Hollywood film as public pedagogy: education in the crossfire.

Of course, films cannot be engaged simply at the level of symbolic culture or through an analysis of their pedagogical character, they are also part of a mammoth culture industry largely dominated by a handful of corporations that exercise enormous power over what can and cannot be seen and heard in the public sphere. Like the schools they often portray, Hollywood films cannot escape the larger set of structuring discourses, ordering principles, instrumental rationalities, and material relations of power that legitimate the multiple narratives that shape our everyday lives. Of greatest importance is the potentially transformative pedagogy that schools and the film industry have in common: they provide the conditions for educating both young and old about the histories they inherit, the present in which they live, and the future on offer to them. Both educate about and intersect with daily life, and should be taken seriously as sites of struggle. They not only provide dominant narratives about education, schools, student life, and what it means to be a good or bad teacher, but give meaning to the experiences of young people in contemporary culture. What they offer is far from innocent, nor is it always on the side of justice and democracy. Yet both are crucial public spheres where it is possible to glimpse the promise of a better future and a substantive democracy. It is in the struggle over such spaces of radical imagination that emergent representations, visions, and pedagogical practices can combine hope and social responsibility as part of a broader emancipatory discourse. As a form of public pedagogy, films gain their most salient meanings and significance, because in their shimmering images and larger-than-life representations of struggle resides both an opening for critical engagement and an affirmation of civic courage. Here the possibility exists that everyone might become more acutely aware of the implications of Robert Hass's insight that the job of education is imminently moral and political, because its purpose is "to refresh the idea of justice going dead in us all the time." (20)

HENRY A. GIROUX holds the Global TV Network Chair in English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada.

NOTES 1. Jacques Ranciere cited in Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, "Art of the Possible: An Interview with Jacques Ranciere," Artform (March 2007), 260. 2. See Robert C. Bulman, Hollywood Goes to High School (New York Worth, 2005). See also Henry A. Giroux, The Giroux Reader (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006) and Henry A. Giroux, The Abandoned Generation (New York: Palgrave, 2004). 3. Ranciere cited in Carnevale and Kelsey, "Art of the Possible," 261. 4. Ranciere takes up this issue in Carnevale and Kelsey, 265. 5. See Henry A. Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism (Boulder: Paradigm, 2006) and Mark Poster, Information Please: Culture and Politics in the Age of Digital Machines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 6. Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (London: Verso, 2007). See also Roger Silverstone, Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis (London: Polity, 2006). 7. This biographical note draws from Henry A. Giroux, Breaking Into the Movies (Malden: Blackwell, 2002). 8. Lawrence Grossberg, Bringing It All Back Home: Essays on Cultural Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 143. 9. For further reading on film culture see Norman K. Denzin, The Cinematic Society (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995); Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Trinh T. Mnh-ha, Cinema Interval (New York: Routledge, 1999); Meenaskshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner, eds., Media and Cultural Studies: Key Works (Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell, 2001); Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (New York Oxford University Press, 2000); Joanne Hollows, Peter Hutchings and Mark Jancovich, eds., The Film Studies Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, and Richard Maxwell, eds., Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001); Andre Barzin, What is Cinema, Volunes 1 & 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Tony Kashini, Deconstructing the Mystique: An Introduction to Film Culture (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2005); Cynthia Weber, Imagining America at War (New York: Routledge, 2006); Sut Jhally, The Spectacle of Accumulation (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Sharon Willis, High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Donaldo Macedo and Shirley R. Steinberg, Media Literacy (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 10. Herman Gray, Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for "Blackness" (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 6. See also Herman S. Gray Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 11. Homi Bhabha, "Staging the Politics of Difference," in Gary Olson and Lynn Worsham, eds., The Politics of Possibility: Encountering the Radical Imagination (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007), 151. 12. Susan Bordo, Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. (Stanford: University of California Press, 1997), 2. 13. Gray, Watching Race, 132. 14. Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 14. 15. James Snead, White Screens/Black Images (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131. 16. Robert Hunter, "Editorial," Art and Culture Taskforce, October 27, 2007: www.acttaskforce.org/indyfilm.html. 17. See Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York: The New Press, 2000). 18. Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Schindler's List is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 22 (Winter 1996), 312. 19. I want to thank David Clark for his brilliant reading of my text and the constructive criticism he provided, including the idea in this paragraph. 20. Robert Hass cited in Sarah Pollock, "Robert Hass," Mother Jones (March/April 1992), 21-22.