III

When we use a lens that merely captures a scene, we thus contribute to the reification of the viewers. In shot after shot, the visual formation ministers to make them whole again. As a result, we become, to some extent at least, involved in the maintenance of today's social stratification. To question the links between lens optics, film equipment, and bourgeois society thus requires a profound investigation of the entire topic. 58 These issues, however, are not likely to be brought up by students unfamiliar with critical studies. "There is no spontaneous germination in the mental life," Dewey reminds us.59 It is always the result of an outward cause. It is therefore up to the teacher to bring these points to the fore, giving students access to the larger intellectual debate that surrounds artistic rendition. All in all, effective film teaching should not consist of a pile of information presented by an instructor who is out of sync with his/her students' work. But neither should the subject be presented as if any figure of style were personal choice only, a matter unconnected to a historical, cultural, and political debate. For the curriculum, and Dewey is specific about this, needs to "arouse interest in the discovery of [the] causes, dynamic processes, [and] operating forces" that govern any topic.60
IX
Another aspect of Dewey's educational philosophy is equally valuable for film teaching. Adapting ideas first developed by Johann Friedrich Herbart in Germany, Dewey rethought the relation between the past and the present. "The present," he wrote, "is not just something which comes after the past. . . . It is what life is in leaving the past behind." To study the past therefore "is of great significance when it enters into the present, but not otherwise."61 To understand what is behind today's film staging for example, it would be useful to comprehend what led to it. How could we accomplish this? "When a pupil learns by doing,'' Dewey thought, "he is reliving both mentally and physically some experience which has proved important to the human race; he goes through the same mental processes as those who originally did these things."62 So, instead of watching films by Griffith and being bored by what we perceive as primitive filmmaking, why not recreate with a video camera Griffith's original situation, inherited from the stage, and his creative solution to it? This is what Dewey had in mind when he advised his instructors to reconstruct the entire procedure that led to the making of a candle. "The whole process of getting illumination," he wrote,

 



Film Production Theory2000
Film Production Theory2000
ISBN: N/A
EAN: N/A
Year: 2004
Pages: 126

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