Screengazing and thinking. Cinema in humanities' education

- 219 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 SCREEN GAZING AND THINKING. CINEMA IN HUMANITIES' EDUCATION CONTEMPLAR LA PANTALLA Y PENSAR. UNA PROPUESTA PARA EL USO DEL CINE EN UNA EDUCACIÓN HUMANÍSTICA Dr. Rafael Cejudo [email protected] Dr. Pedro Mantas [email protected] Universidad de Córdoba. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades. Plaza del Cardenal Salazar, s/n 14071, Córdoba (España) The article deals with a three year collaboration program between the Filmoteca de Andalucía (The Film Institute of Andalusia) and Philosophy faculties of the University of Córdoba (UCO). The aim of this educational project, entitled "To look, to think and to debate", was to integrate film analysis in the syllabi of some Philosophy courses, more than using films as incidental examples. The general aims of that program are addressed by using two Spanish films as case studies, and highlighted, both, the new learning chances and the didactical problems. Keywords: Educational methods, university experiences, cinema, Philosophy. El artículo reflexiona en torno al programa de colaboración de tres años de duración desarrollado entre la Filmoteca de Andalucía y las áreas de filosofía de la Universidad de Córdoba (UCO). El propósito de este proyecto educacional, que fue denominado Mirar, pensar y debatir, fue integrar el análisis fílmico en el programa de varias asignaturas de filosofía, y por tanto no sólo su uso como ejemplos incidentales. Analizando dos películas españolas como estudios de caso, se abordan los objetivos generales del programa y se discuten tanto las nuevas oportunidades de aprendizaje como los problemas didácticos implicados. Palabras clave: Métodos educativos,experiencias universitarias,cine, filosofía. - 220 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 1.Introduction. For the last three years, the areas of Philosophy and Moral Philosophy (Dpt. Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Cordoba – Spain) have laid out a projectt integrate film analysis in the syllabus of some of our modules in bachelor’s degree courses (specifically, in History and Humanities degrees). We entitled our project Mirar, Pensar, Debatir (To look, think and debate) It was developed with the support of the Andalusian Film Archive – AFA. Based on the results and feedback that we have received from its implementation, this paper investigates on the role of cinema in a liberal or humanistic education. In particular we highlight the implications of film analysis for critical thinking learning and for enhancing narrative imagination. Both of them are remarkable capabilities which provide guidance in life, an outstanding goal for a humanistic and liberal education. Last but not least, we shall focus in the hermeneutic appropriation of films to deal with ontoepistemic issues, particularly the use of cinema in the hermeneutical analysis of truth in the works of art. As an illustration we shall discuss two films included in the project: The Hunt (La caza, Carlos Saura, 1965) and Dream of Light (El sol del membrillo, Victor Erice, 1992). 2. Learning processes. Regarding the learning processes, the project looks upon spectatorship as the main purpose of the learning experience. Using AFA facilities, we devised a film watching experience aimed at arise thoughtful and creative attitudes. To achieve that goal, we scheduled several screenings programs that LEVEL COURSE NAME AND NUMBER OF STUDENTS 2009-2012 Lifelong learning students Course ‘Filosofía’ (120 students) Undergraduate students First and second years ‘Historia del pensamiento filosófico y científico’, Degree in Humanities (45 students) ‘Filosofía’, Degree in History (300 students) ‘Filosofía’, Degree in Hispanic Philology (30 students) Third and fourth years ‘Hermenéutica contemporánea’ (Degree in History and Degree in Humanities (40 students) ‘Historia del PensamientoAnglosajón’, Degree in English Philology (45 students) Table 1. The groups involved. - 221 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 we share with AFA and, with the collaboration of different specialist that we have invited to the screening sessions, we discuss with them and our students about the films and the topics we have included in our programs. We claim that watching films in specifically designed venues, like film archives, is a helpful path to transform unreflective spectatorship into new and qualified learning experiences. Among the different ways where cinema can improve the teaching and understanding of several philosophical topics, we can underline these ones: filmmakeseasier some issues which are difficult to understand, it enhances essential skills like creativity and critical thinking, and collaboratesin illustrating different subjects which are difficult to be represented (Castro 2009, pp. 407-418).The project takes advantage from these benefits and uses them as an introductory path for our reflection on Philosophy and Ethics. Our collaborative program with The Film Institute of Andalusia begun in 2008 and it is still ongoing. The period of study of this article is 2009-2012. We screened the same films, in the same screening sessions, with undergraduate students of the Faculty of Arts (UCO), and elderly students of the «Cátedra Intergeneracional Francisco Santiesteban» (the UCO program for elderly people) enrolled in the course ‘Philosophy’. Table 1 shows the groups involved. The intended teaching strategies were the following: a) Highlighting analogies between philosophy and film audiovisual contents. b) Switching from the traditional