JCMS Teaching Dossier Vol 5 (2)
Revisiting the Film History Survey
Diana W. Anselmo, Georgia State University
As someone who only entered the US educational system as a graduate student, I have found that conversations about the razing or the revamping of the Film History Survey (FHS) often evidence my own difference: not solely as an immigrant, but as a queer, feminist, and neuro-divergent academic who began their career as a literature scholar, only to grow into a film historian whose scholarship spans from early cinema to digital media. In a culture of hyper-specialized knowledge, multiple research interests can seem unruly, and hard to harness into a sustainable teaching appointment. That is why, as an interdisciplinary teacher-scholar, the FHS became such a welcoming canvas.
As a teacher, my engagement with the FHS spans almost a decade. I have taught variations of the FHS in Comparative Literature and Film & Media departments at US R1 universities, on the East and West Coasts, in the semester and quarter systems. The pedagogical views I share here draw examples from teaching the FHS in both contexts. Though acknowledging the specificities of each experience (in discipline, as in time, location, and student body), my views are truly the sum, not the byproduct, of those idiosyncrasies. These views also result from my unique status as a later-in-life immigrant, who went to a left-leaning public university in Lisbon (FCSH-Nova) at a time of national collapse and conservative backlash. Amidst the politics of austerity imposed by a right-wing government, my four-year institution began encouraging all its undergraduates to take courses in any scientific field—no bounds, no questions asked. In a decade marked by censorship and constriction, knowledge suddenly flowed unbound. It was a heady and empowering feeling for a twenty-year-old accustomed to being constrained by federal and individual policing. I have never ceased wanting to pass that feeling on, to recreate it in other young, curious minds. I am, therefore, writing from a place of difference, as someone who believes diversity and interdisciplinarity can open horizons and propel changes that seem localized (the FHS), but ultimately may help increase student learning and retention.
As an advocate for the strategic potential of survey courses, one of the polemics surrounding the FHS that concerns me the most is the question of access—or as administrators put it, that of prerequisites. “Who should be allowed to take the FHS?” is the question underpinning discussions on curricular restructuration. Film majors only? Any undergraduates after completing a set core sequence? No first-year students? All Humanities students? Anyone matriculated, regardless of major or advancement? The answer varies from institution to institution, but some form of gatekeeping is generally in place. And not without reason: film analysis has a very specific language which, if neglected, can greatly limit the absorption of knowledge, particularly for first-year students.
At Penn State, the University of California–Irvine (UCI), and the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), I found that introductory classes on Film Analysis traditionally come before the FHS in the curriculum, and are conceived as the stepping stones to an accrued pyramid of intellectual sophistication. What I propose here is that we take prerequisites away and integrate film analysis into our teaching of the FHS. This approach seeks to revitalize the FHS from obligatory learning block to a dynamic exploration of film as a political and aesthetic form.
If open to all enrolled undergraduates, the FHS can be a powerful Swiss Army knife. Whether as a single installment or segmented, the FHS is already in the books and usually mandatory for film majors. However, this course can become a major lure for undeclared students if we eliminate the prerequisites while also allowing it to fulfill general education or other core requirements. Its rebranding as a stand-alone course can be seductive in its low-stakes simplicity, not only working as a gateway for prospective majors and a generator of unlikely conversations (think of law students sitting with engineers and Gender Studies majors discussing James Bond), but also helping guarantee enrollment caps that keep the housing department in business.
Further, though the FHS may be a staple in university rosters, its content is formidably pliable to rotating instructors’ specialties. That in itself allows the FHS to become a key conduit for diversity: not only in expertise, but in ethnicities, accents, and identities placed at the front of the classroom. I strongly advocate for the pedagogical power of representation: to see diversity represented across history—as in front of the classroom—inspires self-assurance in students who are diverse, and respect in those who identify as normative. Yet, in my experience, students often shy away from courses whose titles announce their aesthetic, national, or political focus. In its nondescript open-endedness, the FHS can introduce difference and diversity to US undergraduates in an incidental, breathable fashion—it all depends on the instructor designing it from an international and intersectional lens. For example, when teaching Film History III: 1960 to 2010s at UCI in 2011, I took into consideration my largely Asian-American student body and integrated films from directors they likely were familiar with, such as Wong Kar-Wai. However, I showed his less-known work on male homosexuality (Happy Together, 1997), which students—particularly those from conservative backgrounds—had not had an opportunity to discover, let alone discuss in an engaged, safe environment. According to students’ final evaluations, the resulting conversation and film analysis allowed them to gain a better understanding of same-sex intimacy, and of the place of Chinese/Hong Kong cinema in world film history. Though their willingness to understand diversity partially stemmed from being introduced to queerness in an academic context, it mattered that difference was introduced through the work of a director students already respected.
