The Power and Importance of Film

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Awakening CIE Knowledge Production: A Conversation to Revitalize the Field

Proposal

Film has been traditionally viewed as a kind of text, similar in function if not form to the written word. Historically, we see that the circulation of similar ideas, shared by both mediums, can be mutually reinforcing. This is not surprising given the influence of the Global North with regard to the ways in which knowledge dissemination is distributed and audiences are targeted. Adherence to modernist sensibility is evident in even more fundamental ways where the written word has been used to memorialize and codify ideas, as the awareness stimulated by text reifies the reader and author’s autonomy and independence from the external world. The privileging of the visual image in film to the detriment of the other senses, was similarly viewed as an effort in the cinematic realm to narrowly dictate what faculties should be deemed essential in expressing our humanity. More recently though, it has been argued that film offers more than an affirmation of the visual. The genius of film is in its appeal to all of our senses, especially when it triggers haptic responses (Marks, 2000). It has been further argued that the knowledge generated through experiencing film represents an authentic form of embodiment, whereby the viewer actively participates in interpreting and elucidating meaning from moving images (Morgan, 2021). The medium offers exciting possibilities for re-imagining what time, space, and movement entail (Deleuze a, 1986; Deleuze b, 1989). As a result, unlike the conventional educational and social science texts with which we are traditionally familiar, a more authentic representation of the complexities of human experience is possible through the use of film.

In this presentation, I argue that film can both reinforce and clarify ideas that commonly circulate within academic texts and can offer divergent ways of understanding what such ideas portend. They are able to do so because of their embrace of affect and their acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty as important characteristics of social experience and more broadly, planetary life. In offering examples from my book, Education, Affect, and Film (2024), I compare how conventional scholarship tackles the relationships between education, social class, and colonialism with examples from internationally acclaimed films.

Author

• Irving Epstein, Illinois Wesleyan University