Hollywood film as public pedagogy: education in the crossfire.

Hollywood film engendered a profound sense of danger and otherness for us. Gaining access to the movies meant we had to engage in illicit behavior, risking criminal charges or a beating by an irate theater owner. But the fear of getting caught was outweighed by the lure of adventure and the joy we associated with the silver screen. Once we got inside the movie theater we were transported into an event. We were able to participate in a public act of viewing that was generally restricted for kids in our neighborhood because films were too expensive for the penniless youth and quite removed from the daily experiences of kids who were generally considered too restless and uncultured to sit in a movie theater without talking, laughing, and disturbing a public space meant for family entertainment. Silence in the movie theaters was imposed on us by the fear of being noticed. Yet the thrill of adventure and the expectation of what was about to unfold before us was well worth the self-imposed discipline, the contained silence, and the focus that such viewing demanded. Back on the street, the movies enabled a space of dialogue, criticism, and solidarity for us. Movies were a source of shared joy, entertainment, escape, and though we were too young to realize it at the time, a source of vital knowledge unlike what we were privy to in school--that connected pleasure to meaning. Sometimes we saw as many as three double features in one day. When we left the movie theater, the cinematography and narratives that we had viewed filled our conversations and our dreams. We argued, sometimes actually fought, over the films' meanings and relevance to our lives. Hollywood films took us out of the limited confines of our Smith Hill neighborhood, offered narratives that rubbed against the often rigid identities we inhabited, and provided objects of desire that left us dreaming about possibilities far removed from the burdens and problems that dominated our working-class neighborhood. Films pointed to a terrain of deeply sought freedom, located in an inner world of dreams and reinforced by the private experiences of pleasure and joy, enabled by the twin seduction of escape and entertainment.

We had no language to understand how Hollywood films erased many things we confronted in our daily lives or how they gave us a glimpse of a more politically nuanced view of the world, occasionally even reconfiguring the boundaries between the private and public--albeit by often reducing public issues to problems of personal character and self-responsibility Yet the films we viewed with such awe had an unrealized potential to carry us beyond the privatized confines of our daily existence. It was only when I started working as a high school teacher that I began to address films seriously as a pedagogical and political tool with relevance in the class that far exceeded their traditional use as a welcomed respite for teachers and entertainment for the students.

The choices I made about what films to show in my classes were determined by the overtly educational content that each offered students in terms of alternative views of the world. Films both challenged print culture as the only viable source of knowledge and were attractive cultural texts for students because they were not entirely contaminated by the logic of formal schooling. In opposition to the heavy reliance on the lock-step, traditional curricular materials, I would rent documentaries from a local Quaker group in order to present students with a critical perspective on the Vietnam War, poverty, youth-oriented issues, the Cold War, and a host of other social concerns. My students and I discussed the films we viewed in terms of the ideologies they seemed to privilege and how they worked to move mass audiences and break the continuity of common sense. Films now became crucial counter-texts for me, useful as a resource to offset dominant textbook ideologies and invaluable as a pedagogical tool to challenge officially sanctioned knowledge and modes of learning.

At that point in my teaching experience, I still had not figured out that films played a powerful role pedagogically in the wider culture as well. Nor did I ever quite figure out how my students felt about these films. Far removed from the glamour of Hollywood, these documentary narratives were often heavy-handed ideologically, displaying little investment in irony, humor, or self-critique. Certainly my own reception of them was marked by ambivalence. In this way, films became important as a way of clarifying my role as a critical teacher and of broadening my understanding of the transformative possibilities of pedagogy; but there was a price to pay for such an approach.

Both the traditional notion that films were forms of light entertainment and the more radical argument that dismissed films as one-dimensional commodities seemed crass to me. Films no longer seemed to offer me pleasure as my relationship to them was now largely conceived in narrow, instrumental terms. As a subversive resource to enhance my teaching, I focused on films in ways that seemed to ignore how they functioned as sites of affective investment, mobilizing a range of desires while invoking the incidental, visceral, and transitory. I had a limited understanding of how film could not only offer alternative modes of knowing, but also alter the flow of experience, emotion, and possibility. Films unconsciously became formalized objects of detached academic analysis for me. I attempted to organize films around important critical themes, but in doing so I did not link films to broader aspects of public concern--connecting them to audiences, identities, and events within the concrete relations of power that characterized everyday life. I used a limited notion of theory as a way of legitimating film as a social text, rather than as a site where different possibilities of uses and effects intersect, subjectivities are shaped, and dominant narratives rewritten. I wanted students to read films critically, but I displayed little concern with how such films were implicated in the production of my students' own ideologies, desires, and sense of agency. Film in this approach was merely a resource to appropriate oppositional ideas and information. By being overly concerned with how films might be used as alternative educational texts, I also failed to understand and to impart to my students the powerful role played by film within a visual culture that increasingly employed new forms of pedagogy, signaled different forms of literacy, and exemplified a mode of politics in which "culture [had become] a crucial site and weapon of power in the modern world." (8) Nor did I understand the necessity to educate students not only as cultural critics but also as cultural producers.

Today, even a casual observer can see the potency and power of the movie industry and its influence upon the popular imagination and public consciousness. (9) The power of its reach and extent of its commodification can be seen as film tie-ins are used to sell t-shirts, cups, posters, bumper stickers, and a variety of kitsch. But at the same time, the growing popularity of film as a compelling mode of communication and form of public pedagogy--a visual technology that functions as a powerful teaching machine--suggests how important it has become as a site of cultural politics. All one has to call to mind are Disney's ongoing film representations of American youth as racially bleached, politically homogenized, utterly scrubbed symbols of middle-class innocence in films such as High School Musical I and II (2006 and 2007, by Kenny Ortega). Herman Gray captures this sentiment in arguing that "culture and the struggles over representation that take place there are not just substitutes for some 'real' politics that they inevitably replace or at best delay; they simply represent a different, but no less important, site in the contemporary technological and postindustrial society where political struggles take place." (10) But struggles over meaning must be matched by a cultural politics and pedagogy that encourage the production of meaning as well. That is, educators and other cultural workers need to provide the pedagogical conditions for students to use media technology to produce their own films and other cultural products, thereby fostering the skills and knowledge necessary for students to create counter-public spheres capable of producing alternative and multiple accounts of the world in which they live.