This paper discusses the relationship between cinema and education based on opportunities for the fruition, analysis and production of video in educational contexts. To do so, it locates different approaches to cinema in schools and analyzes the importance of principles and proposals for working with audiovisual materials in the education of teachers and students. Based on the media-education perspective and on multiliteracies, the paper addresses aspects of an experience with audiovisual production in the initial education of teachers, with students in at a teacher's college, based on the Lumière Minute proposal and the Situated Learning Episodes methodology. Finally, the paper indicates some challenges and possibilities for working with video in education.
TopApproaches To Film In Schools: Fruition, Analysis, And Production
The diversity of proposals for working with cinema and audiovisual materials in schools can be analyzed from different perspectives, including those that are presented in this book. This chapter is based on the media-education perspective.
Media-education implies the adoption of a critical and creative posture of communicative, expressive and relational capacities for ethically and aesthetically evaluating what is being offered by the media, to significantly interact with its productions and to produce media as well. Its critical, methodological and expressive perspectives question school mediations, given that education for the medias is not limited to the different media and their instrumental aspects, because media is culture and is located in an arena of production of meanings beyond their instrumental character.
In the relationship between cinema and media-education, the ethical and aesthetic dimensions are related to a discussion about what touches us in a film, in the sense of Barthes’ (1984) idea of punctum, which refers to an aesthetic experience activated during the fruition. Without proposing rules or an analytical model Sorlin (1997) defined this experience based on a mental state, an attitude of opening aimed at the force of expression in the construction of an aesthetic route that he affirms is formed by intuition (the initial moment of perception), by judgement/taste (perception based on a given socio-cultural context linked to an idea of beauty) and by opinion (an interpretive moment, the posteriori evaluation).
An aesthetic experience is triggered in the encounter with the film, without being limited to it, based on different forms of appropriation: of ludic-evasive fruition as well as an educational appreciation that goes beyond “spontaneous” fruition and involves an intentionality concerning the different dimensions of knowledge (narration, critical analysis, interpretation and production).
In the book L’hipothèse Cinemà, Bergalla (2002) discusses how schools can be places for encounters with “art cinema,” because films considered to be works of art allow students to confront a form of alterity to which they would not have access in another space. The author begins with the hypothesis that schools should work with art films, and distinguishes the experience of teaching and initiation in relation to cinema. For Bergalla, the act of teaching implies transmitting a knowledge that exists and in the field of art there is no previously existing understanding or knowledge, which he affirms presents the process of initiation. Initiations begin first with the experience of the person who watches the film, and in this case, the teacher and her experience with the film, because it is more a question of attitude and posture than of knowledge.