Abstract
The final part to the book takes up the discussion of film’s conceptual aesthetics, and situates it within the higher education classroom, asking how film can contribute to a student’s better understanding and appreciation of education, as well as the value of expressing one’s position in relation to it. Context, community, and criticism are explored here as key considerations in film pedagogy.
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Notes
- 1.
Described in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome as the process by which “Each self is drawn on a journey of ascent to a further state of that self, where the higher is determined not by natural talent but by seeking to know what you are made of and cultivating the thing you are meant to do” (CHU, 7).
- 2.
Alain Badiou also distinguishes between possible ways of responding to, or talking about, film. The first is to offer value judgments, or ‘indistinct judgments’, about a film, but simply saying whether one likes it in terms of actors, scenes, shots, or plot. He contrasts this with the ‘diacritical judgment’, an attempt to overcome the superficiality of the indistinct by ascending to the level of style, particularly that which associated with a film’s author. Style trumps techniques by virtue of transcending the mere pleasure of cinema that the latter affords, but ultimately, according to Badiou, is no better in its elevation of the author’s status than the indistinct judgments fixation with actors. Badiou proposes a third way of talking, that begins by being indifferent to judgment, at least in the sense that, if a film is being talked about, it is tacitly assumed that it is thought to have some worth. He suggests instead that we think of an ‘axiomatic judgment’, that looks to explore “what are the effects for thought of such and such a film” (Badiou, 2013, p. 96). The other dimension to this third way is that the film needs to be considered in terms of the Idea it conveys within that particular film, especially the ways in which the ‘native impurity’ of the idea appears. Where painting is celebrated on the grounds of its being able to concentrate and refine an idea to its most integral form, cinema, for Badiou, commands its viewer to access an idea “through the force of its loss” (ibid.).
- 3.
Malle’s 1960 film, Zazie Dans le Metro, might be seen as more the successor to Vigo’s Zero for Conduct , not least in the closing scenes in which the entire set collapses around the cast as they engage in a food fight. The scene emulates vision of childhood bringing down the artifices of the adult world. Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film if… is also thought to pay homage to Vigo’s anarchism in this respect.
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Gibbs, A. (2019). A Postscript on Film Pedagogy: Context, Community, and Criticism. In: Seeing Education on Film. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_7
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