Lessons from Teaching with Films

Mateo Sancho Cardiel, Social Sciences, Human Services and Criminal Justice

Like so many faculty, during pandemic times, I was trying to put together the most engaging experience for my students amid tragic circumstances. As a sociology professor, the idea of doing field work and sociological research came out as, if not impossible, definitely insensitive. In a not-very-groundbreaking-at-all idea, I changed the traditional research paper for a set of movies that would become risk-free windows to other realities. But as overused as that resource is, when it came to curating the films that would be the core of the impromptu modality, I realized that I had to be very intentional to avoid the flaws and the prejudices of previous experiences with the paired experience of film and teaching.

Intentionally using some film argot, I had a flashback to when I was a student and most of my professors picked very on-the-nose, literal films to explain the concepts. Cheap biopics, mainstream historical dramas… and how ineffective they were pedagogically. Being myself a movie nerd open to almost any moving image, I was never engaged with those films, and I did not take anything away from them. As a professor 25 years later, I tried hard to fight against the preconceived idea that young people are unable to unpack complicated narratives or reluctant to watch foreign movies in other languages than their own. Consequently, I decided to challenge myself and my students and, thanks to the wonderful streaming platforms that BMCC provides (Kanopy and Swank especially, kudos to BMCC library!) I can proudly say that my students reacted positively to the not-so-obvious movies that I included in the syllabus. Here are some of my choices and my conclusions.

• Unconventional narratives spark more questions: Most of our students are not familiar with cinema d’auteur, but that does not mean they do not like it or that you cannot introduce them to it. Furthermore, if they dislike the movie, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Their surprise or even rejection sparks more engagement and debate. I do think a movie that provides more questions than answers stimulates critical thinking. My students watched Kynodontas (Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009) and some of them were in shock, but that came with a passionate debate about the irrational part of it. They had to readjust their expectations about what a movie is, but they were deeply engaged with the story of these three brothers kidnapped by their own father who deceived them about the real nature of the outside world. And, somehow, this made them curious about what the next movie would be.
• Non-western representation boosts relatability to minority students: International movies that tackle underrepresented populations/realities and use various languages suit the multicultural reality of the classroom and empower them to talk and to keep exploring those filmographies. While we work on decolonizing our curricula, getting out of mainstream Hollywood-English spoken movies can give some students the hardship of reading subtitles but also make the ESL (English as a Second Language) (English as a Second Language) ones a moment of reaffirmation, as they may have captured some nuances lost in translation and they can enrich the classroom with their interpretation of the materials. The French movie La Haine (Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) not only discusses the pros and cons of being revolutionary or conformist, but also makes most of our Muslim-French-speaker students feel represented and relevant. The Mexican film El Ángel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel, 1962), as abstract as it is, not only was very useful to me to explain social stratification among upper classes, but was a good opportunity to tell our Latino students to watch the movie with their parents or grandparents who may identify some telenovela actors in their early auteurish years.
• Quality matters, and good movies are more engaging: Selecting a praised film or a mind-blowing narrative, even if the sociological message is less obvious, has more impact on students. They may not have a very solid background for knowledgeably viewing those movies, but they can identify beauty and quality and they watch them with a non-prejudiced gaze. On top of that, exposing them to older movies has a double benefit, as it gives them perspective on the evolution of the topics those movies address. When they watch a classic Hollywood melodrama like Imitation of Life (in both John M. Stahl’s adaptation from 1934 and the Douglas Sirk version in 1959) they are deeply moved by how the movie encapsules complexities of the racial struggle that are still present in our society.
• Movies are a flexible and student-friendly format: As we’ve being going back to (the new) normal, the format of teaching with film has been also evolving. It remained as part of the program, due to its success, but the movies themselves have been rotating and, most importantly, students have spontaneously suggested titles or connected the concepts organically with other movies or tv shows they watched recently. Thus, for those who are into switching to a more student-curated syllabus, this is an easy way of making them co-creators of the course. After a very thoughtful selection process and a passionate discussion among them, my students chose movies like Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016), Dope (Rick Famuyiwa, 2015) or Mulan (Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, 1998) and the TV shows Shameless to explore social stratification and/or gender and racial discrimination. And they were excited to introduce me to those movies/shows they love and consider sociologically interesting.
• AI-proof: During that Spring 2020 semester, my assignments were straight forward questions about applying sociological theories to specific situations in the movie. But little by little the movies have been analyzed from more creative points of view, in a way that not only gives dynamism to the course, but has been (so far, as the challenge is ever-evolving) immune to the wonders of AI and the temptations of plagiarism. This immunity has been accomplished first, by introducing more personal questions about the relatability of some of the movies. Then, by creating more creative activities, like celebrating a trial based on Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960). Students had to defend or accuse the main characters’ behavior based on the sociological theories about crime and deviance. Both the written assignments and discussion in the classroom were active. And, of course, when it comes to doing the analysis of the movie they chose, they want to prove what their point is by themselves with no artificial additions.

Overall, movies became the leitmotif of the semester. I have six movie assignments per semester, and they have been a bidirectional learning tool, a scaffolding for conversation, and a beautiful way of getting to know my students better. Also, as our favorite movies talk a lot about who we are, it has been a subtle way of exposing myself as a person without getting too personal, and that is something that our students always appreciate and reward with engagement and a better academic performance.

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