Introducing Students to Film

For all the institutionalization of film studies that has occurred over the past twenty-five years, the field still appears to be relatively wide open. This is nowhere more apparent than in introductory film courses, where teachers face the very practical questions of what to emphasize, what to gesture toward, and what to pass over altogether. The rich variety that enables film scholars to range from close textual readings to psychological studies of fandom to economic analyses of the entertainment industry and so on becomes a challenge to those who must represent the field to students taking their first and perhaps only film course. This section of Cinema Journal looks at issues that arise in planning and teaching these introductory classes.

Three of the essays describe the choices made and the assignments given in introductory courses. The other two, moving from content to audience, look at the introductory course through students' eyes. One examines how the textbooks we use do or do not engage students, while the other looks at the questions and doubts students have about the value of film analysis. All the articles provide insights and perspectives that may prove valuable to teachers setting up their own introductory courses.

Frank P. Tomasulo's article describes the most ambitious of the courses. Noting five different approaches that one can take in an introductory class on film history (aesthetic/textual, technological, industrial/economic, sociocultural, and historiographical), Tomasulo leaves no path untaken. Rather, he proposes to sublate all five approaches. The danger, he acknowledges in a parenthetical caveat in which he quotes Gerald Mast, is that the course may cease to be a history and become an encyclopedia. Issues of breadth versus depth also surface in such a framing. But the depth comes in the projects Tomasulo's students undertake. If the teacher does not choose a narrow path, the students make choices, leaving the teacher responsible for keeping eyes and ears open to the realm of what is possible and where the students want to go. The final synthesis may lie less in the course content than in what each student does with it.

Doreen Bartoni and Peter Mascuch do not have the same institutional freedom as Tomasulo and, because their courses are more circumscribed, do not face the same challenges. Bartoni is concerned with teaching an Aesthetics of Film and Video class in a production-oriented curriculum, Mascuch with being the only film person in an English department in a university without a cinema program. Both Bartoni and Mascuch, in a sense, are trying to "sneak" something into their curricula, thereby using programmatic restrictions to their advantage. For instance, in the course Bartoni describes, the students study the films of, say, Jane Campion, from a production angle. These students note the artistic choices that were made and examine what they mean for a filmmaker with a vision. Meanwhile, Mascuch regards film as narrative, reasonably arguing (and sounding very much like an English teacher as he does so) that this is how students primarily experience the movies they see. As narrative, then, film can be studied parallel to a study of short stories and novels. Mascuch describes assignments that move between the two.

Warren Buckland is interested in how learning takes place and how a film textbook facilitates or impedes that process. He limits his test case to the first chapter of James Monaco's How to Read a Film, but his questions can be usefully applied to any cinema textbook or general reading assignment. Buckland emphasizes that if students are to develop the specialized perspective of the expert, the course readings must begin by acknowledging their particular framework.

Such acknowledgment is the focal point of Greg M. Smith's contribution. Smith shows his respect for his students by taking seriously questions such as "Aren't you reading too much into these films?" In doing so, he provides us with more than just answers that we can pass on to our students, although teachers may well...