2 posts tagged “film studies”

   I know it's been awhile since I've posted anything, but believe me, there's a good reason. Try having to write about thirty pages worth of analytical essays across three different classes in the span of six days. Yeah, it's a lot of freaking work. Fortunately I managed to finish up everything on time, but by the last few pages I was mentally exhausted and completely out of gas. It's just so hard to do so much in so little time. On the plus side, I think fall was probably the hardest quarter I'll have all year, so I should be pretty well off until graduation.
   The last day of classes I stayed behind and had a nice chat with one of my professors, who's sponsoring an independent study I'm doing for winter. We talked about a lot of things ranging from film and getting a job teaching at the university level to earthquakes and car crashes. Tracing the line of the conversation was pretty funny. Anyway, what struck me as a bit interesting was how one gets a job teaching.
   Essentially you turn in an application and resume as usual, as well as a thesis (I think). From there, the university narrows it down to a small number of candidates who run a colloquium or talk on the subject of their choice, and after all the candidates have presented, the faculty of the university decides on who - if anyone - they want to hire. Apparently it's not uncommon for the university to not hire anyone, even after going through all those stages. It's pretty shocking to imagine, given that all of this takes place over six months or so.
   Guess it'll take a lot longer than I thought if I want a job teaching film.

   The other day in my seminar we were talking about Christian Keathley's cinephiliac anecdotes, and how they can be used as springboards for larger discussions. Keathley used an example written by a student studying Fritz Lang's M; essentially the student focused on the use of bowler hats in the film to talk about the origin of bowling as a sport, something about it being used by German cults to "cleanse" sins. The student then related this back to the film, in which he describes Peter Lorre's character as a "pin" being chased around the "alleys" of the city and such.
   At this point in the discussion one of the other students in my seminar goes off on a tangent about how this example doesn't make any sense at all, since bowler hats have nothing to do with bowling. His whole argument was that since there's no real connection between the two, the student's reading of the film is totally wrong and therefore invalid. I'm not quite sure what was said immediately afterwards, but it lead to a discussion about filmmakers and theory. According to this guy, every film has to involve some sort of theoretical framework, otherwise it automatically is labeled - as he put it - as "bad". I don't know why, but this struck a cord with me.
  

First off, Keathley himself points out that one reason for the declining interest in film studies is because the discipline has become extremely elitist; individual interpretation has been replaced with a mechanical way of looking at movies. As he says, his book is meant to show how individual experiences - cinephilic "moments" - are important in reading film, and the above example is meant to show how anyone can come up with an interpretation of the film by looking at specific objects or moments in the film.
   The guy in my seminar is a total example of how snobby a lot of film students are. He talked a lot about the Russian school of film (i.e. Eisenstein) and how a lot of those filmmakers were also film theorists who infused their films with their theories. He's always comparing everything we watch in class to these theorists and putting down a lot of other ideas and theories that are just as valid, which is something I've grown tired of over the course of the quarter. What's worse is that this guy made it into the Critical Studies concentration, which is something I wanted to do. It's bad enough that our department is already so U.S./Euro-centric when it comes to film theory, but to have an elitist guy like him teaching a seminar in the spring is just ... baffling.

   Truth be told, sometimes I do get a touch of elitism when it comes to "knowing" more about film than others. But hey, everyone's like that at some point or another. People just love to show off their knowledge, especially when they know the other person doesn't know certain things. My friend Derek is like that all the time, but there's a difference between simply passing on factual information and trying to eliminate a certain way of thinking. When dealing with non-film majors it's easy to get carried away, but this poses the problem of alienating people away from film studies, as Keathley writes.
   What we need to do is to open up film studies, to make its appeal a little more broad. Film studies, especially in regards to theory, is not completely dictated by the Russian montage theorists or the French writers of Cahiers du Cinema, despite how influential they've been in helping to create film studies as a discipline. Literary studies have already begun to delve into the individual experience, but until film studies can do the same, you're only going to see the same people talking about how Eisenstein's a genius, French films are the "best", and how your interpretation of (insert name of film) is completely and utterly wrong.
   So please, be a little open-minded when it comes to film. We're not all a bunch of pricks.