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from a production angle. These students note the artistic choices that were made
and examine what they mean for a filmmakerwith a vision. Meanwhile, Mascuch
regards film as narrative, reasonably arguing (and sounding very much like an
English teacher as he does so) that this is how students primarilyexperience the
movies they see. As narrative,then, film can be studied parallel to a study of short
stories and novels. Mascuch describes assignments that move between the two.
Warren Buckland is interested in how learning takes place and how a film
textbook facilitates or impedes that process. He limits his test case to the first
chapter of James Monaco'sHow to Read a Film, but his questions can be usefully
applied to any cinema textbook or general reading assignment. Bucklandempha-
sizes that if students are to develop the specialized perspective of the expert, the
course readings must begin by acknowledgingtheir particularframework.
Such acknowledgmentis the focal point of Greg M. Smith'scontribution.Smith
shows his respect for his students by taking seriously questions such as "Aren'tyou
reading too much into these films?"In doing so, he provides us with more than
just answers that we can pass on to our students, although teachers may well find
his answers useful. His essay also functions as a conversationwith himself and, as
such, models a process that film professors should undergo regularly.The very
wide-open nature of cinema/TV studies means that we must return time and again
to why we teach what we teach. Students in introductory courses provide chal-
lenges that should compel film instructorsconstantly to redefine the field, keep-
ing it fresh and relevant as they do so.

WhatKindof FilmHistoryDo WeTeach?:The Introductory

Survey Course as a Pedagogical Opportunity
by Frank P. Tomasulo
An introductorysurveycourse in internationalfilm historyis potentiallyladen with
practical and intellectual difficulties: how to cover every nation or movement in
one term, the difficulty of selecting representative canonical and/or noncanonical
(or even anticanonical) film texts, and the choice of a methodology by which to
investigate history.This essay will focus on the latter problem-what kind of his-
torywe teach-in an effort to establish that different professors, textbooks, assign-
ments, and lesson plans all emphasize different approachesto the study of cinema
history.Indeed, the methodological terraincan be divided into five paradigms:(1)
aesthetic/textualhistory, (2) technological history, (3) film industry/economic his-
tory, (4) socioculturalhistory, and (5) historiography.When only one approach is
selected as the primaryparadigm,that initial determination often structures most
subsequent curriculardecisions and thus proffers a one-note viewpoint on a highly
complex subject. As a result, students are limited to seeing the cinema and its
history as a one-dimensional field of inquiry.
After laying out the five various (and varying)methods, this essay proposes a
synthetic sublation as the solution to the historiographicmorass. The essay then
concludes with specific practical proposals of ways to organize such a dialectical

110 CinemaJournal 41, No. 1, Fall 2001

film history course. In this final section, decisions such as the choice of textbook,
additionalreadings,assignmenttopics, andweek-to-week lesson plansare discussed.
(Anyone interested in obtaining a copy of my sample syllabus can contact me at
<cj@cinemastudies.org>.)
I do not hold this History of the Motion Picture survey course up as a model.
For one, my honors version of the course was only offered every other year. For
another, it was offered as an honors seminar, with ten to fifteen elite students
(GPAs of 3.5 and above) at Georgia State University,a large urban public institu-
tion. Almost none of the students in the class were film/video majors, although I
sometimes made some converts. Other instructors at GSU teach the course (for
non-honors students) to 120 to 240 students each term. It is one of the most popu-
lar choices from among several humanities electives that all undergraduatesneed
to take to satisfy core graduationrequirements.
This essay discusses the methodological approachesthat implicitly and explic-
itly structure so many of our curriculardecisions in planning cinema history sur-
vey courses-from textbook selection to the films to be screened to the kinds of
research and writing assignments and quizzes to the focus of classroom discus-
sions. For instance, a film history course can emphasize aesthetic evolution, tech-
nological development, industrial/economicformation, socioculturalsignificance,
or historiography,what Hayden White calls "metahistory."1 Each of these peda-
gogical paradigms carries with it a set of theoretical implications and practical
ramificationsfor the study of film history.
Furthermore, each of these five methodologies can be approached from a
different critical perspective: ideological, feminist, auteurist, semiotic, formalist,
poststructuralist,deconstructionist, cultural studies, or cognitivist;mainstreamor
Third World;canonical or anticanonical.Emphasis can be placed on classical nar-
rative cinema, experimental film, animation, or documentary.
So, how do we choose? Probably most of us structure film history classes on
the basis of our individualscholarlypredilections. If you're a Marxistwho special-
izes in economic analysisof the film industry,you'll probablypick a textbook, per-
haps Tino Balio's The American Film Industry or Robert C. Allen and Douglas
Gomery's Film History: Theory and Practice, that emphasizes that approach. If
you're a formalistsemiotician who sees the history of the medium as the evolution
of an artistic language, you might choose Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin'sA Short
History of the Movies, whose operative principle is that "the primary historical
documents are [the] films themselves." According to Mast, all the rest is "second-
ary material,""backgroundinformation."2David Bordwell, Louis Giannetti, Jack
C. Ellis, Robert Sklar,Thomas Bohn and RichardStromgren,John Fell, Pam Cook,
and many others have authored survey textbooks (although some have not been
updated). If you want to cover all the majornationalcinemas in depth, then David
Cook'sA History of Narrative Film is probably the best single-volume choice.
Similarly,writing assignmentsare often structuredaccordingto the dominant
methodologyof the course. If the emphasisis on economics, studentsmight research
local turn-of-the-centuryzoning codes and other public records to determine the
location of early movie theaters and the demographicnature of the audiences. If