way of explaining and studying (through verbal and written communication) to audiovisual discourse. c) Widening the space of teaching: from the traditional venues (university rooms) to the screening room. d) Enriching the context of teaching using the extra-academic possibilities of one of the most important cultural centers of the city (The Film Institute of Andalusia) e) Encouraging reflexive debate, which is essential in philosophy courses. After the screening there is a dialogue between teachers and the general public of The Film Institute of Andalusia, and not only between teachers and students. The debate on the movie continues for several days after the screening in the blog hosted at the official university web (www3.uco.es/moodle/) and the blog http://area-filosofia-moral- uco.blogspot.com.es/ f) Encouraging self-evaluation because students are supposed to link theoretical contents with what they watched, listened and discussed at the screening room 3. Methodology: Cinema in the liberal educational model. We suggest the idea of humanistic or liberal education as a general framework to address the relation between cinema and philosophy. In 1930, the year of L’âge d’or (Buñuel, 1930) and The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel, Sternberg, 1930), the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset published his Mission of the University (Ortega y Gasset 1987, pp. 313-353). Even today, this issue the goal of universities is difficult to define. Our time is quite different from Ortega’s but we believe, like he did, that universities should be committed to a general notion of culture. Ortega claimed that universities should have three main goals. The first two goals are generally acknowledged: first, students are - 222 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 trained for professional careers at university campus; second, university provides skills and knowledge for making research. Besides universities should attain a third goal that is quite important in a liberal educational model. According to Ortega, the real mission of universities is to create, preserve and communicate culture. But culture is not (or not only) tradition. Ortega did not mean the anthropological concept of culture, but a specific notion to bridge the gap between our present and an ever-challenging future. Social life is always complex and can becomes a mess. It could become a real chaos if we do not supplement instincts and immediate desires with some guidelines. All of us need a kind of a map or compass to find our way in the tangle of life. That compass is culture and, through it,individuals and societies strive to organize their experience and appraise what has a real value. Therefore culture is neither an aristocratic privilege nor the general way of life of a community. Ortega defined culture as the living ideas systemof every period of time, meaning a framework of ideas to organize and understand the world, as well as establishing successful value rankings. Organizing, understanding and assessing are universal social needs, because every society must tackle some kind of irrational variety and lack of sense. These problems can be solved whether in an unproductive and passive way or in a fertile one. For this reason an important mission of university education is providing people with an adequate culture, namely a culture at the high of their time in the words of Ortega. There are at least two lessons concerning cinema and liberal education that we can get from Ortega. The first one is about what culture representsin our time. As far as in the 1930s, Ortega pointed out that science furnishes contemporary culture. However that has not always been the case, because mythology and religion provided the bigger part of culture at other times. On the other hand, science is not culture. Let us note that science is a highly specialized knowledge with an obscure jargon, so that university educators should transform scientific information into knowledge for the daily life. The culture of the age is made of scientific ‘living ideas’ for the most part. While this is true, we claim other kind of ideas should be taken into account as well, including film ideas. As Adorno and Horkhimer noticed (1973, p. 171) «the entire world is filtered by the cultural industry», including film industry. It is quite possible that the fear of Lumières’first audiencesis just a legend. However, movies have come to be part of daily life since then. Cinema has become such a heavy influence on our interpretation of the world, that La Ciotat train is not only on the screen any longer. We mean that our ideas of the world are mediated and filtered by the movies, so they are part of the live ideas system of our time. McGinn (2007, p. 18) claims that «the screen functions like a window onto a world beyond, through which the eye naturally and spontaneously passes, and that has been happening for a hundred years». For this reason we claim that movies are part of the culture of our age.Taking aside the role of film in contemporary culture, the second lesson is that film is important to communicate culture at the university, whatever ‘culture’ might be. The notion of culture has become ambiguous, and this vagueness is part of the problem concerning humanistic or liberal education. It is not only a question of words, but a symptom of the structure of our time. The fall of the liberal education did not - 223 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 happen yesterday. Already in the sixties Allan Bloom (1991) pointed out the flaws of university education due to lack of