Why should Films be Taught in School?

Okay, hold your horses! Calm down and listen to me before you get all riled up about the futility of this. Now instead of jumping into it directly, let’s take a step back. Let’s talk about that form of art that is already being taught in schools around the globe – literature.

So why do we study literature in school? When we study literature, our horizons are broadened, because we can learn about and come to understand people who are different from us. Literature has been a way of artistic expression for centuries now. Writers have told tales about gods and goddesses, heroes and their valiant victories, historical epics, romantic tragedies, comic incidents, legendary episodes, and much more. It is a form of time travel that helps put today in context. Conversely, we might discover characters or poems that we really identify with—it can be really exciting and validating to discover that our exact thoughts and feelings have also been experienced by someone else. Because of these effects, literature encourages us to be sensitive to the whole spectrum of human experience. Academically, studying literature also helps us to refine our own writing skills and expand our vocabulary.

Now there can be a very few people who would disagree that. Literature should definitely be taught in our schools. We also agree that other art forms like drama and music should also be a part of the curriculum.

But what about film? Why do film history and film theory have very little place in the school syllabus? Is it because most educationalists see cinema primarily as a pleasant but hollow diversion, only judging it by its populist and entertaining side, and not as an art form on a par with the other forms of art?

Given the validity of Paul Rotha’s (a British documentary film-maker, film historian and critic) description of cinema as being “the great unresolved equation between art and industry”, and that film, in comparison with the other arts, is unique in its relation to a mass audience, it is perhaps even more important to educate children to be able to distinguish between art and industry.

Do we not feel responsible enough to teach children to differentiate between Jane Austen and Charles Dickens from a Mills and Boon (or even Chetan Bhagat!) or a bad mumble rap from Mozart? If yes, then why can’t we help students understand the contrast between the multiplex fodder and the classics of world cinema, and that those few, foreign films that get a showing but are pushed aside and given the worthy label of “art cinema”.

Still, there can be a question lurking in the minds of many people, especially the parents: why do students need to take a class to learn how to watch movies?

It’s true, of course, that anyone can watch movies without the kind of training you need to read books. But students should know how to read a sentence well before high school — what high school literature classes teach is how to read critically. High school film classes would do the same thing, only for images.

School children should be taught how to “read” films just as they are taught to read written literature. They should learn how films systemise time and space and communicate ideas and emotions; how the patterns and structures of film genres allow us to engage specific historical and social rituals; how different conceptions of film history can direct and shape our responses. They should learn how to explore films from different angles and cultural perspectives. By doing so, their mind would know which films they should be influenced by, and which films they shouldn’t. This doesn’t happen overnight. It needs practice and proper guidance from a young age.

To tell industry from art, they should know about Truffaut, Eisenstein or Bergman along with the blockbuster movies they are watching at the theatres. The sad part is even many “media students” abroad have never heard of them, or have never been taught to watch classics like  The Battleship Potemkin, Au Hasard Balthazar, The Apu Trilogy, The 400 Blows, Au Revoir Les Enfants, The Colour of Pomegranates.

“I think you’d find the students receptive. For the last four years of my teaching career, I taught a film history elective once a year. I realized that… they could all read books — but when it came to reading images, none of them knew montage from mise en scène… We would gradually build our tool kit for analyzing the films we watched, studying how to dissect form as well as absorb content. The watershed moment in every class came near the beginning. After tracing the developing complexity of films through the silent era, we would take two paradigmatic silent features — The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Battleship Potemkin — and tear them apart as a workshop in understanding images. As the classes painstakingly examined the expressionist sets and grotesque makeup of Caligari, they began to grasp the emotional response and atmosphere that can be created through effective mise en scène. Even more revelations awaited in Battleship Potemkin, where they learned to identify how the director Eisenstein would place the camera for dramatic or emotional effect, and the power of cuts to build tension and plant ideas in your mind.”

Asher Gelzer-Govatos, a writer, film critic and teacher, is one of the very few people in the world to advocate teaching film studies in schools.

Also, every student has their own unique learning style. Sometimes auditory learning or learning through reading doesn’t come easily to students. Movies are a great resource for visual learners because they enable them to understand concepts without the barriers that hinder learning.

Just like books, movies allow students insight into the lives of different characters, how their perspective differs, and how they handle certain situations. Films can show students how different people, in different parts of the world, live their lives. This can be particularly useful in subjects like geography and social studies.

As students learn about history in the classroom, it isn’t always easy to fully realize how a historical situation would have really felt. For example, a historical drama like Saving Private Ryan can help students understand the Second World War, or a movie like Les Misérables can help students understand the French Revolution, or a film like Gandhi, for example, allows a student to view a recreation of the life of Mahatma Gandhi, a paramount figure in the history books that they study.

There would be many challenges in implementing film studies in high schools, but the biggest — a lack of instructors qualified to teach it — only points urgently to the need. To quote Nathaniel Branden, “The first step towards change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.” Be it a mandatory course or an elective like music or drama, let us all be aware of and accept the fact that movies can and should be analyzed just like written literature. It is also argued that films are literature because they can be analyzed and interpreted in the same ways as traditional written literature. All of the elements of fiction that are present in written literature are present in film. Even the methods that we use to analyze a film are closely related to those used to analyze literature; nevertheless, films are multi-medial. They are visual media made for viewers. Films take command of more of our senses to create special atmospheres, feelings or to bring out emotions.

Simply put, written literature and film, if bound together in school, can help teach students to understand psychology as well as art, in a much better way, and eventually help their minds grow stronger.