Re-Seeing Film and Video Pedagogies
Introduction
In recent years, we’ve witnessed a flourish of interest in digital video production in writing studies and related fields. Arguing that digital video is a powerful and pervasive form of communication that all students need to learn, numerous scholars have published compelling accounts of the potential benefits and challenges of incorporating moving image composing into writing and literacy instruction (Adsanatham 2012; Arroyo 2013; Dubisar et al. 2017; Halbritter 2012; kyburz 2019; Lovett et al. 2010; Selfe 2007; VanKooten 2016). In addition to teaching students to compose with video, writing studies researchers have increasingly published their own born-digital, video-centered scholarship in both online journals and digital book series (Alvarez et al. 2017; Anderson 2010; Butler 2019; Fulwiler and Marlow 2014; Hidalgo 2017; Kinloch 2012; Miles 2015; Rhodes and Alexander 2015; Shipka 2016; Vitanza and Kuhn 2013). Positioning digital video as a powerful research tool, these works of online video scholarship have demonstrated that composing with moving images can enable scholars to make affectively powerful, robustly multimodal arguments that simply cannot be contained within the confines of print alone.
For the most part, advocates of digital video production in writing studies have tended to position their work as an outgrowth of the computer era—a digitally-inspired innovation in a field that had traditionally focused on alphabetic literacy instruction. In recent years, however, a few scholars have begun to insist that contemporary digital video work in writing studies could benefit from being situated in relation to the much longer history of filmmaking both within and beyond the English classroom. Demonstrating how contemporary digital video scholarship could be enhanced by a deeper connection to cinematic histories, kyburz (2019) elucidated how the the DIY cinematic practices of Jean-Luc Godard might inspire and animate contemporary digital filmmaking in writing studies pedagogy and research. Furthermore, kyburz historicized her call for “film-composition” in relation to 8mm film production pedagogies exercised in 1960s and 1970s composition classrooms. We seek to extend kyburz’s important work here by recovering and engaging a wider variety of archival sources on film production in K-12 as well as university English classes.
Our historical recovery work also owes an important debt to Kelly Ritter’s masterful Reframing the Subject: Post-War Instructional Film and Class-Conscious Literacies (2015). In her work, Ritter offered a deeply nuanced history of the use of instructional films in K-12 and university English classrooms in the post-WWII, mid-century era. Tracing the complex networks of educational, military, and corporate literacy sponsorship that shaped the development and deployment of instructional films in this period, Ritter revealed that instructional films commonly screened in English classrooms in the 1940s and 1950s problematically reinforced current-traditional pedagogies of correctness as well as further sedimented classist structures of educational inequality. Because Ritter has already provided an excellent history of instructional film in the mid-century period immediately following World War II, we’ve chosen not to review that period here, instead extending our view to encompass either side of it. When we zoom out to periods before and after the mid-century, we can begin to uncover a substantial tradition of film production pedagogies in English classes—a tradition that encompasses a wider range of conservative as well as progressive ends.
Film production pedagogies in English Journal have followed something like a boom-bust cycle. We see a burst of energy in film production pedagogies in the late 1930s as schools turned towards using 16mm film for instructional purposes, and we saw later spikes in the seventies and eighties as Super 8 cameras and, a little later, home video camcorders came on the scene. Despite these bursts of enthusiasm brought on in part by new technological developments, film production often remained sidelined as an ancillary or supplemental part of the curriculum. Furthermore, we found that the persistent complicating factor of inequalities in access ultimately kept film production out of the hands of most teachers and students. While the film production pedagogies we detail in this chapter offer numerous inspiring examples of student-centered, collaborative media making, we also found numerous examples of ways that filmmaking has historically been employed in service of exclusionary pedagogies. In our current moment in which writing studies teachers and scholars are increasingly seeking to use digital video production to transform our pedagogies and our disciplines, we argue that we can benefit from having a more thorough account of the historical highlights and lowlights of integrating cinematic production into literacy instruction. In this chapter, we tell our story in three parts: we start by introducing the anxieties and enthusiasms of the silent film era, then showcase the school film production boom of the late 1930s, and finally conclude by considering the resurgence of moving image production pedagogies in the 1970s and 1980s.
While in the last chapter we recounted the story of radio primarily through digital audio, we found that the story of film production pedagogies was not so easily translated to digital video (and we didn’t want to produce a talking-head historical documentary because, well, those can be dreadfully dull to watch, not to mention produce). As a result, we present much of our close analysis of archival sources in this chapter through the medium of alphabetic text rather than through video. Nevertheless, the student film work we read about in the archive got our own creative imaginations flowing and we couldn’t help but at least try to make some video content inspired by our reading. Once we had freed ourselves of the constraint of trying to make academic, analytical arguments in video form, we were then able to re-see the archive as inventive source material that could be creatively remixed and reimagined in ways that blurred the boundaries of fiction and nonfiction. In our creative video work, we were most inspired by the teachers we met in the archive who engaged students in trying the make the popular film genres of their day. Accordingly, we realized the best way to honor this history of student film production was to try our own hand at composing in some popular cinematic genres: the silent film melodrama, the newsreel, and the movie trailer compilation.
We open our “film festival” with a satirical silent film that dramatizes how English teachers navigated the tensions between film and literature in the silent film era. While our story was inspired by our reading of the archive, the narrative we dramatize is, for better or worse, largely our own invention. When we turn to the 1930s, we offer a kind of mockumentary newsreel about student film production in the 1930s that relies mostly on legitimate archival sources, with only a few creative liberties taken on our part. When we turn to the seventies and eighties, we present a series of imaginary film trailers for actual student projects described on the pages of English Journal (necessarily exercising some artistic license as we worked to bring their printed descriptions back to cinematic life).
So without any further ado, let the film festival begin!
