It’s Only a Movie

IT'S ONLY A MOVIE Pauline Kael Iseemovies, talk about them, and write about them all the time; why should it be so enervating even to consider sitting down and formulating my general approach in terms of a course? Although I accepted this commitment in good faith, I found myself postponing its accomplishment. When I could no longer put off this oppressive assignment, I sat down and looked at the original letter with its suggestions for what the paper might include: the "rationale" of the course, a description of what you hope students will gain by studying the subject with you; the sequential treatment of subjects within the course; a complete list of all texts, journals, and periodicals used in the course; a complete list of all films screened; and so on. And suddenly I heard a teenage voice inside me muttering, "Do you want the questions the students will ask, too? So you can prepare the answers in advance?" All the hostility toward the project that I had been trying to keep down, rose to the surface. This was what I had gotten interested in movies to get away from. And I recognized the symptoms of fatigue. I remembered how my thumbnails got worn down from scraping the paint off my pencils as the teacher droned on about great literature. I remembered music appreciation with the record being played over and over, the needle arm going back and forth, and I remembered the slide machine in art history and the deadly rhythm of the instructor's tapper. And I knew that I could not present a course of study. I began to see that the reason I dreaded it, the reason I couldn't just toss it off is because I don't believe in it. More than that, it goes against the grain of everything I feel about movies, and against the grain of just about everything I believe about how we learn in the arts. Perhaps you once shared my association of courses of study with institutional lethargy. Perhaps, even most of us got interested in movies to get away from that. And maybe the only way we can save movies from being dehydrated like other arts converted into academic "disciplines" is to consider what they meant to us earlier in our lives, what they may mean to students now, and the more terrible question of how our interests have shifted from our earlier ones and from those of students now. Possibly our personal commitments-professional, economic, institutional, or whatever-and our personal needs for career or status or whatever, may have caused not only an alteration in our original desires and intentions toward movies, but also they may prevent us from recognizing what students think about and want. 8 E Let me give a simple example of the kind of shift I mean. Many film teachers got interested in movies as a vehicle for social change. Those, especially, who got involved in documentary production in the thirties and forties and from thence into teaching, were dedicated to documentary as a criticism of social and economic life. Now they train students to glorify that life, and instead of recognizing, facing, discussing these alterations in the uses of documentary, they usually find it easier to talk about training and technique, about good and bad ways of doing things. But surely the important question is: what are we doing? For if our belief in documentary film as an important force for good, for opening people's eyes to their environment and its problems, results in nothing more than helping produce better institutional ads for Bell Telephone, then perhaps we should re-examine the nature of our beliefs. Should we go on pretending to do one thing, when the evidence shows we're doing something else? We all know that the reason so many documentary people have become integrated into big business is that this is the only way they could practice their trade. This is something that must come out into the open if they are to give students any clear notion of how movies work in the world; and perhaps students will respond to the facts of the...