Cinema in the English Department Introductory Course, or, How to Make Film an "Element of Literature"

At institutions without a major in film or video, English instructors must often step forward if students are to be introduced to the language and workings of film. The Introduction to Critical Analysis or Thinking about Literature courses that, in many colleges and universities, function as gateways to advanced study in English, provide a good opportunity for such an introduction to take place. In the following essay, I outline ways in which I have incorporated film instruction into the University of New Hampshire's Writing about Literature course.

The standard curricular and pedagogical requirements of Writing About Literature are threefold: (1) the class reads across the major literary genres (prose fiction, essay, poetry, and drama) and across historical periods and national boundaries; (2) students write intensively in response to their readings; and (3) in the process of such readings and writings, students learn and practice strategies for developing engaged and articulate responses and interpretations of a variety of kinds of literature. Students generally tend to be English majors in their second year, which usually means that they have taken English Composition and assorted introductory surveys across the disciplines but have not taken courses in either literary-textual analysis or film studies. There is usually (though not always) a twenty-student limit to the size of this course and courses like it. Writing About Literature meets two times weekly for a total of two hours and forty minutes. There is not any precedence, nor all that much time or available facilities, for screenings of material outside class. For in-class screenings, a large-screen television monitor with a videocassette recorder is available for use.

Since beginning to teach such a course, my goals have been heavily influenced by reading Robert Scholes. As he states:

In an age of manipulation, when our students are in dire need of critical strength to resist the continuing assaults of all the media, the worst thing we can do is to foster in them an attitude of reverence before texts. What is needed is a judicious attitude: scrupulous to understand, alert to probe for blind spots and hidden agendas, and finally, critical, questioning, skeptical. . . . To put it as directly, and perhaps as brutally, as possible, we must stop "teaching literature" and start "studying texts." All kinds of texts, visual as well as verbal, polemical as well as seductive, must be taken as the occasions for further textuality. And textual studies must be pushed beyond the discrete boundaries of the page and the book into the institutional practices and social structures that can themselves be usefully studied as codes and texts. This is what a reconstructed English apparatus ought to do. ¹

Wanting very much, as the lone cinema studies specialist in the English department, to do my part in such a reconstruction, I have become dedicated to making film one of the regularly featured categories of texts that Writing about Literature includes. My goal (following Scholes) is to guide the students through a three-part process from (1) actively "reading" ("breaking down" the basic codes and components of) a given text, to (2) engagedly "interpreting" ("filling in" what seems to be "missing" from that initial reading) that text, to, finally, (3) "responding critically" (offering a critique of the codes and messages) to that same text.

In combining the study of film with examinations of prose fiction, essays, poetry, and dramas, one must be sure to consistently point out that the differences between film and video and printed texts are just as important (if not more so) than their similarities, even while "fitting" film and video into the course's offerings. Focusing on the shared characteristics, such as that films usually begin with words on a page, I introduce film after spending the first few weeks reading and responding to a variety of short stories and dramatic scenes. Once the students have a...