post<\/a> a while ago about the importance of integrating Film Studies within English Studies, but my concerns surpass today the framework of a particular degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMy students tell me that most persons approach cinema as basic consumers, feeling no curiosity about how films (or series) are made, in which they\u2019re not so different from common readers who have no idea about what writing actually entails. Yet, while most common readers understand that literary creation happens in the mysterious process by which the brain of the writer and the page (or the screen) are connected, either in a private room or in other locations (some writers love writing in libraries or in crowded cafes), there is a very poor understanding of how films are made. This is important at a general culture level because films (and series) are consistently misjudged and the professional efforts of the many artists involved in them downplayed or totally ignored. You might say that people use roads all the time without understanding who made them and how, and I\u2019ll reply that this is precisely my point: if education cannot explain to us how the world we live in is built, then what is it doing?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the particular case of cinema and TV, the lack of a basic regulated education means that whatever audiences know about films and series comes from the media. Film magazines and reviews in newspapers and other types of periodical publications stepped in to cover the gap, together with cinema programmers and TV channels. This resulted in two main distortions: the importance of actors was much exaggerated and that directors (or creators and showrunners for TV) were acknowledged as authors, following 1950s French auteur<\/em> theory.<\/p>\n\n\n\nActors were magnified because their presence is crucial for the audiovisual business. In early silent-era cinema, actors were not even credited but after producer Carl Laemmle introduced Florence Lawrence to the world (in 1910) and the label \u2018film star\u2019 was invented (in 1912), film studios saw the convenience of publicizing their products through actors. Fran\u00e7ois Truffaut (then a critic, not yet a director) and his colleagues at Cahiers du Cinema<\/em> promoted the absurd idea that the authors of films were not the screen writers, as it was commonly accepted in France, but the directors, whom they elevated from m\u00e9tiers en sc\u00e8ne<\/em> to artists. Humble Hollywood luminaries like John Ford scoffed at this view of film production, but narcissists like Alfred Hitchcock loved the idea and adopted the auteur label with a passion.<\/p>\n\n\n\nGenerally speaking, then, most spectators believe that cinema somehow emerges from the collaboration between directors and actors (the people interviewed in promotional junkets). Very few spectators understand the roles of the professionals named in the opening credits, supposing they pay attention at all. The production team members named in the closing credits are just ignored except by the crazy film buffs that insist on watching said credits even if they take ten long minutes (or more!). The critics, whether they are professional reviewers or academics, focus mostly on plot and themes, still assuming with no questions that directors are the authors of films, and paying attention only occasionally to script writers, directors of photography and original score composers, perhaps even costume designers. To this day, I remain astonished that other key professionals, above all production designers, are not named in reviews or academic publications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My own knowledge of how films (or series) are made is patchy, coming from books, documentaries, films dealing with films, interviews, reviews and so on. I\u2019ve never taken a Film Studies subject because none were available to me. I\u2019m learning as a teach and write, telling myself that one day I will finally understand camera movements. Perhaps I should teach a course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two days a week, I present to my students a lecture that combines bibliography from a list of selected sources on Adaptation Studies, and the analysis of a case study. We\u2019re studying Unit 1, the adaptation of realist fiction, and so far I have commented on Gone with the Wind<\/em>, Emma<\/em>, Brideshead Revisited<\/em>, Spartacus<\/em>, The English Patient<\/em>, The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, and (today) Schindler\u2019s List<\/em>. The selection is very eclectic because each student is working on a different realist novel and with a long list of 55 already chosen, I had to work hard to find other adaptations to discuss.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe question is that when I prepare the lectures at home, I can see that the academic analysis of film is totally disconnected from the pragmatics of filmmaking. When I focus on how the films were made and who designed them a whole new world opens up. But then, when I go to class, I have to combine advanced and basic teaching, and that is a challenge. For instance, I was thrilled to show how differently designer Robert Haas worked for the two versions of The Maltese Falcon<\/em> (1931, 1941), but I had to do so taking into account that students know nothing about director John Huston, or, attention, Humphrey Bogart. When I asked students, \u2018am I giving you too much information in each lecture?\u2019 one replied, \u2018yes, but we obviously need it.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo, here I am, combining in my teaching this semester a rather experimental approach to film adaptation (asking students to consider visual elements rather than plot) and at the same time offering a crash course on basic filmmaking. And all because Film Studies is not an integral part of an education in the Humanities yet, 130 years after the first was movie was shown in public and when students\u2019 free time is mostly employed in consuming series (not even films!). I\u2019m thinking, then, of teaching a basic Film Studies course though I would be then intruding into the territory of my colleagues in the History of Art or Media.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Next week I\u2019ll receive my students\u2019 first essay, and I will be able to assess in more detail what they need, always considering they my class is a tiny drop of water in the ocean of their generation. Whatever teachings I transmit might change the perception of audiovisual production of a very small group of persons but not at all the way films are understood generally. This would take an educational effort that requires completely overturning most academic work done since the 1950s and the selection processes by which some matters are included in official education and others are not. As a student reminded me, after all cinema is not really a special case: most arts are outcasts in pre-university education, why would films by an exception? He might be right, but if things continue this way, the whole legacy of cinema, an art which is still relatively young, might be lost in no time. You\u2019ve been warned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I\u2019m discussing film education. In Spain, \u2018Educaci\u00f3n Pl\u00e1stica, Visual y Audiovisual\u2019 (EPVA) [Plastic, Visual, and Audiovisual Education] was introduced in 1990 as one of the main subjects to be taught along the three secondary education years of the compulsory secondary education course ESO (ages 12-16). The EPVA block now called \u2018Image and Visual\/Audiovisual Communication\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,15,16,18,1053,34,36],"tags":[171,900,1039,1040],"class_list":["post-4635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-film-adaptations","category-film-studies","category-general","category-students","category-teaching-tools-and-rules","category-tv-series","tag-education","tag-film-education","tag-primary-school","tag-secondary-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4635"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4636,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4635\/revisions\/4636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}