Pedagogy and films

Dave Postles (pot@leicester.ac.uk)
Tue, 10 Oct 1995 17:38:20 +0100

I own that I share Larry Poos' doubts concerning the pedagogical
relevance of films to history teaching for such remote periods as the
medieval or early modern periods. They are interesting to study the
representations of those periods since cinema started 100 years ago, but I
am strongly sceptical about the kind of historians we are preparing if we
choose to make the past 'familiar' to them.
To me, a good historian is an ethnologist (or entomologist) who
looks at the past as a remote country, inhabited by folks with strange,
exotic customs, speaking a foreign language, even when it sounds like ours.
I sometimes wish I could have a pint with New Model Army soldiers
in the winter of 1648-49, or could find my way into Harrington's Rota Club
in the last months before the Restoration, but the film remains to be done,
and the only thing I can do is write the screenplay, which would be mere
fiction.
I can see the point of showing a literature class film adaptations
of plays or novels, or of writers' biographies, but the danger (in my
experience) is that the most naive of them will take the film for a
definitive reading of the play or novel. Literature is about text and
creation, not seemingly flesh-and-blood persons. History is about
everything in the past, which makes the use of films as teaching documents
very dangerous. Let's not add our contribution to the current naivety of
this generation of students in front of the relationship between reality
and representation: is it not difficult enough to assess the relevance or
authenticity of a historical source? there are so many methodological and
epistemological problems in history that we'd better avoid adding more to
our teaching burdens.

Just my two or three centimes worth

Luc Borot

*e-mail: lb@alor.univ-montp3.fr - lb@bred.univ-montp3.fr
*Prof. Luc Borot - Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Angla=
ise
*Universite Paul-Valery, Montpellier (France)

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