Hollywood film as public pedagogy: education in the crossfire.

The ubiquity and importance of film as a mode of public pedagogy offers educators both an opportunity and a challenge to connect film as a cultural practice to broader public considerations, social relations, and institutional formations, as well as to important social issues. How films derive their meanings and how specific claims are made by different audiences on films must be addressed through neither the narrow lens of film theory nor the somewhat limited lens of reception theory, but through a broader assemblage of cultural texts, discourses, and institutional formations. Meaning should not be sutured into a text, closed off from the myriad contexts in which it is produced, circulated, and renegotiated. Nor should the primacy of signification exist at the expense of engaging material relations of power. On the contrary, films become relevant as public pedagogies to the degree to which they are situated within a broader politics of representation, one that suggests that the struggle over meanings is, in part, defined as a struggle over culture, power, and politics. The problem with Hollywood movies is not that they can be understood in multiple ways, but that some of the meanings they produce have a force that other meanings do not; that is, some meanings gain a certain legitimacy and become the defining terms of reality because of how well they resonate and align under certain conditions with broader discourses, dominant ideologies, and existing material relations of power.

In my own approach to the pedagogy of cultural politics, I emphasize in my classes that I approach films as serious objects of social, political, and cultural analysis; moreover, as part of an attempt to read films politically, I make it clear that I bring a certain set of assumptions, experiences, and ideas to my engagement with films. But at the same time, I try to emphasize that in doing so I am not suggesting that my analyses in any way offer authoritative interpretations that make a claim to either certainty or finality. Not only do I encourage a critique of my own interpretations and analyses of film; I also urge students to develop their own positions as part of a critical engagement with various perspectives, including my own, that develop amid class dialogue and in conjunction with outside readings and reviews. The pedagogical challenge is to make a convincing case that my analyses of films are necessarily partial, incomplete, and open to revision and contestation. Rather than closing down student participation, my own interpretations are meant to be strategic and positional, eschewing the notion that any type of closure is endemic to my perspective on particular films while at the same time using my own position to encourage students to think more critically about their interpretations as they enter into dialogue about films. Critical analysis under such circumstances is not replaced or shut down, but expanded by encouraging students to enter into dialogue with both the films and the interpretations that frame them, thus engaging the meaning, function, and role of film as a pedagogical, moral, and political practice that can only be understood within a range of theoretically constructed practices, relations, and frameworks. Addressing films within a framework that is both defined and problematized signals to students and others the pedagogical value of their taking a position while not standing still.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Films both shape and bear witness to the ethical and political dilemmas that animate the broader social landscape and often raise fundamental questions about how we think about politics and political agency in light of such recognition. Critique as a form of self-analysis and a mode of social criticism is central to any notion of film analysis that takes seriously the project of understanding just how cultural politics matters in the everyday lives of people and what it might mean to make interventions that are both critical and transformative. Films can enable people to think more critically about how art can contribute to constructing public spaces that expand the possibilities for pleasure and political agency, democratic relations, and social justice. As a form of public pedagogy, film provides teachers, students, and others outside of the academy the opportunity to examine Hollywood films critically--in spite of their unquestioned fetishization of entertainment, spectacle, and glamour--in terms of how they not only encourage us to understand (or misunderstand) the wider culture but also influence us to live our lives.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In every class I teach, I use widely accessible films that deal with complex and provocative subject matter, highlighting a number of important social issues, problems, and values that provoke the public imaginary, and in many cases have generated substantial controversy In addressing film as a form of cultural politics and an important mode of public pedagogy, educators can engage the pedagogical and political practice of film in ways that render due account of the complexities of film culture itself. At the same time, such educators need to challenge a voyeuristic reception of films by offering students the theoretical resources necessary to critically engage how dominant practices of representation work to secure individual desires, organize specific forms of identification, and regulate particular modes of understanding, knowledge, and agency Taking films seriously as a vehicle of public pedagogy means examining how their practices and values embody relations of power and ideological assumptions (admittedly in contradictory ways) that both mirror and construct the interests, fears, longings, and anxieties of the periods in which they were produced and viewed. Accordingly, this suggests developing pedagogical practices that promote political engagement, challenge conventional ways of thinking about film as simply entertainment, and use film as a cultural text to bridge the gap between the academic discourse of the classroom and social issues that animate the larger society.

As a young boy watching films in Providence, I believed that movies only provided the diversion of entertainment. I had no idea they also played an active role in shaping my sense of agency, offering me a moral and political education that largely went unnoticed and uncontested. Films have been a great source of joy throughout my life. Now they not only provide pleasure, but also enable me to think more critically about both how power operates within the realm of the cultural and how social relations and identities are forged. All films disseminate ideologies, beckon in sometimes clear and always contradictory ways toward visions of the future, and encourage and stultify diverse ways of being in the world. Most importantly, film constitutes a powerful force for shaping public commitments, hope, popular consciousness, and social agency, and as such invites people into a broader public conversation. As a horizon of "sensory experience and discursive contestation," (18) films engender a public space where knowledge and pleasure intersect--no small matter as public life becomes increasingly controlled and regulated, if not militarized. It is in this promise of education and sensuality that films become other, gesturing toward public spheres in which critical dialogue, pleasure, shared interaction, and public participation flourish. Film registers as both a public dialogue and a set of experiences that offer the opportunity to revitalize those democratic public spheres in which the popular intersects with the pedagogical and the political in ways that suggest that film cannot be dismissed simply as a commodity, but now becomes crucial to expanding democratic relations, ideologies, and identities.

CONCLUSION

Struggles over how we view, represent, and critically engage films about education should be part of a larger public dialogue about how to develop a new vocabulary, a set of theoretical tools, and pedagogical practices for re-visioning civic engagement and re-inscribing the possibilities for democratic public life. We have entered a period in which representations of education bear all of the scars and marks of a damaged democracy. Schools are under siege by a number of anti-democratic forces, and it is clear that those in power at the highest levels of government would like to turn them into either test centers, training programs, or simply low-intensity security blocks to warehouse the poor and other populations considered disposable. What has become evident is that the crisis of schooling has to be understood as part of the crisis of democracy itself, and that many Hollywood and independent films not only provide on occasion a glimpse of that crisis, but can also unleash imaginative possibilities for dialogue, engagement, and thoughtfulness, all the while giving force to the crucial political insight that such films have relevance for how we conceive ourselves as engaged public intellectuals, responsible citizens, and communities of solidarity.

Screen culture is a dynamic mode of cultural production and we cannot predict what Hollywood or independent films will look like in the near future. What is clear is that this ongoing dynamic revolution in film culture will require new pedagogies, create new public spaces demanding new roles for educators and others, and most certainly refuse any fast and fixed understanding of the relationship between film and pedagogy, on the one hand, and the demands of public life, critique, and social responsibility on the other. All we have now are hints of what is to come. (19)