transmitted for the purpose of control. Murray also suggests how films depicting changes in the social norms of Europeans transplanted to a colonial contest might alter the way teachers thematize French history. She uses portrayals of interracial relationships in films to historicize imaginings about race and gender in ways that include the invisible camera operator's relation to his subjects. Finally, through recent social films that address the question of immigration, racial tension, and multiculturalism in contemporary French society, she offers to her American students a view of modern France as a "sister republic" faced with many of...