philosophy, literature or history of art. But Bloom was thinking about the great philosophy or the great literature since that he was defending a canon of major works with permanent and universal meaning. Fortunately Martha Nussbaum recently proposed a wider and non-elitist view of liberal education. Using Nussbaum’s approach we can eschew both the culture definition problem and that of canon. Nussbaum distinguishes between liberal education for the elite, for a higher rank whose political mission is to govern, and liberal education for the citizens, for the vast majority of the population. This educational projectis not worked out fornow free people, but to help people to become free. Liberal education is intended to «produce free citizens», as Nussbaum says, because «they can call their minds their own» (Nussbaum 1997, p. 293). To get this we do not exactly need a canon but the capacity to judge on canons, and skills to influence on our culture (whatever a culture might be). In that way liberal education aims at developing three capabilities: a critical way of thinking, a capacity to see and judge beyond the conventions of our born culture, and to use a narrative imagination (Nussbaum, 2010). The educational project To look, think and debate has focused just on the first and the last ones, and we do so in the remaining paper. Narrative imagination is a capacity for empathy, notably for rejoicing and suffering with the joy and sorrow of other human beings. There is a long philosophical tradition dealing with this issue, including classic works like Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1976), and contemporary workslike Nagel (1980), Parfit (1984) or Sen (1993). As Smith noticed, empathy requires imagination because it is not only a capacity for passive feeling. As narrative imagination relates to emotion, it has a cognitive dimension. Through the use ofthat kind of imagination, we are able to adopt the point of view of other people. As Nussbaum holds, this is not a static possibility but something with a wider scope. Bythe narrative imagination we can imagine how other people experiences are, and so we are able tofeel a genuine interest for their needs and longings. That is to say, we are able to interpret the alternative narratives of other lives, notably the diverse worth while ways of life. Everybody can make use ofher narrative imagination; nevertheless it is something we need to foster since it requires not merely intellectual training, but also education of sensitivity and taste. Like literature, cinema can play a major role in narrative imagination and critical thinking. 4. Results and discussion: Spectatorship as hermeneutics in liberal education. 4.1. The case of Saura’s La Caza (The Hunt). Admittedly, film discourse is scarcely praised for its ethical complexity and for its potential as a trigger of narrative imagination (Muller, 2001), but films could be used like case studies «filled with the subtlety and messiness» of real life (Kupfer, 1999, p. 32). As an instance of one of those case studies, we turn now to the use of The Hunt (La caza, Carlos Saura, 1966) in a module for undergraduates called History of Ethical and Political Thought. The Spanish film director Carlos Saura shot The Huntin 1965. The film - 224 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 was awarded with the Silver Bear at Berlin Festival 1966. The Hunt tells the story of three old friends who spend a hunting day near Madrid. The three of them are in their fifties. Enrique, a twenty year old youngster, goes with them. He is the brother-in-law of one of the friends, and it is the first time he hunts. The entire story happens during that day, and through the dialogues we can infer just a few details about the characters previous life. We grasp that José, Paco and Luis were business associates in the past, and that there was another partner who died (we never know how). The film was shot at an arid place, almost a desert, south of Madrid. Location is quite important because Saura wanted to ‘leave’ the characters in an isolated and unpleasant place during a terribly hot and sunny day. Through that narrative device characters are placed outside the society, so they come back to the ‘state of nature’ as the day and their hunting goes on. The kind of hunting is important too: they hunt rabbits, many of them, so they almost make a slaughter. A wise spectator can easily infer that the film is a metaphor of the Spanish Civil War, a forbidden topic in the time of the film. At a more general level, the film conveys a symbol of the violence and nastiness of human relations when they are poisoned by hidden offences. To escape from censorship, Saura created a claustrophobic allegory to represent the still fresh injuries of the Spanish Civil War. Berliner’s jury announced that The Hunt was awarded for the braveness and indignation used in his fashioning of a peculiar situation of his time and society. This is true, but we think The Hunt goes beyond. It makes possible to address an issue related with the Civil War but of a wider scope, namely the relation between memory and political justice. Changes of political regime (like from dictatorship to democracy) involve specific problems of justice. Elster used the expression transitional justice for this issue (Jon Elster, 2004). Part of the problem lies in the attention that we should devote to the victims caused by the former regime, and the role victims should have in the new regime. These are hard practical problems, because it is not always clear who was responsible of unfair behaviors, and because there might be