Abstract
This paper engages with the question of whether education itself goes undervalued in Alain Bergala's The Cinema Hypothesis. Bergala identifies schools as being key in providing a space in which all young people should be able to access a cinema education, but in doing so situates the school simply as a means to the end of cinephilia. While this approach does much to nurture film appreciation via educational institutions, this paper argues there is insufficient justification for why schools should engage with film education to this end in a way that distinguishes it from other forms of art provision within current curricula. An alternative approach sees the school not just as a place for teaching film, but as a place in which perceptions of teaching, learning and schooling could also be transformed by the experience of film-viewing and criticism. In re-examining the four parts that Bergala prescribes for the role of schools in fostering programmes of film education, the paper questions whether his approach promotes film-as-art at the expense of school-as-education, and suggests that the two might have more to offer one another in classroom practice than their seeming opposition implies.
Highlights
This paper engages with the question of whether education itself goes undervalued in Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis
Bergala employs a dialectical opposition between cinema and school to conceptualize film education as a voyage of individual experience and/in taste, whose educational goal is cinephilia
Art’s very obligation is to remain ‘a catalyst for anarchy, scandal, disorder’. This Romantic view of art being the force of wild nature opposed to the rules of law, of institution or normativity is one that was well captured in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933), in which the innate joyful anarchism of childhood brings down the strict and artificial regulation of the boarding school environment
Summary
On in the articulation of his hypothesis, Bergala (2016: 21) writes that ‘Art is by definition a sower of trouble within the institution.’ art’s very obligation is to remain ‘a catalyst for anarchy, scandal, disorder’ (ibid.). Vigo’s vision was born out of personal experience, and to some extent Bergala reveals the autobiographical character to his own dialectics in the first chapter of The Cinema Hypothesis He speaks first of his early encounters with cinema, and the sense that he had been ‘saved’ from cultural disinheritance by the twin rewards of cinema and schooling (Bergala, 2016: 12). Without wishing to deny this sentiment outright, I want to suggest here that the romance of solitary aesthetic experience is an inclination towards privacy that is fundamentally at odds with the public orientation of education, not least as articulated in Bergala’s own advocacy of equality of opportunity To explore this unresolved tension in The Cinema Hypothesis further, I will look at the ‘four parts’ to the school’s role in effecting a film education outlined by Bergala in the text. These four parts are only sketched in rough detail within The Cinema Hypothesis, and some of the criticisms raised here are ones that likely would not have required as much attention had the parts been elaborated further
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