A Lesson Plan for a Course in Film History

A LESSON PLAN FOR A COURSE IN FILM HISTORY Andrew Sarris irst my credentials. I have been teaching a variety of film-related courses for close to eight years, and I have been lecturing on film to lonely crowds for close to fifteen. My classes have ranged in size from a seminar six to a semaphore six hundred in such institutions as The School ofVisual Arts (1965-67), New York University (1967-69), Columbia University (1969-72), and Yale University (1970-72). I have spoken with films and without them, before films and after them and even during them (the last a practice guaranteed to foster lingering resentments). In the course of my academic career I have received many inquiries from other educators about my method and my message, and I have never known exactly how to respond. I happen to depend too much on improvisation, Socratic stimulation, and contemporaneous involvement ever to freeze my curriculum into the mold of preconception. Hence, this brief rumination is not intended so much to supply permanent answers as to define some of the problems that arise in the teaching of film history. One of the problems that does not concern me is the feeling shared by many nonfilm academics and many non-academic filmites that film should not be taught at all. Since film courses are here to stay, some one or other will have to teach them. If not I, then thou, and who is to say that thou is any more qualified than I, or I than thou? Not I certainly. Having disposed of the ontological problems of teaching film history, let us now proceed to the pedagogical options available in a relatively uncharted field. Among these options are purely chronological (Edison, Lumiere, Mdlies, Porter, Griffith and all that), the technological (Kinetoscope, Panoptikon, Vitascope, Vistavision, Cinematographe, CinemaScope, Cinerama, wide-angle lens, deep focus, jump cut, fade, dissolve, iris, wipe, traveling shot, parallel editing, tilt, pan, zoom and all that), the stylistic (montage versus mise en scene, documentary versus fantasy, medium versus art form, movie versus film, objectivity versus subjectivity, realism versus expressionism, analysis versus acceptance and all that), the thematic (capitalism, socialism, anarchism, militarism, pacifism, religiosity, anti-clericalism, puritanism, liberalism, libertarianism, libertinism, etc.), plus all the attendant subdivisions by nations, genres, directors, writers, cinematographers, players, studios, production units et a. 30 N The purely chronological approach is not entirely without merit even though it tends to obscure the density of film history by implying that a mere twenty or thirty films can serve as the expressive emblems of twenty or thirty thousand more. The earliest courses in film history tended to synthesize the chronological with the technological into what I once designated as the pyramid theory with Potemkin at its apex. By this theory it was stipulated that film history progressed until Potemkin, and then declined precipitously thereafter. It is extraordinarily difficult today to convince students in the seventies that there was a time in the very late fifties when most serious-minded film scholars firmly believed that the artistic development of the medium had ended in 1930. The pendulum has now swung so far in the opposite direction that Richard Schickel was forced (in a 1971 article in The New York Sunday Times Magazine) to adopt a defensive tone in upholding the artistic worth of the silent screen. Griffith, Murnau, Lang, Pabst, Sternberg, Stroheim, Flaherty, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovjenko, Sjostrom, Stiller, Dreyer? Who are they? For that matter, even Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy have to be reintroduced to a skeptical generation weaned on Mad magazine, Mick Jagger, and Hermann Hesse. Thus I find myself compelled to bridge the generation gap between my aged self and my students by resurrecting the traditional Anglo-Russian montage-documentary aesthetics against which I have been rebelling for the past fifteen years. I suppose it is like a Trotskyist being forced to explain who Stalin was in order to achieve selfdefinition . Similarly, I must assign readings in Eisenstein and Pudovkin and Rotha and Griffith and Kracauer and Spottiswoode and Reisz and Lindgren and Bal~zs and Manvell and Sadoul and Grierson and Bard&che and Brasillach and Wright and Arnheim and many others before I can...