Film education otherwise: A response to Bergala's dialectics of cinema and schooling

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.

What do film teachers need to know about cognitivism? Revisiting the work of David Bordwell and other cognitivists

“…Language and language systems were the predominant way of analysing and explaining learning, and, as such, the role of the brain was not given much thought. Witness, for example, recent discussions of the work of French film educator Alain Bergala in the inaugural issue of the Film Education Journal (Chambers, 2018;Burn, 2018;Gibbs, 2018). In The Cinema Hypothesis (2016), Bergala devotes many pages to why young people should be taught film, but relatively few to the question of how they learn.…”

Consolidating an experimental pedagogy: Exploring ecologies of film education within France’s Cinéma Cent Ans De Jeunesse and Scotland’s Understanding Cinema project(s) between 2013 and 2019

“…It would seem no understatement in 2020 that the Cinémathèque Française's longrunning Cinéma Cent Ans De Jeunesse (CCAJ) has become one of the most influential film education projects in the world today. It was founded in 1995 by Alain Bergala, whose work was explored by various commentators in the inaugural issue of the Film Education Journal (Burn, 2018;Chambers, 2018;Gibbs, 2018;Henzler, 2018;Reid, 2018), and since (Eckert and Martin, 2018;Donald, 2019;Slatinšek, 2020); as well as in Cannon (2018) and Nathalie Bourgeois. CCAJ was delivered for the first decade of its life within France 'across … grades one through twelve … from several regions of France and diverse social backgrounds' (Bergala, 2016: 48).…”

Exploring co-creation in practical film education from primary school to postgraduate study: Theoretical and auto-ethnographic perspectives upon teaching film practice

“…Film education projects, particularly those at primary and secondary level, are frequently conceived and discussed through a focus upon participant identity: 'New media production is as much about producing identities and social spaces as it is about creating media' (Willett et al, 2005: 2); 'there seems to be little disagreement that participation in narrative-based media production activities supports identity development' (Rosenfeld Halverson et al, 2009: 23). With some exceptions (see discussion of the In Progress project in Rosenfeld Halverson et al, 2009), this focus upon identity and singular authorship tends to lead to an individualist emphasis that, as Alexis Gibbs (2018) recently remarked, is not always the most comfortable fit with the more collective environment of the classroom. In a manner similar to auteur theory, a worldly multiplicity of voices (or, recalling Bakhtin, a heteroglossia) is quietened to emphasize the single, singular authoring voice (or voices) of the student(s) from whom the work is seen to arise as a discrete utterance.…”

“…How can any given teacher suppress his or her worldly credentials as a historical subject? Alain Bergala's more partial, worldly, implicated figure of the passeur (as discussed in the inaugural issue of the Film Education Journal (Burn, 2018;Chambers, 2018;Gibbs, 2018;Henzler, 2018)) is perhaps a more convincing model for the practical film educator, as discussed below. Further, rehearsals of the non-interventionist teacher risk an abdication of responsibility, suggesting that one can avoid the realities of teacherly authority through reflexive intellectual gymnastics.…”