Defamiliarizing and Refamiliarizing Film and Television Texts

Before they’ve so much as set foot in our classrooms, today’s college students have watched thousands of movies and television shows on everything from theatrical screens to cell phones, and they can view, share, and even manipulate countless texts at the click of a mouse. At once a major pleasure and a major hurdle of teaching media studies, such absorption in visual entertainment is a factor that all media studies teachers must engage with. Students of Generation Y grow up steeped in popular culture, and media studies majors in particular have usually taken an even deeper interest in film and television texts, both for entertainment and for intellectual edification. In many ways, this offers an advantage to teaching this material: the students are enthusiastic about the subject matter, and they arrive on day one of class with at least a base level of knowledge in the subject. But this also poses an obstacle: some of them think they already know everything, they come in with preconceived and sometimes even problematic assumptions about how media texts work, they have trouble seeing beyond their ingrained informal experiences with media entertainment consumption, or they don’t respond well to film and television texts that are outside of their aesthetic or cultural comfort zones. Therefore, I strive to tackle the challenge of students’ personal familiarity with film and television via essay assignments whose primary designs draw on strategies of defamiliarization and refamiliarization, asking students to either look at media texts from different perspectives than they are used to or to apply familiar perspectives to unfamiliar texts. In this short piece, I will elucidate this approach through descriptions of sample assignments, including three for film history courses and two for television courses.

On the first day of my post–World War II film history course, our class icebreaker discussion involves the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. I show the students the list of titles that have been deemed worthy of preservation (in the spring semester, the latest selections have just been released). We then discuss their reactions to the listed titles, and that in turn leads to a discussion of what it means to declare a film historically important (while dismissing others) and a consideration of how a film can represent some aspect of the movie heritage of the United States. This lays the groundwork for the first essay assignment, which is odd in its premise but relatively straightforward in its execution. I require the students to pretend that it is fifty years in the future; much of the world was destroyed in a series of global wars a few decades earlier, and with their infrastructures since rebuilt, nations are now trying to piece back together their previous cultural legacies. The students are employed by the Library of Congress as part of a global project to help reconstruct world film history. Along with a list of 1950s and 1960s films from which they can choose to write on, the premise continues with these instructions:

This is your latest assignment: the Library of Congress has just received a set of film canisters that was found deep in a salt mine in Utah. There is no title, year, or country of origin listed on the canisters, degradation of the film stock has resulted in the opening and ending credits crumbling to ash, there are no existing historical records that indicate what exactly the film is, and you have no recollection of this particular film. It is your job to establish when and where this film was made based on the evidence you glean from watching the film and your general knowledge of twentieth-century film and cultural history. Thus, you have to watch the film and then produce a 4-page report containing your deductions about the film’s historical identity. Using evidence from the film itself, whether aesthetic, technological, cultural and/or economic in nature, and your knowledge of film history, you will identify as much as you can about the film—what particular period and country it was made in, what film movement it was...