terrible crimes whose cruelty and injustice any new regime cannot repair nor even punish. Still there is a relation between justice and the memory of the victims. Indeed, political killers strive to lessen the importance of their crimes, and for this reason memory and justice go together as oblivion and injustice do. Films provide a way to restore somehow the memory of the victims, particularly by the hermeneutic relation between the film and its audience. Landsberg called ‘prosthetic memories’ to those devices that let people feel alien memories as real ones, for example in films like The Thieving Hand, Blade Runner or Total Recall (Landsberg, 2004). Films themselves are not implanted memories but they can be used to enhance and enrich collective memory since films are a kind of cultural prosthetic memory, a social and cultural device to understand human experience. Because of memory helps to shape social memory, as Landsberg points out, we set up the screening in AFA projection room to arouse a critical look on that politically-shaped, prosthetic memory. In the hope that our student could imagine a more plural and complex collective memory, we proposed The Hunt as a text for conscientious hermeneutics. - 225 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 In the sixties, when Saura made his film, the remembrance of the victims, the Historic Memory, was a forbidden issue. Since recently the Historic Memory is part of the Spanish political debate of nowadays. The topic has two main sides: the Civil War victims and the terrorist group ETA victims. Regarding the first side, Civil War victims and their heirs, many people think the whole issue is just political opportunism because the problem was solved in the political transition during the seventies. But many other people think that Historic Memory is still due. We think The Hunt was useful to pose this debate in a dispassionate and unbiased way, because films can develop the narrative imagination that is necessary to tackle issues like that. The audience at the The Film Institute of Andalusia’s projection room realized immediately that the Civil War was the hidden issue of the film. Actually, it was something Saura might insinuate but not mention. Yet not everybody agreed on the role of the Historic Memory, on the disturbing presence of the victims. They died many years ago and Saura alluded to them very subtly: in the course of their shooting party, the hunters discovered a corpse inside a cave. Then one of the characters sanctions:‘every corpse deserves his grave’. Clearly, Saura was meaning the confinement of memory. That corpse symbolizes the incarceration of the memory of Civil War losers, and how much the winners despise remembrance (and so Luis, one of the winners, cries ‘Burn down that cave!’). Saura’s film lets our students to use their narrative imagination to adopt others points of view in the Spanish biased debate on Historic Memory. 4.2. The case of Erice’s El Sol del membrillo (Dream of Light). Cavell has raised the question whether films could make people morally better. In the previous section we tried to answer that question through the role of film within a contemporary Weltanschauung. In his Film in the University, Cavell answers in the affirmative since some movies are of works of art, and art arouses hermeneutical enquiries (Cavell, 1981). It is this line of thought that we shall pursue in this section. A film could be considered a special kind of text, but it does not become either a work of art or a philosophical reflection. On the other hand, the hermeneutical approach adopted by the reception theory draws a distinction between works of art and texts, because «the work of art is the constitution of the text in the lector mind» (Iser 1987, p. 149). Therefore it is important not just watching a movie but also paying attention to the way we look at it – particularly in an educational context. In fact, the use of the AFA facilities instead of the Faculty’s was planned to get a self-conscious and critical audience, as we said previously. Watching a film in an appropriate projection roomand in an academic contextis like offering a ‘reader pact’ to the student. Sartre said that writing and reading are two sides of the same coin. Writing, said the French philosopher, is an invitation to read, but, taken together, writing and reading constitutes a pacte de générosité or generosity pact (Sartre 1965). In the same way, filmmaking and film watching are linked by this generosity pact: on the one hand the director makes a proposal to the spectator, specifically from his personal view of the world, hisown world; on the other hand, the spectatoris free to accept the director - 226 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 invitation. If he does, he shall look into the screen in order to watch what is happening in the film’s virtual space. We encouraged our students to agree on this generosity pact in a self-conscious and open-minded way. Let us recall this seminal Edgar Morin’s text: Spectators in the ‘dark room’ are passive subjects in their purest form. They can do nothing, they have nothing to give, not even their applauses. They are patient, and agonize. They are suppressed, and suffer. Everything happens very far out of their reach. At the same time, everything occurs in them, in their psychic sensibility, if we can put it this way. When the influences of the shadow and the double merge on a white screen in a dark room and the channels are blocked, the locks of the myth, the dreams, the magic are opened for spectators, who are sunk in their alveolus, an entity closed to all except