I
previously wrote (and wrote and wrote...) about what I was thinking when designing an intro to film class that I'll be teaching next term, and particularly when choosing the fourteen films to show during the 150-minute screening time outside of class. That post wasn't complete, though, because an important other factor in the shape of the course is the textbook.
When I got the assignment to teach intro to film, I'd never looked at a film textbook. I'd be tempted to say, "When I was in school, we didn't need none of them overpriced, overstuffed, overacademic behemoths!" And though it is true that the profileration of such textbooks is a relatively recent event, a handful of them are over thirty years old. I just tended to get teachers who didn't want us to read much in film classes.
I'm a fan of reading, though. And I'm especially a fan of reading in an intro class, where a textbook gives interested students more information than they'll get from the inevitably incomplete survey an intro class provides. With a good textbook, or even a mediocre textbook, a student who becomes particularly curious about a topic will have a tool that shows the way toward deeper exploration.
I began by borrowing books from colleagues, then contacting publisher's representatives to see what they could send me. I soon had over a dozen books to choose from.
After skimming the books in my pile, I was able to eliminate half of them as in one way or another obviously inappropriate. For instance, I loved Routledge's
Introduction to Film Studies, and particularly appreciated that it was thirty dollars less expensive than most of the other textbooks. But that book's idea of introduction and mine are very different -- for students in their first or second year of college, it would be dauntingly complex, its vocabulary and concepts challenging even for intrepid students. As a textbook for graduate students or for undergraduates in a serious and comprehensive Film Studies program, it would be an excellent resource.
Once I had skimmed and whittled, I encountered
this post by Chris Cagle about film textbooks and found it helpful and reassuring. Most of the books Cagle writes about have been updated or are out of print, but the post confirmed a number of ideas that had been floating around in my mind. With one exception (and that likely because of a difference in editions), the descriptions of the books seem accurate and fair to me.
It only took me a few days to get down to three finalists: Bordwell & Thompson's
Film Art, Barsam & Monahan's
Looking at Movies, and Corrigan & White's
The Film Experience.
Each is a wonderful textbook and would serve the class well.
Looking at Movies is the most straightforward and clearly written of the three, absolutely perfect for a basic intro class. It also has the only useful accompanying DVD that I've seen with a textbook.
Film Art is a pure joy to read an
Because a colleague is going on sabbatical next term, I've been recruited to teach an Intro to Film class at
Plymouth State. I suppose they thought of me because I spent three years as a playwrighting and screenwriting major at
NYU, so my CV has more film-related stuff on it than most other folks' in the English Department, which oversees this particular class (though it's also a class that's a requirement for the Communications department ... I'm staying happily ignorant of the politics and regulations that, in the absence of a specific Film Studies department, make particular film classes part of one department or another...). I've spent time on film sets of various sizes, know a few writers and producers and such, and even have a couple of friends who were real, live film majors in college ... but academic film study is a world I know only at a superficial level, so it's good this is just an intro class.
And so I've spent more time preparing for this class than I have for any class since I decided to add an African lit section to one of the high school AP English classes I taught nearly ten years ago. I've done this only partially out of fear of not knowing what the heck to do once I'm standing in front of the class -- that fear, I've learned, never goes away, no matter how well prepared I am; it's the same fear I have before setting foot on stage as an actor, and it's essential to being able to perform well. (Indeed, the few times I've lacked the fear have been disastrous.) The primary reason I've spent so much time preparing is that the material is engrossing and the possibilities for the class are about as close to limitless as it's possible to get and still provide a general course description. One of the two regular teachers of the class told me he loves teaching it because it allows him to show some movies he likes and talk about them with students, and who wouldn't like that? (His syllabus reveals there's a bit more to it than that!)
First, I had to decide what I wanted my class to achieve. I always do this when writing a new syllabus, and usually with a few levels. First, there's "What do I want them to learn even if they learn nothing else?" That's the most basic level, the level that I try to distinguish from passing or failing the class, the thing that should be so central to the core of the course that if you only attend 60% of the classes and do 60% of the work, you'll still get it. There are always other levels, but the first level is what provides the fuel for the first draft of the syllabus.
So for this class, I decided I wanted the students at the very least to leave with a stronger and more articulate sense of their own responses to movies. Unlike in introductory literature classes, where half my job is selling the idea that books are not terrible things, I don't have to convince them that movies are worth watching. They come to the class with lots of experiences of movies, and they already have a sense of what they like and don't like. They will continue to watch moovies throughout their lives, even if I am the most boring and soporific teacher of their entire educational careers. The most basic thing I want to give them, then, is a toolbox they can use to be more engaged filmgoers than they would be otherwise. (Some of the students will, I expect, already be savvy and thoughtful about film, while others will not have spent a lot of time thinking about it at all.)
The first thing I set out to do was ch
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Just wanted to say I've been enjoying your posts on film, and wish you the best with your class.