Film and Video: Production vs. Reception Over Time
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English teachers were initially quite ambivalent when the silent film
came on the scene. In the first article on film in English Journal,
Robert W. Neal (1913) felt compelled to assert humorously that “the
moving picture is not an invention of the devil.” (658). After assuaging
fears that the motion picture was a tool of Satan, Neal then offered
suggestions for how English teachers might engage students in analyzing
and writing about narrative stories told in films. We found relatively
few articles about silent film in the early days of the journal, and the
few we did find focused on pedagogies of textual reception. Perhaps Neal
was right in his worry that many English teachers viewed the silent film
as a tool of the cloven-hoofed one after all.
When we move into the Hollywood era of the sound film in the 1930s,
however, we see a greatly increased interest in motion pictures among
English teachers; this interest might reflect the growing influence of
film in the culture at large. We also would suggest that English
teachers may have been more attracted to the “talkies” because they more
closely resembled the conventions of the dramatic stage plays that
already played a key role in the English curriculum. We found that
English teachers first turned to the sound film as an object of
analysis—much as they might treat a play script by Shakespeare; however,
in the later 1930s, we noted a sudden increase in teachers engaging
students in composing movies. In some cases, teachers managed to mimic
the process of filmmaking by having students write and perform a film
script; however, quite a few English teachers managed to work
collaboratively with students and faculty to gain the means to produce
short, rudimentary 16mm films. This is remarkable given that film
equipment was quite expensive and relatively inaccessible during this
time period.
Taking advantage of the rich cinematic environment of Los Angeles in
the 1930s, Louise Whitehead (1937) managed to borrow cameras and films
from three students in the class (who likely had ties to the film
industry) to make a class film adaptation of scenes from David
Copperfield. Teaching in Louisville, Mary Ruth Hodge (1938)
managed to coordinate her class to make and screen a movie adaptation of
“Lady of the Lake.” Hodge accomplished this feat in collaboration with a
social studies teacher who had taken a summer institute on filmmaking
pedagogy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)—once again
in Los Angeles. On the one hand, these filmmaking experiments were quite
radical, as they engaged students in collaborating with classmates to
compose films and share them with audiences beyond the teacher; yet we
note, too, that despite a few mentions of using film equipment to
produce student newsreels, filmmaking was positioned first and foremost
as a way to engage students in appreciating canonical works of print
literature.
After the initial burst of enthusiasm in film production pedagogy in
the late 1930s and early 1940s, there was a long period of production
drought—1943 through 1967—when the journal featured no articles about
film production. Yet, during this time the journal continued to feature
many articles about teaching film reception. In a period in which film
increasingly came to be recognized as an art form in its own right, it
is not surprising that English teachers returned mostly to positioning
films as texts to be analyzed (not unlike novels, poems, and plays). We
also suspect that the expense and relative inaccessibility of filmmaking
equipment caused many teachers to see film production as beyond their
reach. In many ways, our timeline confirms Kelly Ritter’s (2015)
argument that the forties and fifties were a time period in which
English teachers employed film for conservative ends.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, we see another burst of
interest in filmmaking pedagogy—once again in a period of great
technological and social change (not unlike the 1930s). While the film
production teachers in the late 1930s tended to have some kind of
collaborative connection to members of the film industry, the arrival of
the Super 8 camera format in 1965 began to make film production more
inexpensive and technically simple for non-professionals to pursue as a
hobby (Lipton 1975). In contrast to 1930s film production pedagogies,
which tended to feature adaptations of classic literature, late 1960s
and early 1970s production pedagogies featured students composing in a
wider range of genres. While Hanke (1971) stuck with the literary
approach, i.e., having a class make a cinematic adaptation of the “Love
Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” other instructors taught students to
compose their own documentary films engaging local social issues (Foley
1971; Scheufele 1969), instructional films teaching school subjects
(Dart 1968), examples of commercial “propaganda” (Babcock 1967), or
original fictional film narratives (O’Keefe 1971).
As we move into the later 1970s and 1980s, we find teachers
increasingly turning to video cameras for moving image production.
Although video is a medium with different affordances than film, we
chose to code these video pedagogies together with film as we noted that
teachers tended to conceptualize video equipment as a means for making
and analyzing “films.” Yet, despite the proliferation of home video
camera technologies in the 1980s, we didn’t find the same kind of
groundswell of production pedagogies that we saw with the Super 8
camera. We might surmise that interest in video in the 1980s was
somewhat dampened by the larger groundswell of interest in
computer-based writing in this period. In the 1980s, the computer was
clearly the most exciting form of new media for English teachers, with
video playing second fiddle. In the twenty-first century, we found
emerging interest in the use of digital video specifically for
filmmaking; while we could reasonably have coded these digital video
articles as “computer media,” we chose to code them as film/video when
they focused on students using digital video technologies to craft
original cinematic texts. Interestingly, while much scholarship on
digital video pedagogy tends to position such video work as “new” to the
field, we actually found greater interest in moving image production
pedagogies in the late 1930s and early 1970s than we did in the current
century.
Topoi for Teaching with Film and Video
X = number of articles; Y = topoi
Click to view graph data in table format
Topoi for Teaching with Film
Film Topos
Production
Reception
Engaging for Students
51
83
Changing the Nature of Literacy
42
70
Enhancing Alphabetic Literacy
25
83
Requiring Teacher Judgment
3
45
Expanding Audience Beyond Teacher
31
7
Harming Alphabetic Literacy
1
8
When we look at the topoi that teachers employed to make
sense of film and video, we can see that teachers have consistently
found the moving image to be “engaging for students” and that they have
sought to harness that engagement to enhance the teaching of traditional
print reading and writing. It’s notable, though, that the second most
prevalent topos we found was that film and video were
“changing the nature of literacy”—often expressed as a call for English
teachers to pay more attention to the unique visual affordances of film.
As we look at these topoi, we can see a persistent tension in
the field: on the one hand, teachers want to harness new media for
traditional goals (e.g., enhancing appreciation of canonical
literature), but they also see new media as offering an occasion to
expand their conceptions of what teaching literacy entails (i.e., paying
more attention to imagistic forms of meaning making).
As we review the long timeline of film and video pedagogies, we can
note that film reception pedagogies have had great staying power in the
field over the past hundred years; the moving image clearly has been
established as a valid and important text for analysis in English
classrooms. Pedagogies that focus on film/video production, however,
have been much more fleeting and erratic; we see bursts of enthusiasm at
moments when new film and video production technologies come on the
scene, but these bursts of energy rather quickly flame out. Since we
stopped coding in 2012 in the midst of an ongoing revolution in digital
video technology, it’s too soon to say if that pattern will repeat
itself or not in relation to digital video—although we would argue that
we should be cautious of the tendency to turn digital video into yet
another text for analysis. Of course, these graphs also leave us with
some lingering questions too, most notably: Why did film persist in
English classrooms so much longer than radio (for example)? And, what
might today’s digital video teachers learn from recovering English
instructors’ past cinematic pedagogy experiments? We explore these
questions more fully in chapter
5.
