For the Love of Cinema , livre ebook

FOR THE LOVE OF CINEMA
FOR THE LOVE OF CINEMA
Teaching Our Passion In and Outside the Classroom
Edited by Rashna Wadia Richards and David T. Johnson
Indiana University Press
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ISBN 978-0-253-02963-8 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02995-9 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03012-2 (ebook)
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Brief excerpts of the essay Passionate Attachments were formerly published in The Company I Keep, Film Quarterly 68.3 (2015). The author thanks Film Quarterly and the University of California Press for permission to reprint these portions.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Love and Teaching, Love and Film / Rashna Wadia Richards and David T. Johnson
Part I. Theorizing Cinephilia and Pedagogy
1 Cinephilia as a Method / Robert B. Ray
2 Passionate Attachments / Amelie Hastie
3 Cinephilia and Cineliteracy in the Classroom / Thomas Leitch
4 Nearing the Heart of a Film: Toward a Cinephilic Pedagogy / Tracy Cox-Stanton
5 Movies in the Middle: Cinephilia as Lines of Becoming / Kalling Heck
6 Audiovisual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema / Cristina lvarez L pez and Adrian Martin
Part II. Practicing Cinephilia and Pedagogy
7 Teaching Film Nonfictionally: The Reciprocity of Pedagogy, Cinephilia, and Maternity / Kristi McKim
8 Loving Performance: Cinephilia, Teaching, and the Stars / Steven Rybin
9 Go to the Movies! Cinephilia, Exhibition, and the Cinema Studies Classroom / Allison Whitney
10 Cinephilia and Paratexts: DVD Pedagogy in the Era of Instant Streaming / Lisa Patti
11 Lessons of Birth and Death: The Past, Present, and Future of Cinephilia in Martin Scorsese s Hugo (2011) / Andrew Utterson
12 Cinephilia and Philosophia: Or, Why I Don t Show The Matrix in Philosophy 101 / Timothy Yenter
Selected Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK BEGAN with a conversation at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference in Boston in 2012. That year we were both presenting papers on a panel on cinephilia and haunting, prompted by a line from Serge Daney, but our discussions before and after covered wider ground. As we kept talking, we realized that one of the topics animating both of us was teaching. So when we decided to take on a longer-term research project, which turned into this edited collection, we knew two things: we were keen on bringing together issues of cinephilia and pedagogy, and we wanted to retain the personal, invigorating, at times exuberant tone of our initial exchange. We are so grateful to all of our contributors for enabling us to broaden that conversation, for sharing their experiences openly, and for showing us how to talk about love in so many ways. We thank them for their stimulating scholarship and their timely attention to all of our editorial requests time and again. More than anything, we appreciate that working with them has allowed us to feel part of a vibrant community of teacher-scholars in cinema studies.
We would also like to thank Indiana University Press for enthusiastically championing this project. We re very grateful for Raina Nadine Polivka s early encouragement and for Janice Frisch s guidance throughout the process. We also want to thank Kate Schramm, Shannon Sue Brown, and Darja Malcolm-Clarke for helping us during the book s production as well as Charlie Clark at Newgen for his judicious editing. We are deeply indebted to our external readers for their detailed and thoughtful responses, which made this book much stronger. And we are grateful to friends of the project, including Christian Keathley, Girish Shambu, and many others, who buoyed us along as the manuscript came together.
We would also like to acknowledge the support we ve received at our home institutions, Rhodes College and Salisbury University. Rashna completed a large portion of this book while on sabbatical, and she would like to thank Rhodes for that time away from teaching to focus on this project. Dave would like to thank the Department of English, the Fulton School, and the Salisbury University Foundation for support during the completion of this project. Most importantly, we are grateful to our students, and to our contributors students, who motivate and inspire us everyday and make this work worthwhile.
Finally, we would like to express our deepest gratitude to our families. There have been major changes in our personal lives during the time it has taken to put this book together. Our most profound pleasures have been the birth of our children, and our challenges have included complex, lifesaving surgeries. Through it all, we re lucky to have continued working on ideas of love, which couldn t have happened without the constant nourishment provided by our little worlds. Rashna would like to thank her husband, Jason, for his steadfast love and fierce devotion, and for showing her always what is possible; her daughter, Madeleine, for teaching her about a mad love that is all out of proportion, out of control, and beyond reason; and her dog, Callie, for her high-voltage, energizing companionship. Dave would like to thank his wife, Eileen, for her love, support, affection, and, yes, patience in reminding him daily that the sky isn t falling (yet); his son, Luke, for his love and for his unbounded, unapologetic enthusiasms; and his daughter, Anne, for her love and her sweet-natured disposition. We couldn t imagine anything without them.
FOR THE LOVE OF CINEMA
Introduction
Love and Teaching, Love and Film
Rashna Wadia Richards and David T. Johnson
What We Have Loved
It is hard to talk about love. It is harder still to talk about love in relation to the work we do in and outside the classroom: teaching and thinking about the movies. On more than one occasion, we ve had a well-meaning acquaintance exclaim, You must love your job! When the subject is film, it seems to many, the work itself must be effortless and uncomplicated and pleasurable. Sadly, this kind of view is not limited to people outside the academy. In Why Teach , for instance, Mark Edmundson argues for rethinking the purpose of higher education, which ought to focus not on impacting careers and salaries but on changing students minds and lives. 1 But such a real education cannot include film, at least not popular film, which, for Edmundson, does not lend itself to thoughtful intellectual inquiry; if you are teaching mainstream cinema, no matter what you propose by way of analysis, things tend to bolt downhill toward an uncritical discussion of students tastes, into what they like and don t like. 2 Even if you hope to offer a Frankfurt School-style analysis, Edmundson suggests, you can be pretty sure that by mid-class Adorno and Horkheimer will be consigned to the junk heap of history. 3 What you will be left with, under the guise of serious intellectual analysis, is what [students] most want-easy pleasure, more TV. 4 To be fair, Edmundson s critique is leveled at what he calls cultural studies, not cinema studies per se. Yet the teaching of film in general is being attacked as well, for it allows students [to] kick loose from the critical perspective and groove to the product. 5 It would be too easy to refute this old-fashioned notion of cinema as uncritical-and it would be entirely unnecessary, especially for readers of this volume. But we would like to take on a more pernicious argument implied here: that there is a fundamental distinction between serious intellectual analysis and easy pleasure. Is it possible to deconstruct this binary between evaluation and enjoyment? Can we rigorously critique that which we enjoy, even love? Given the long history of cin -love in our field, what does it mean to teach what we love or love what we teach? These are some of the questions addressed by this collection, whose larger aim is to put cinephilia and pedagogy into a productive dialogue with each other.
Since the 1960s, love s central role in teaching has been tackled in the field of education. Influenced by Marxist theory and anticolonialist struggle, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire was among its most prominent theorists. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (published in Portuguese in 1968, translated into English in 1970), Freire first argued that treating students as empty vessels to be filled with knowledge is a form of oppression; he therefore proposed rethinking the relationship between teachers and students, who would become co-creators of knowledge. 6 Love would be central to this endeavor, as it is impossible to teach without the courage to love, to speak of love without the fear of being called ridiculous, mawkish, or unscientific, if not antiscientific. 7 Love would enable teachers and students to face each other as subjective beings, become more human, and defy subjugation in all its forms. Freire s philosophy has influenced