to the screen, wrapped in the double placenta of an anonymous community and the darkness. (Morin 1956, p. 14) Film theory has been developed a lot since the fifties. Nowadays we know that spectatorship is not a fully passive experience as Morin suggested. Indeed if it were, cinema could hardly be used in a humanist model of education (Zumalde- Arregi, 2011, pp. 326-49). Still Morin is right when interpreted as searching for a suitable educational environment. Accepting the generosity pact, students are exposed to a strong intellectual stimulus for a hundred minutes. For that we need to catch their attention. In an article on learning and teaching innovations, Jesús Salinas makes this suggestion: […]integration of new materials, new learning behaviors and practices, and new beliefs and conceptions according to Fullan and Stiegelbauer (1991) are changes related with the processes of innovation and certain improvements within the methods of teaching and learning. According to Fullan and Stiegelbauer, the use of new materials, the introduction of innovative curricular approaches or the latest technologies are just the tip of the iceberg: the complexity is related not only with the development of new skills encouraged by the teachers and associated to the change, but also with the acquisition of new believes and some conceptions linked to it. (Salinas 2004, 4). We agree that, somehow, the difficulties showed in several innovation projects are related «not only with the development of new skills encouraged by the teachers and associated to the change». Coming back to Salinas’s words, not a minor difficulty has to be place into those ‘conceptions’ linked to the innovation process, because when we try to innovate we have to be convinced of its necessity. And we say ‘its necessity’ since when we enter a process of innovation, at first, the only thing we are convinced is the necessity of a change in perspective, a turn in the design of our modules and the curricular material. Uncertainties and the implicit complexity of any change process frequently lead to some of the mayor difficulties in the development of new conceptions. In other words, since we are at the beginning of a course of action, we hold some doubts about it results and consequences. At any rate, we claim that the role of film as an innovative method to teach philosophy should not be a minor one. Using films is a way to start studying deep philosophical issues. Furthermore, film language and screening analysis are a way to pose quite important philosophical questions to our students, and as a result to improve our courses methodology. - 227 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 If we are to use films as special learning tools in Philosophy, then we need to change the philosophy teachers mentality. Philosophy teachers are accustomed to work with documents -as in textual comments and close readings of philosophical works-, or even with works of art as illustrations of philosophical topics. Compared to those ones, films have a further complexity since they raise a particular relation between meaning and interpreter. Apart from their artistic aspects, films are hard to interpret due to that relation. As other works of art, films have not definitive meaning because they are opportunities for understanding in the way of interpretation. For this reason films are more than just instruments to decipher a given meaning. On the contrary, works of art cross the boundaries of pre-established meanings because the process of comprehension is shaped as a hermeneutical circle between work and interpreter. Since this circle makes possible a permanent renewal of contents and contexts, both philosophy and philosophy teaching are transformed as well. Apart from the mentioned reason, the choice of film material is particularly sensitive, since depending on the artistic nature of the chosen cinematographic works, we can improve and enhance some different impressions on the students,and a diversity of readingsand nuances which are present in our modules’ contents. Thus, both the teacher-student relationship and the relationship between the planned subject matters and the selected films are constantly enriched.We are nor just into a simple circle (Illustration 1) but into circles of much more complexity and richness (Illustration 2). Illustration 2 highlights two circular and interdependent relations: a circular teachinglearning relation teacher (T) - student (S) through the film work (F) and the interplay between the players (teacher and student) and their own ‘anticipations’ (A) – - 234 - Cejudo, R. & Mantas, P. Páginas 219 a 234 Píxel-Bit. Revista de Medios y Educación. Nº 46. Enero 2015. ISSN: 1133-8482. e-ISSN: 2171-7966. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/pixelbit.2015.i46.14 cimiento, 1.4-6. Available at: http:// www.uoc.edu/rusc/dt/esp/salinas1104.pdf> Sartre, J. P. (1965). What is Literature? New York: Harper & Row. Sen, A. (1993). Positional Objectivity. Philosophy and Public Affairs, 22. 26-145. Smith, A. (1976). The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Oxford: Clarendon. Zumalde-Arregi, I. (2011). The filmic emotion. A comparative analysis of film theories. Revista Latina de Comunicación Social, 66, 326-349.doi: 10.4185/RLCS-66- 2011-936-326-349 7. Filmography. Buñuel, L. (1930).L’âged’or. France. Erice, V. (1992). Dream of Light (El sol del membrillo). Spain. Saura, C. (1965).The Hunt (La caza). Spain.von Sternberg, J. (1930).The Blue Angel (Der blaue Engel). Germany. Fecha de recepción: 05-02-2014 Fecha de evaluación: 06-06-2014 Fecha de aceptación: 25-06-2014