Teaching Transnational Cinema

Politics and Pedagogy

Katarzyna Marciniak, Bruce Bennett, Katarzyna Marciniak, Bruce Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317401056
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This collection of essays offers a pioneering analysis of the political and conceptual complexities of teaching transnational cinema in university classrooms around the world. In their exploration of a wide range of films from different national and regional contexts, contributors reflect on the practical and pedagogical challenges of teaching about immigrant identities, transnational encounters, foreignness, cosmopolitanism and citizenship, terrorism, border politics, legality and race. Probing the value of cinema in interdisciplinary academic study and the changing strategies and philosophies of teaching in the university, this volume positions itself at the cutting edge of transnational film studies.

seeing “the world” through film

part one

ignorance and inequality

one

teaching with transnational cinema

bruce bennett

teaching on film

Surviving Desire (1993), a short, comic film by American director Hal Hartley about a US college professor’s brief existential crisis, offers us a provocative way into thinking about teaching transnational film.

The film opens with a scene set in a raucous classroom in which an academic, Jude (Martin Donovan), is reading aloud a passage from an English translation of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Figure 1.1). In the background we can hear the disgruntled voices of his students. A book flies through the air and slams against the blackboard behind Jude, just missing him, and he retaliates by hurling a board eraser back across the room and then continues reading calmly from the novel. One inexplicably angry student shouts, “We’re paying for this!” Another storms out of the room yelling at Jude, “You’re a disgrace!” Their behavior is quite disproportionate to what seems to be an unremarkable literature class. When he finishes reading, Jude closes the book and a student asks, “So, what was all that about?” “That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Jude replies, and the infuriated student responds, “But you never discuss anything, you just ask questions. We’ve been stuck on the same paragraph for a month and a half!”

Figure 1.1 “You’re wasting our time!”: Jude is berated by an angry student in Surviving Desire, Hal Hartley, 1993.

Jude’s fixation upon this passage from the novel—in which a character discusses the distinction between “active love” and “love in dreams,” or between selfless perseverance and narcissistic gratification, between realism and fantasy—is a symptom of Jude’s personal impasse that leads him later in the film to morose, romantic self-absorption, dancing, drinking, writing poetry, and a brief fling with a student. However, as well as establishing the premise for this narrative, the opening scene also presents us with a succinct reflection upon contrasting approaches to pedagogy.

The scene ends with one of the students wrestling Jude to the ground, and what has infuriated these students to the point of physical violence is Jude’s apparent refusal to teach them. They react with the sense of acquisitive entitlement of consumers demanding a tangible return for their investment, a direct transmission of skills or clear, unambiguous knowledge. In other words, they are operating under the terms of what Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire calls “the banking concept of education” that defines education in economic terms as “an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor.”¹ More than just a metaphor, what is implicit in Freire’s formulation is the idea that education is an intrinsic component of the market economy, providing students with the cultural capital that will allow them to thrive professionally and financially. Jude’s students thus also understand education as a mundanely utilitarian process for the delivery of transferable knowledge and skills; “Teach us something useful,” one of the exasperated students demands as Jude begins to read. More precisely, the use-value of knowledge is understood by the students in relation to an institutional and socio-cultural context in which knowledge and understanding are measured principally by formal examination rather than, say, self-reflection, self-transformation, or critical thinking: “Tell me something that’s going to help me pass the final exam!” another student demands desperately.

Thus, the film’s opening scene stages a confrontation between the cynicism or utilitarian realism of the students who understand themselves (or, at least, who are positioned) as consumers of commodified, instrumental knowledge within the for-profit university, and the idealism of Jude, who understands knowledge not as a reified acquisition—“a gift bestowed by those who consider themselves knowledgeable upon those whom they consider to know nothing”—but as a process.² In response to the accusation that he is wasting their time, Jude, who pointedly shares his name with the tragic protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, a character obsessed with learning, explains that he is asking them questions. When one student insists, “We’re supposed to ask the questions. You’re supposed to give us the answers,” Jude counters, “Perhaps it’s not so important to know the answers as it is to ask the questions better.” What is at stake in the educational encounter for Jude is not the transfer of knowledge from teacher to student, but learning how to learn. To challenge the reactionary “banking concept” of education, Freire proposes that “education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.”³ It is precisely this reconciliation with which Jude is engaged, refusing to treat the students as empty vessels while recognizing his own comparative ignorance. Consequently, the film ends with Jude back in the classroom, relaying Dostoevsky’s life story to the class while writing on the blackboard (although the camera angle means that we cannot initially see what he is writing). He finishes writing and slumps in a chair at the front of the room before announcing wearily, as if defeated by his own logic, “I have nothing else to say. I can’t teach you anything. Class dismissed.” A cut to a shot of the blackboard then reveals what Jude has written: “KNOWING IS NOT ENOUGH” (Figure 1.2).

As a character, Jude is far from exemplary. He sleeps with a student, struggles to engage with his bewildered, alienated class—failing to “manage the excess of affect” generated in the classroom— and, like most of the male protagonists in Hal Hartley’s films, he is romantically self-absorbed, melancholic, and intermittently aggressive.⁴ Nevertheless, in his insistence that learning is a matter of asking questions in the right way, and his concomitant refusal to reproduce the unequal power relation between knowledgeable teacher and ignorant student in his interactions with the class, the character offers us an interesting lesson in critical pedagogy. In effect, the film teaches us how to teach but, following the principles of Jude’s approach in which he refuses to provide a definitive interpretation of the text under discussion, does not show us an ideal teaching session or an ideal teacher, refraining from explanation or “knowledge-transfer” and instead suggesting a method that might be applied.

