Film, Pedagogy, and Film Pedagogy: Introduction

“Who would I be if I didn’t sing?” the Canadian, feminist, lesbian singer/songwriter Ferron asks in her song “Shadows on a Dime.” A professor borrowed this question for her course on postmodern sexualities, which I took as a first-year undergraduate, and which continually stumped me in its theoretical density and abstractness. It wasn’t just while reading Monique Wittig or Erica Rand or María Lugones that I confronted the limits of my imagination and analytical skills but also in the films we watched almost every week. Ulrike Ottinger’s Madame X (1977), Jane Cottis and Kaucyila Brooke’s Dry Kisses Only (1990), and Ela Troyano’s Your Kunst Is Your Waffen (1994), among others--these films left me bewildered as they used satire, parody, semiotic play, and the blurring of boundaries to question identity, power, and privilege. I tried my best to grasp something meaningful while watching and discussing them, but I didn’t even know what I didn’t know. This postmodern slipperiness and disorientation was not a friendly guide through a strange new landscape.

As an instructor now, I’m not sure I would have taught my own 19-year-old self more skillfully. I understand that films can be powerful pedagogical tools. They provoke and evoke emotions, they decenter the instructor as the sole purveyor of knowledge, and, importantly, they can be fun. My training in print culture, moreover, has taught me that the relationship between form, content, and meaning matters. Films present material in ways that allow us to open to ideas and concepts that conventional academic writing may not. Describing her pedagogic practices, Sarah Hentges finds that films have created space for students to begin challenging not only representations of race, gender, class, etc. in the films they watch but also their own conceptions about these identity categories (2007, 16). Such practices set a foundation for us to push beyond mere tolerance of others and to create space for unruly bodies, for “angry, subversive, radical, promiscuous, nonhetero queers,” through a “radical queer pedagogy in film and media” (Nair in Bronski et al. 2006, 124).

However, my film pedagogy is a crude one. Almost without fail I show a film and then follow it with discussion and occasionally in-class freewriting. Coursework, writing my dissertation, going to conferences, trying to publish, moving and starting a new job all have kept film pedagogy as something that I continually plan to get to, sooner or later. Although, perhaps I am not alone. Paul McEwan, introducing a series of short pieces about teaching with potentially controversial or challenging films, writes, “Teaching is central to what almost all SCMS [Society for Cinema and Media Studies] members do every day, yet we spend surprisingly little time talking about how we teach film” (2007, 93). Through my work with Films for the Feminist Classroom I have realized more acutely that, in many ways, I have expected films to teach themselves. Surely students will realize that I am using Born into Brothels (2004) or The Beauty Academy of Kabul (2004) to interrogate the complexity of postcolonial, intercultural encounters, no?

This special feature on film pedagogies has thus been a selfish project. I wanted to learn more about using films effectively, creatively, and purposefully in my classes. The scholars and activists generously contributing to this special feature of Films for the Feminist Classroom offer not only films and film clips that they found pedagogically successful but also instructions for using them. A lesson plan often emerges after much trial and error and through much time and energy, so I am especially grateful that Shara K. Lange, Özlem Sensoy, Shoba Rajgopal, and Anna Zailik have let us benefit from their insight and labor.

Shara K. Lange brings us a lesson plan from the perspective of a documentary filmmaker and educator. In her class Documentary Research and Production students explore the issues related to producing and consuming documentary films by preparing presentations that put multiple documentaries in conversation with each other and with secondary sources. Because Lange’s lesson plan presents a rich array of films and activities, we can easily revise and/or excerpt from it. For example, the section titled “Documentary Ethics & the Perils of Image Making” could be incorporated into courses that address issues of representation, semiotics, ethics, genre, and the power of film. And the questions included in the plan’s different sections could help us examine films other than the ones Lange lists.

Drawing the focus toward one film and asking us to look more deeply into current political matters, Shoba Rajgopal builds a series of activities and readings around Afghan Women: A History of Struggle (2007). In addition to sampling other film clips, Rajgopal integrates popular nonfiction, fiction, and scholarly writing, offering a multi-genre, multimedia approach to understanding and interrogating women’s lives in Afghanistan. This juxtaposition allows us to investigate the media itself and to conduct a nuanced exploration of race, gender, and imperialism, both historically and in the present. Therefore, such a lesson plan would fit well with classes covering topics related to government and politics, ethnic and gender studies, postcolonialism, and media studies.

The politics and practices of representation is a recurring theme in these lesson plans, and Özlem Sensoy artfully explores them through her cultural studies pedagogy. Popular culture and media are the subjects of her lesson plan, inspired by a class in which she used the film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006). Sensoy’s method for deconstructing this movie involves a genealogy of representation activity that looks at a range of depictions of native “others” from a historical perspective. This activity thus demonstrates that Pirates of the Caribbean is neither benign or an outlier in the way it treats native peoples, and it disrupts students’ assumptions that racism is a thing of the past. Moreover, as Sensoy notes, we can apply this method to other identity categories, depending on a course’s content.

Despite the focus in this special feature on college-level coursework, pedagogical practices frequently happen outside the boundaries of a conventional classroom. Anna Zailik’s lesson plan takes us to the Youth Advocate Program in central New Jersey, where she worked with youth aged fourteen to sixteen. During a seven-week time period, they watched and evaluated four different documentaries for the purpose of deciding which one to show at a community screening, eventually choosing Presumed Guilty (2010), which chronicles two lawyers in Mexico attempting to free a wrongly imprisoned man. This lesson plan strives to draw connections between the films and students’ own lives, reminding us that education can not only revolutionize consciousness but also lead to social transformation.

Cumulatively, these essays and lesson plans present exciting possibilities for bringing films into our classes and other educational spaces. Not only do the contributions to this special feature challenge ideologies of racism, sexism, imperialism, and colonialism, they also give us concrete suggestions for doing so. The lesson plans included here are thus gifts and a challenge. Let us use them.