In this vein, it is important to recall that for many first-year students, the FHS will be their first critical encounter with non-Western cultures, feminist theory, and non-normative orientations and mental health statuses. In my experience, the FHS often ignites curiosity among students, particularly those who are expecting the FHS to be a rote nuts-and-bolts course, not a cabinet filled with affecting material. That is why I find it so vital to design the FHS around films, theorists, and directors that encourage discussions on diversity and difference. These need not be limited to international or independent cinemas, as conversations on class, race, gender, queerness, mental health, and power inequalities can be as productively sparked by analyzing Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) in tandem with Catherine Hardwicke’s Twilight (2008). Making the FHS relevant to students by framing filmmaking and reception as a reflection of current affairs, national policy, coming-of-age experiences, and global concerns further reaffirms its pertinence as a mainstay in film curricula.
To cultivate students’ hands-on engagement with film history, I privilege assignments that require primary-source research, including oral histories and online archives. In a World Literature & Film survey class taught at Penn State in 2009, I instructed my sixty-five undergraduates to collect and write oral history reports (1500 words) documenting moviegoing experiences of family members who had come of age before 1980. Students were then required to share their findings through five-minute video presentations posted online. With participants originating from all over the globe, these individual presentations demonstrated that historical film reception transcended Hollywood and the American context, speaking to a variety of young spectators in spite of their nationality, class, gender, race, creed, or sexual orientation. This graded assignment (20%) introduced undergraduates to the methods of reception-based scholarship, helped them valorize the diversity of lived experiences present within the student body, and made the FHS classroom a safe forum for learning about plural cultures and standpoints.
When paired with archival research, the FHS can also prompt students to question the official record and seek for alternative accounts in primary sources. I am a feminist teacher-scholar, so when designing film classes, I think of my choice of class materials—media, readings, assignments—as a dynamic form of civic activism, an extension on my pro-intersectional ethos. That means I deliberately treat the classroom as a space where civic awareness and individual curiosity are actively fostered. To guarantee students’ first contact with film history is cemented into durable knowledge, I seek to make its content resonant and relatable. Archival research not only teaches students that media objects have a cultural voice and can “speak” of human experience, but has also helped me stimulate interest in the first section of the FHS, often dedicated to pre-WWII cinemas. When teaching silent film, for instance, I instruct students to research an early movie star’s biography and deliver a brief in-class presentation. Students have to illustrate their presentations with a primary source (film or print) found at an online archive (e.g. Media History Digital Library, Women Film Pioneers Project, and Early African American Film). In my experience, watching silent cinema within the context of studying the tribulations of a Chinese-American actress striving to succeed in a “white-only” Hollywood (Anna May Wong), or reading original newspaper clippings tracing a matinée idol’s fall into queer suspicion and consequential obscurity (J. W. Kerrigan), persuades students to re-conceptualize pre-sound cinema as a watershed period that throws light on Hollywood’s complex history of gendered, sexual, and racial representation. At Penn State, for instance, one of my undergraduates felt inspired by learning about Josephine Baker and began developing a project about internalized racism and assimilation that turned into her senior thesis.
Equity and creativity are other key values that I seek to engender in my students. I integrate social-media platforms like Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram in my teaching as a means to subtly even out students’ heterogenous abilities. Social-media assignments encourage such equilibrium because, regardless of their varied life circumstances, most college students have developed social-media skills. It is a fact that undergraduates now experience the world around them as users navigating a data-flow spread across multiple media platforms. I believe that effective college-level teaching acknowledges the value of digital literacy and pleasure, embracing a multimodal approach to knowledge-gathering. Thus, when leading high enrollment survey courses, I have students create annotated class journals on Tumblr. Using the site’s built-in system of “tags” and coupling licensed images with original text, each student crafts a digital scrapbook that functions as an easily accessible Rolodex of course information. They are then encouraged to connect with other students enrolled in the class via the social platform, forging a network of knowledge-production and exchange. Comprising 15% of their final grade, this assignment draws on students’ social-media literacy to encourage the individual synthesizing and collaborative digestion of main course topics.
By bringing new media into an “old” course framework, college-level educators are not only capitalizing on (and rewarding) students’ digital literacy and media-making skills, but also alerting them to the circularity of history and the slippery transmediality of knowledge-production and dissemination—central notions in an era marked by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” online news sourcing, and archived presidential tweets. By teaching our undergraduates how to read images as reflections of power, pleasure, and intention, we are teaching them the critical lesson that film and media are a refraction of cultural history, thrumming with its anxieties, its happenings, and its biases, and that as such, it should be interrogated thoughtfully.
In the end, structural multi-functionality renders the FHS surprisingly elastic in breadth and in stakes. In an age presumably defined by dwindling attention-spans and technological acceleration, I understand that the FHS may seem musty and unwieldy, a passé piece of bulky furniture that should be summarily replaced. However, I (admittedly an antiquarian at heart) appreciate its sturdy old bones. Like an heirloom armoire, it is all about how you dress it up and what you store inside it.
Diana W. Anselmo is an Assistant Professor of Film & Media History at Georgia State University. Her work on female fans, social media, and U.S. silent cinema has appeared in Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Screen, Feminist Media Histories, Spectator, and several academic anthologies. Her research has been awarded grants from the Fulbright Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University, and the International Association for Media History, among others. She is currently working on a book examining the personal scrapbooks and suicide letters produced by the first generation of movie fan girls to emerge in the United States. Her parallel project surveys queer dialects, intimacy politics, and fan labor practices developed on Tumblr.
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