CinemaJournal 41, No. 1, Fall 2001 111

motion picture technology is key, then students would probablystudy landmarkin-
ventions and their effects on film history.If a culturalstudies approachis employed,
then a Foucaultian"archeological"project that studies the broader discursivecon-
text or episteme might be attempted (including research on fan magazines, con-
temporaneous reviews, censorship laws, and such). If the accent is on the cinema
as an art form, then analyticalpapers that point out stylistic techniques would be
appropriate.To be broad-brush, students do either document history or textual
history, either "historyhistory"or film history. Quizzes and exams are probably
more fact- and date-based under one rubricand more essay-like and criticalunder
the other, although Geoffrey Nowell-Smith once suggested that there are "stylistic
facts, as amenable to investigationas facts of any other kind."3Thus, film texts and
film systems have their own history that can be written into the overall context of
their historicaldeterminants.
In my opinion, we disserve students-film majorsand nonmajorsalike-when
we introduce them to the history of cinema through only one predominant
subdisciplinarylens. Difficult as it may be to sublate methodologies, I believe that
because film is simultaneouslyan artform, an economic institution,a culturalprod-
uct, and a technology, only a dialectic surveycourse that shows how all these parts
interact can fully acquaint the beginning student with all (or most) of the recog-
nized approaches to the study of cinema history.This entails choosing a textbook
that covers all the highlights and that illuminates all the major approaches and
theoretical paradigms. It also means supplementing that text with articles, films,
and classroom discussion to cover those areas in which the text is weak. (But be
forewarned, as Gerald Mast once wrote, "Atruly encyclopedic history of the cin-
ema would not be a history at all but an encyclopedia."4)
I used David Cook'sA History of Narrative Film in my surveycourse because
I found it the most comprehensive in its synthesis of aesthetic, technological, in-
dustrial,and socioculturalhistory-and because the coverage of marginalizedna-
tional cinemas in his most recent edition is the most thoroughoutside of specialized
monographson African, Pacific Rim, Nordic, Balkan,and Sri Lankanfilm. In ad-
dition, his close analyses of The Birth of a Nation, Potemkin, and Citizen Kane
cover all aspects of those groundbreaking,albeit classically canonical, texts and
thereby provide beginning students with models for understanding (and writing
about) the aesthetic experience.
I screened avant-gardeand documentary films even though Cook's volume
treats cinema only as "a narrative form concerned with individual and collective
human destiny."5Thus, I show Un Chien Andalou or L'Age d'Or, Meshes of the
Afternoon, Scorpio Rising (that progenitor of music videos), and/or A Movie to
expose students to accessible alternativesto narrativecinema-as well as to numer-
ous issues involving gender, ideology, aesthetics, and audience reception. I also
screened Triumphof the Will, High School, Rosie the Riveter, and/or The Celluloid
Closet to introduce the nonfiction mode-as well as a number of cultural/contex-
tual issues that each film raises. (Incidentally,at GSU, separate classes are offered
in documentary film and African American cinema, but there is no course in ex-
perimental cinema.)