Figure 1.2 Jude’s final message to his students, Surviving Desire, Hal Hartley, 1993.

ignorant pedagogy

Thus, Jude—and, by extension, screenwriter-director Hartley—is the epitome of the eponymous “ignorant schoolmaster” discussed by French philosopher Jacques Rancière in his reflections upon the politics and practice of conventional models of teaching. Rancière’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation is a reflective commentary upon—or, as Yves Citton observes, a narrative account of—the writing and practice of French academic and polymath Joseph Jacotot, who developed a system of “emancipatory” or “universal teaching” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.⁵ In telling Jacotot’s story, Rancière relates that the educationalist’s experimental approach to pedagogy is founded on a challenge to the dominant “structuring fiction” that teaching is essentially and necessarily a process of “explication,” and that a student gains understanding of concepts by having them explained to her by someone with superior knowledge or a superior intellect.⁶ As Rancière observes, the explicative system that underpins much teaching at any level is based on an ideologically fundamental assumption about the unequal distribution of intelligence in the world: “Explication is the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid.”⁷ As a result of this divisive premise, the paradoxical function of much conventional teaching is not emancipation, enlightenment, or empowerment but rather the maintenance and reproduction of this division—a process that Jacotot terms “enforced stultification.”⁸ The conventional relationship between teacher and student is situated within a hierarchical power relationship in which the teacher always knows more than the student. According to the philosopher Louis Althusser, Rancière’s former teacher and a key influence on his work:

The pedagogic situation is based on the absolute condition of an inequality between a knowledge and a lack of knowledge. Those to whom society transmits, through its pedagogical institutions, the knowledge that it has decided they should assimilate, represent […] the side of unequal-inferior knowledge. Those whom society puts in charge of transmitting to the non-knowers the knowledge that they possess represent the side of knowledge, or those who have unequal-superior knowledge. The famous pupil-teacher, lecturer-student, relationship is the technical expression of this fundamental pedagogic relationship.⁹

This structural inequality and dependency is maintained no matter how far the student progresses through the system or a particular curriculum. The implicit message of the teaching encounter, regardless of the specific content that is under discussion, is that the student always remains comparatively ignorant, and dependent upon a teacher’s explanation for her understanding of the material. This is not a consequence of incompetent or disingenuous instruction, but on the contrary is reinforced even more effectively by “good” teaching since it is even more self-evidently “true” that a “good” teacher knows more than her students. The well-meaning and conscientious teacher, or “stultifier” in Rancière’s terms, “is all the more efficacious because he is knowledgeable, enlightened and of good faith. The more he knows, the more evident to him is the distance between his knowledge and the ignorance of the ignorant ones.”¹⁰ Consequently, no matter how benevolent and committed the teacher may be—as if in a restaging of Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise—the student is always left with the impression that the “master is a length ahead of the student, who always feels that in order to go farther he must have another master, supplementary explications.”¹¹

By contrast, Jacotot’s model of pedagogy, “universal teaching,” rests on the radical emancipatory premise of equality rather than inequality. The central principle of his approach was that “all men have equal intelligence,” and a consequence of recognizing this is that the teacher’s role must necessarily shift from explication to enabling the application of this intelligence to analysis, reasoning, and learning.¹²

In a broad sense this principle is based on the observation that people learn all the time without instruction, through experience and trial and error, dialogue and feedback, in the way that a child learns language, for instance. However, as Rancière relates, Jacotot’s realization came when he was employed as a lecturer at the University of Louvain in what was then the Kingdom of the Netherlands and was required to teach a class of Flemish-speaking students, most of whom could not speak French. Since they had no common language, Jacotot issued the students with copies of a newly published bilingual edition of Les Aventures de Télémaque, a seventeenth-century French novel derived from Homer’s Odyssey, and asked them—through an interpreter—to write reports on what they thought about the novel in French. Whereas he “expected horrendous barbarisms, or maybe a complete inability to perform,” what he found to his apparent surprise was that “the students, left to themselves, managed this difficult step as well as many French could have done.”¹³

What Jacotot apparently observed was that, by comparing the dual texts, without any explication, these students were able to teach themselves a new language. One of the implications of this experiment is that students are not reliant upon the interpretations, opinions, and explanations of an expert, but can learn independently when they are required and encouraged to do so. As Rancière relates, Jacotot deduced from this that “one can teach what one doesn’t know if the student is emancipated, that is to say, if he is obliged to use his own intelligence.”¹⁴ Jacotot apparently went on to test this thesis further by teaching painting and the piano—subjects in which he had no competence—and reportedly announced to prospective students—in a statement that is echoed by Jude at the end of Surviving Desire—“I must teach you that I have nothing to teach you.”¹⁵

This is not to say that the teacher is rendered redundant by Jacotot’s method of “universal teaching,” but rather that the role of the teacher is altered from that of an instructor who is a repository of specialized knowledge, to that of an emancipator, stimulating the student’s will to learn with increasing independence. Rather than “knowledge-transfer,” a term that has become commonplace in describing the function of the contemporary university, what Rancière de...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• list of figures
• acknowledgments
• introduction: teaching transnational cinema: politics and pedagogy
• part one seeing “the world” through film
• part two transnational encounters
• part three transnational aporias
• coda: “teaching films as things to think with”: a conversation with rey chow
• contributors
• about the american film institute
• index