Many media students know Titanic and Batman inside out, but have never heard of Truffaut, Eisenstein or Bergman. How will they learn to tell industry from art?

There can be few people who would disagree that literature, drama and music should be taught in our schools.

But what about film? Why does film history and film theory have very little place in the school syllabus? Is it because most educationalists see cinema primarily as a pleasant but vacuous diversion, only judging it by its populist side, and not as an art form on a par with the other arts? Given the validity of Paul Rotha’s description of cinema as being “the great unresolved equation between art and industry”, and that film, in comparison with the other arts, is unique in its relation to a mass audience, it is perhaps even more important to educate children to be able to distinguish between art and industry. Multiplex fodder has as much in common with the classics of world cinema as Mills and Boon romances have with Jane Austen, Hallmark card doggerel with WB Yeats, or bad rap with Mozart. But those few, mostly non-English language films that get a showing are shunted into a siding and given the worthy label of “art cinema”.

As long ago as 1911, the Italian Ricciotto Canudo, considered the first film theoretician, saw cinema as “plastic art in motion”, arguing that film synthesised the spatial arts (architecture, sculpture and painting) with the temporal arts (music and dance). He later named it the seventh art, the other six being architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature, and theatre (which included dance).

Having delivered lectures on the “seventh art” in the UK and US at schools where they actually have “media studies” courses, I was astonished, at first, that none of the kids had ever heard of Sergei Eisenstein, Jean Renoir or Ingmar Bergman. Is it possible that children taking music would know nothing of Bach or Beethoven, or those taking literature would be unfamiliar with Shakespeare or Dickens?

Subsequently, I discovered that most high-school courses in the US concentrate on American cinema, with a few schools even giving the children what they already know: Titanic, Batman, Indiana Jones, etc. I introduced students aged 15 and 16 to The Battleship Potemkin, Au Hasard Balthazar, The Apu Trilogy, The 400 Blows, Au Revoir Les Enfants, The Colour of Pomegranates, and so on – most of which were enthusiastically and intelligently received. Schoolchildren should be taught how to “read” films just as they are taught to read literature. They should learn how films systemise time and space and communicate ideas and emotions; how the patterns and structures of film genres allow us to engage specific historical and social rituals; how different conceptions of film history can direct and shape our responses; how film theory is a pragmatic extension and intensification of our interactions with a film, formal, technical and empirical. They should learn how to explore films from different angles and cultural perspectives.

If, at the end of such courses, a small percentage of the students arrive at the conclusion that Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped is better than Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption (always trotted out by American college kids as a great film), or Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à Part better than Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, then something would have been achieved, and the level of general discourse raised. 

The oft-heard mantra that film should be considered merely as entertainment and not as art, and that any analysis of it reduces the enjoyment, patronises young people and limits their horizons. Enjoyment and knowledge are not mutually exclusive. In fact, knowledge of any art can only enrich one’s experience and increase one’s enjoyment.

Ronald Bergan
www.guardian.co.uk