Re: Pedagogy and films
Dave Postles (pot@leicester.ac.uk)
Thu, 12 Oct 1995 08:22:09 +0100
To answer Michael Graham, I'd say that I overrate the 'pedagogical
hazards', if I may coin a phrase, of using films in teaching history,
whereas I don't underrate the potential qualities of films in teaching. My
bias may come from my initial literary training: I began teaching with
literature courses, so I became aware of students' misunderstandings about
modes of fiction at an early stage in my career. This must have given me a
rather strong bias. I'm not against pictures or images: I use a lot of
period iconography, to provide a sense of the material civilisation of the
times. I mean that these pictures tell us a lot on the way people pictured
themselves, they tell a lot about who printed, drew or painted what for
whom.
I am not teaching history majors, but English dept (foreign
language) students, and my emphasis is very radically on period documents;
if I had a class of historians, I would certainly resort to films to
illustrate methodological problems raised by *our* representation of the
past, but rather in seminars than in undergraduate teaching.
To take a few French examples of good XVIIth-century based films:
Mnouchkine's *Moliere*, from the late 1970s, for instance, overemphasised
grime and slime to look more 'ancient', including ultra-modern
pronouncements in the dialogues; her approach was Brechtian: she is a
theatre stage-director who was producing for TV and the cinema at the same
time, with her own theatre company. Representing the previous decades,
Rappeneau's *Cyrano* (an adaptation of a XIXth-century play in
alexandrines, not a biography of the writer, as you know, with Depardieu in
the title-role), showed a super-clean 17th-century Paris, partly filmed on
location, partly in studios, and partly in Uzs in the Gard (unless the
artificial settings were perfect imitations: I thought I recognized some of
the places). *Tous les matins du monde*, by Alain Corneau, also with
Depardieu, playing the composer Marin Marais, was a very interesting
presentation of the court/country oppositions, a biography of a musician,
with period music played by Jordi Savall. The first time I liked Depardieu
in a movie... But these masterpieces remain XXth-century fictions, *Cyrano*
was a fiction on a fiction on a character whose life had very little to do
with Rostand's play.
I regard a fiction as a document on the time when it was produced,
not on the time it tries to depict. Does it mean that the 1990s are better
at representing the XVIIth century than the 1970s or 1940s? I would support
this argument, yet Depardieu, Marielle, Bouquet, Brochet didn't pretend to
imitate provincial or courtly early modern French.
To our descendants in 300 years, our films will be documents on
ourselves, as we can look upon Shakespeare's *Julius Caesar* as a
Renaissance view of the Roman world, his history plays as Late Tudor views
of the wars of the roses (the same time-distance as between the American
civil war and current TV series on that period, if you think of it).
Does this partly explain my attitude? If my previous post on the
matter seemed a bit violent, I sincerely wish to apologise to any that took
it that way.
Vive le cinema!
Luc Borot
Luc Borot <lb@alor.univ-montp3.fr> home 33-67 52 07 98
<lb@bred.univ-montp3.fr> fax 33-67 14 24 65
Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches sur la Renaissance Anglaise
Universite Paul Valery --- Montpellier (France)
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