A Response to Bergala's Dialectics of Cinema and Schooling

Gibbs, A. (2018) ‘Film education otherwise: A response to Bergala’s dialectics of cinema and schooling’. Film Education Journal, 1 (1): 90–100. DOI https://doi.org/10.18546/FEJ.01.1.08 Film education otherwise: A response to Bergala’s dialectics of cinema and schooling Alexis Gibbs* – University of Winchester, UK Abstract This paper engages with the question of whether education itself goes undervalued in Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis. Bergala identifies schools as being key in providing a space in which all young people should be able to access a cinema education, but in doing so situates the school simply as a means to the end of cinephilia. While this approach does much to nurture film appreciation via educational institutions, this paper argues there is insufficient justification for why schools should engage with film education to this end in a way that distinguishes it from other forms of art provision within current curricula. An alternative approach sees the school not just as a place for teaching film, but as a place in which perceptions of teaching, learning and schooling could also be transformed by the experience of film-viewing and criticism. In re-examining the four parts that Bergala prescribes for the role of schools in fostering programmes of film education, the paper questions whether his approach promotes film-as-art at the expense of school-as-education, and suggests that the two might have more to offer one another in classroom practice than their seeming opposition implies. Keywords: film pedagogy; Bergala; film education; aesthetic education Alain Bergala’s contributions to exploring the place of film in formal education settings through The Cinema Hypothesis (published in English for the first time in 2016) and the Cinémathèque française’s ongoing ‘Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse’ project have arguably reinvigorated the potential for the medium to cultivate in young audiences a passion for cinema. Bergala’s pedagogy aspires to open up opportunities for children not only to ‘read’ and understand cinema, but also to make cinema themselves. A consistent source of tension throughout The Cinema Hypothesis, however, is what seems to be for Bergala a fundamental incompatibility between film-as-art and school-as-education. Bergala employs a dialectical opposition between cinema and school to conceptualize film education as a voyage of individual experience and/in taste, whose educational goal is cinephilia. While this approach may bode well for the possible role of film in our aesthetic self-education, it arguably does so at the expense of any aesthetic dimension to schooling, and the possibility that our understanding of education might also be transformed and enriched by film-viewing. Further, I would argue that The Cinema Hypothesis provides insufficient justification for why schools have an obligation to play host to this goal. In this paper I intend to examine the four parts that Bergala delimits as appropriate for schools to play in facilitating a film education: (1) setting up the possibility for an encounter with films; (2) appointing, initiating and becoming the passeur; (3) learning to go to the movies; and (4) drawing connections between films. I will suggest that the deliberate staging of an opposition between cinema and the school within each of these roles succeeds in advocating the *Email: [email protected] ©Copyright 2018 Gibbs. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Film education otherwise 91 former over the latter, but does not wholly do justice to the ways in which films and schools might be mutually enriching fields of activity and interest. Film and educational autobiography Early on in the articulation of his hypothesis, Bergala (2016: 21) writes that ‘Art is by definition a sower of trouble within the institution.’ In fact, art’s very obligation is to remain ‘a catalyst for anarchy, scandal, disorder’ (ibid.). This Romantic view of art being the force of wild nature opposed to the rules of law, of institution or normativity is one that was well captured in Jean Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933) (a film Bergala has used as a reference point within ‘Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse’), in which the innate joyful anarchism of childhood brings down the strict and artificial regulation of the boarding school environment. Vigo’s vision was born out of personal experience, and to some extent Bergala also reveals the autobiographical character to his own dialectics in the first chapter of The Cinema Hypothesis. He speaks first of his early encounters with cinema, and the sense that he had been ‘saved’ from cultural disinheritance by the twin rewards of cinema and schooling (Bergala, 2016: 12). In his own ‘novelistic narrative’, school saved Bergala from a ‘small-town destiny’ and also gave him independence from his parents. He goes on to describe how ‘cinephilia’ then occupied more of his time while at boarding school than his academic studies. Later in life, thanks to a pedagogical experiment conducted at the Centre of Education and Culture in Yerres, Bergala was able to integrate his passion for cinema back into the formal educational environment by devising a curriculum for the practice of teaching cinema studies. One of the conclusions that Bergala arrives at as a consequence of this personal journey is that it is important to effect a turn away from the decoding of cinema as language, or viewing it with suspicion as a vehicle for ideology, and instead ‘to consider cinema primarily as an art’ (ibid.: 23). The notion of school and cinema both providing ‘access to the adult life and culture that I would later embrace’ shows how these poles relate to one another politically in Bergala’s thought. Access and encounter are the founding principles of The Cinema Hypothesis, in that everyone should have the right to them, irrespective of what they choose to do with them as a result. Bergala’s underlying concern in emphasizing the importance of an early intervention of film in the lives of young people appears to be one of cultural disinheritance – the possibility of being left out. If Bergala says that he was saved by school as much as by cinema (ibid.: 12), it is because he equates the two with the possibility of social and cultural exclusion respectively. Thus far, this is a claim only for access, and has nothing to do with the specific character or value of either film or schools in terms of education, other than that they are sites of participation in a common culture. Neither yet distinguishes itself from other art forms (such as the theatre) or other institutions (such as marriage or the electoral register) in this respect. Bergala concedes that the mass participation of young people in schooling makes it the only logical site for mass access to the film encounter that is his primary goal. But could one not argue that any attempt to institutionalize art risks killing its spirit completely? Bergala is highly sensible to this concern, and at every stage he leans towards a minimum intervention for the sake of maximum exposure. What allows him to overcome such concerns in order to espouse an institutional introduction to cinema is less a reconciliation with schooling than an admission of defeat: if schools did not provide young people with access to great works, no one would. ‘Primary school’, writes Bergala ‘is not made for such work, but at the same time, for the majority Film Education Journal 1 (1) 2018 92 Gibbs of children today, it is the only place where an encounter with art can take place’ (ibid.: 22). Schooling is again pictured as the antithesis of art’s anarchistic imagination, but necessary to the political ideal of equal opportunity that Bergala has in mind. Herein lies a central, problematic tension within Bergala’s dialectics: it is not so much that an opposition between cinema and school should not result in the triumph of cinephilia as a lifelong mode of education; it is more that Bergala remains bound by opposing tendencies towards a Romantic sublime of art as transcendental and intensely individual experience, and education as the architecture of collective egalitarianism and democratic commonality. Towards the end of The Cinema Hypothesis, Bergala reiterates a belief set up by his own experience at the beginning, that ‘solitude and risk-taking are at the heart of the act of creation’ (ibid.: 115). Without wishing to deny this sentiment outright, I want to suggest here that the romance of solitary aesthetic experience is an inclination towards privacy that is fundamentally at odds with the public orientation of education, not least as articulated in Bergala’s own advocacy of equality of opportunity. To explore this unresolved tension in The Cinema Hypothesis further, I will now look at the ‘four parts’ to the school’s role in effecting a film education outlined by Bergala in the text. These four parts are only sketched in rough detail within The Cinema Hypothesis, and therefore some of the criticisms raised here are ones that likely would not have required as much attention had the parts been elaborated further. Setting up the possibility for an encounter with films At numerous stages of The Cinema Hypothesis, Bergala expresses his own hesitations and reservations over the matter of whether film – as art, and as an experience of art – can be taught. ‘We can require learning, but we cannot require being moved’ (Bergala, 2016: 37), he observes when introducing the complex relationships we have with cinema as a highly personal experience.

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