Innocent question

If English professors should refrain from teaching film, then should they also refrain from teaching drama?

Shakespeare, for example.

Discuss. 

Comments

[Miriam]

Obviously, I'm being snarky, but I'm genuinely interested in the pedagogical issues here, and have been bothered by them in the past--I've found that many plays, comedies especially, don't "work" until the students see them performed. Even plays that lie inert on the page can become rather zippy on the stage. And most of us lit types are not well-equipped to deal with a collaborative form like drama, any more than we are with film.

[Neophyte]

First: long-time lurker, love the blog, etc.

Next: who says English profs should refrain from teaching film? One of the best I've known teaches a film course on Shakespeare adaptations. Ohhh snap! Two birds, etc.

But really: what are the pedagogical/disciplinary arguments against film?

[Miriam]

It's a point that has come up at various sites--leaving aside the collaborative nature of film (where the final work may have dozens of interacting "creators"), the technology involved, the reception process, etc. all require an entirely different critical language. (There's a reason I haven't turned my one film-related conference paper into an article.)

I've always thought that the "Shakespeare on Film" courses make perfect sense, but I suspect that ACTA might not agree.

[Hannah]

They're introducing a Shakespeare on Film course at my uni next year, and I suspect it will be massively popular. This year we had a course with a heavy emphasis on Shakespeare staged, and it had a big film element because it isn't feasible to send us all to the theatre to see every play we study - even though the RSC Complete Works Festival was on at the time, so film was the closest we could get to a performance. It was interesting, because we're so used to film (although, I'd argue we should all be used to theatre but that's another bugbear) and have a language for discussing movement and choices in it. It may not be the "correct" language, but it works, and it's a lot more developed than our language for discussing Jacobean dramatic choices which we are that bit more removed from.

As a way into a course which relied on knowing a language of the stage, it was invaluable.

[Ray Davis]

Any movie script (including scripts for Shakespeare adaptations) is very different from that very small proportion of theatrical scripts read as literature, but you know that already, which somewhat sullies the innocence of the question.

Speaking as a non-professor, I prefer that people earn authority before they exercise it. Back in the dark ages when I was a student, English professors who "taught" film (or genre fiction, another professorial gut) often knew virtually nothing about their subject matter. All institutional safeguards against BS-ing were down. It was like George W. Bush teaching the novel.

I agree on the importance of making these bones live. I wouldn't deny the value of helping students understand viscerally that few plays were meant to be read alone in silence, or of giving them some idea of dramatic form and collaborative craft. But that's no more "teaching film" or "teaching theater" than reading poetry aloud is "teaching diction" or discussing commercial pressures on novelists is "teaching economics". If a "Shakespeare on Film" course is to be anything more than enjoying a bunch of movies and receiving a passing grade, something other than watching the movies must be involved. That would be the teaching part, and my guess is that for most English teachers that part's best devoted to something other than the particulars of film.

I also wouldn't deny that in these happier times some academics have developed impressive expertise in film or genre fiction, and could teach them almost as authoritatively as George W. Bush might teach national ruination.

[TM]

Do you really mean "English professors shouldn't teach film" or do you really mean "Literature professors shouldn't teach film"?

As a media studies scholar (and I would include literature under that umbrella since, well, ya know, most of it is published in books-the first mass medium), I can understand the various disciplinary hedgerows meant to keep everyone in their own yards.

But, let's be serious: a lot of film studies has traditionally been done by people hired as English professors. It's really only been within the past 20 years that separate departments have emerged, even for just Communication (which is often just an elide for Media Studies of some form).

Why can't a Literature prof teach film ...from a Literary perspective? Back c. 1990, a friend told me his Lit prof folded film and TV studies into Literature. While I am sure this is still controversial, I think it definitely notes a certain perspective that anything that was originally or currently "written" counts as Literature. Thus, Beowulf, the Gettysburg Address, Shakespeare, and even music videos not only can be, but perhaps SHOULD BE, looked at by various disciplines.

Why should only books, short stories, and poetry count? Whatever happened to interdisciplinarity??

[Ray Davis]

TM, as far as I know, interdisciplinarity's doing finer than ever. But TLP's question was ambiguous: there is "teaching with a film" (as one might teach "with a biography" even though one isn't teaching a survey of biographies) and there is "teaching film." Attempting to teach any subject without sufficient knowledge usually leads to vapidity or fraudulence, and, in my dated experience, "film classes" were particularly open to abuse.

[Hannah]

The Shakespeare on Film course is being solely run by the English department, and I suspect it has a focus on Shakespeare as a performance not as literature. I *think* (as someone who is graduating this year I didn't go along to the options talk) that it is going to have a concentration on historical progression and evolving social ideas about how we represent these plays and how we cast them and "stage" them. The Prof convening it has a big interest in Othello, Merchant and Hamlet, so I expect that he will be searching out all the versions of those ever made. He showed us about ten version of The Tempest once, including a (hilarious) silent film of it.

It strikes me as a neat side-step of the issue about merely showing films and having students write essays on them. Essays which would, for the most part, be dire because we have a relatively small number of people studying for the Film and Literature degree. From what I've found out about it by chatting to staff and tutors, the course will have a few lectures in which they combine this lot of students and those on the "From Page to Stage to Page" course, and the focus will very much be interpretation and how it is affected by social history and current events.

[Jonathan Dresner]

I thought everything was a "text" these days....

I don't see why literature professors shouldn't use and teach about film or drama, as long as they are clear about what aspects of it they are discussing and analyzing. It's not easy to separate out issues of performance and production, perhaps, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible, or worth doing.

[Philip Carey]

neophyte -- that isn't prof smf, is it? random question, but struck me as a possibility...