Neoformalist Pedagogy and 2001: A Space Odyssey

Introduction: The Experience of Structure

Robert Rosenstone has reminded teachers that even a deeply empirical art form like a documentary or historical film will “create its own standards, appropriate to possibilities and practices of the medium” (33–34), requiring that each film be taught as a medium, a set of instruments and materials, operating inside a specific moment of personhood, technique, genre, history, and pattern of meaning. Students can learn some history from Judgment at Nuremberg (Kramer 1961), but they can learn neither the history of the Holocaust nor the aesthetic experience of the film if they look for that specific form of knowledge inside a medium not set up to produce it. History does not teach film, and film does not teach history, just as film does not actually teach physics or law in the TV series Cosmos or Law and Order. This confusion was, in fact, the beginning of the philosophy of art in the West. When Plato protested to his fatuous colleague Ion that reading about an event is not the same as experiencing it, Plato was arguing against art as a valid substitute for experience. Aristotle then rebutted his teacher by explaining how art could teach audiences something perhaps more valuable than the information of, say, history or physics or law. It could teach meaning. The secret to this power lay in how well a “mimesis” could be structured to reveal the complex array of consequences following upon a character’s choices. The artist’s choices, in other words, were an essential part of the story. Improbable choices in diction or character or, especially, plot structure would vitiate the power of a narrative to simulate the experience of learning from what results from a character’s choices.¹ Done right, however, a mimesis could be eminently practical, making audiences the apprentices to a moral craft, not the mere witnesses to topics better left to experts in other fields.

Perhaps for this reason, Stanley Kubrick, the director of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), once told his own apprentice, Steven Spielberg, never to offer a “definitive thematic statement” of one’s film (qtd. in McBride 479). Kubrick knew how anxiously audiences, like all students, reduce the often difficult process and order of an art form into political, ideological, historical, or philosophical proposition.² Art is not a topic or theme; it is a form of problem-solving. It teaches students an essential skill—how to make an action mean something, not as a proposition triggers a semantic process but as an experience triggers a rational-emotive process from within an ordered context, a structure. The student just needs to process correctly all the materials operating inside that structure, moving beyond the adolescent experience of art as a small set of discrete givens, usually processed as unrelated thematic moments, and graduating to the mature experience of art as a larger set of related choices.

This set of related choices extends well beyond the formal work, however, so instructors themselves must graduate to a new formalism. In film studies, for example, pervasive economic and cultural influences of the day, such as the quality and availability of celluloid or digital stock or the pressure of Cold War politics or the imperatives of Hollywood commerce, must be placed alongside individual or unconscious influences, such as family biography or social and sexual relationships or brute genius, as materials. Why “materials”? Because they are not determinative agencies: they are possible choices. Such a “practice-based theory of art,” says David Bordwell (28), will teach students how to read these materials, from, say, the images and metaphors constellated inside a film all the way up to large-scale “motifs, iconography, and themes,” as “constructive principles, or as effects of constructive principles” (17). In film studies, the real agent of form is cinema itself, its application. The practice of “cinema” (which includes individuals as “rational agents” who are “not complete prisoners of . . . conceptual schemes”) turns materials “circulating” at every level “into significant experience” (20, 23). Only by seeing the medium of cinema as the formal agent can students make the leap into organizing...