112 Cinema Journal 41, No. 1, Fall 2001

 I also deconstructthe Cook book as a historicaltext (which I would do with any
textbook), pointing out how any historian by necessity selects facts in addition to
collecting them. The historyof cinema, which perhaps exists as an inchoate mass of
virtuallyinfinite data (possibly in Plato'srealm of the Forms), needs to be distin-
guished from a history of the cinema-which orders and shapes some portion of
that data. Furthermore, from a methodological perspective, the same historical
events can be attributedto a variety of generative mechanisms-a "greatman (or
woman),"economic forces, societal pressures, or aesthetic imperatives-depend-
ing on one's outlook.
Most film historians do not state their metahistorical assumptions outright
and so the class tries to ascertain Cook'spartis pris from his implicit claims. Simi-
larly,almost all historians narrativizehistory,and many turn the random events in
the annals of cinema into a teleology. In a proper metahistory,we would distin-
guish narrativefrom descriptive history and interpretive from critical history,not
to posit one method as better but to be accurate in our classification. But how do
we differentiate between what happened and why it happened? Usually,historical
events are overdetermined by several factors anyway.
Studentsin my classwere given a choice of essay assignmentsfrom a wide array
of aesthetic, technological, economic, and socioculturaltopics. They also had the
option to select a subject of their own. For instance, a music majorwrote about the
history of a downtown Atlantamovie house that was refurbished as the university
concert hall. A history majorresearched the local legend that the first commercial
motion picture screening took place in Atlanta at the Cotton States Exposition in
September 1895, three monthsbefore the Lumierebrothers'premiere at the Grand
Cafe in Paris.Others have written analyticalessays on some aspect of film aesthet-
ics, with an emphasis on the historicaldevelopment of style in relation to its indus-
trial,technological,cultural,and nationaldeterminants(a comparisonof socialspace
in Italian neorealist and contemporaryIraniancinema stands out).
During class discussions and through assigned papers, we also attempted to
make links between films of different eras and nations to explore the dynamics
(and Harold Bloomian "anxiety")of cultural influence and intertextuality.We also
forged interdisciplinarylinks between film and the other arts and cultural activi-
ties, not to mention politics and economics. For instance, slides of Russian
Constructivistand German Expressionist paintings might accompany screenings
of films illustrating Soviet montage and Weimar cinema; SalvadorDali paintings
are paired with Un Chien Andalou, and Giorgio DeChirico paintingscan add reso-
nance to a film by Antonioni. Asian woodcuts and African artifactsimbue a sense
of those nationalcinemas as more than isolated culturalphenomena. Shostakovich
symphonies or Prokofiev sonatas can be played in conjunction with Soviet films
and Cuban music with One Way or Another. Movie posters, trade papers, and fan
magazines can be useful adjuncts to demonstrate the commercial and marketing
aspects of the movie business, as well as the cultural studies approach to various
social issues (the depiction of gender in posters, for instance).
Statistics on women in the workforce during the post-World War II era can
be profitablyintegrated into a discussion of women's roles in the film noir period.

Cinema Journal 41, No. 1, Fall 2001 113

Similarly,statistics on the number of labor union strikes in the period leading up
to the year of On the Waterfrontcan be a provocativeway to introduce the society-
cinema nexus-not to mention the HUAC hearings. Care must be taken not to
privilege the American cinema, except to point out the economic power of
Hollywood'shegemony over world markets and how Hollywood style is used in
Moscow, Tokyo, and Bombay.
What is true of film is also true of literature and art. The latter are also aes-
thetic practices, systems of representation, business practices, communication
media, social acts, and technologically based commodities. Yet, for various rea-
sons, novels, poems, plays, and paintings are usually not studied in the integrative
manner proposed here, except in isolated cases. Film history professors are in a
unique position to introduce students not only to the cinema but to how to explore
a more comprehensive synthesis of variousmetamethodologicalapproachesto his-
torical research.

Notes
1. HaydenWhiteassertsthat"therecanbe no 'properhistory'whichis notatthe sametime
[a] 'philosophyof history."' TheHistoricalImaginationin Nine-
White,Metahistory:
teenth-CenturyEurope (Baltimore, JohnsHopkinsUniversityPress,1973),xi.
Md.:
2. GeraldMast,"FilmHistoryandFilmHistories,"QuarterlyReviewof FilmStudies1,
no. 3 (August1976):300, 301.
3. GeoffreyNowell-Smith,"FactsaboutFilm and Factsof Film,"QuarterlyReviewof
FilmStudies1, no. 3 (August1976):273.
4. Mast,"FilmHistoryandFilm Histories,"297.
5. DavidCook,A Historyof NarrativeFilm,3d ed. (NewYork:Norton,1996),xix.

Teachingan IntroductoryCinemaClass to
Production-OrientedStudents
Doreen Bartoni

The Film and Video Department at Columbia College (Chicago), where I teach,
has a very strong production-oriented curriculum.We offer state-of-the-art tech-
nology in courses such as Film Production (16mm and digital post), Nonlinear
Editing (Adobe Premiere and Avid), and Sound Design (Pro-Tools). Many stu-
dents come to our school expecting to become producers, directors, editors, gaf-
fers, sound engineers, or animators. Although our department's main focus is
production, we want our students to be well versed in film history,aesthetics, and
criticism. Hence, our challenge is to create an environment that links the theoreti-
cal with the practical.'This article focuses on how we try to accomplish this in our
introductorycritical studies course, the Aesthetics of Cinema.
The class is designed to introduce the basic principles of and perspectives on
film and video art and to present concepts of "filmlanguage."One of the primary
goals of the course is to provide students with a broad perspective on the concep-
tual tools they need to create or appreciate media. This class is designed to guide

114 Cinema Journal 41, No. 1, Fall 2001