International Negotiations
While I was undergoing my shock of recognition about Lynch, I took a trip around the world with Jayne Fargnoli, at Wiley-Blackwell. I was delighted to be working with her again. (I have been extremely blessed with support from the best and brightest in the publishing community.) That is to say, that with her support and counsel I designed World on Film, a textbook to introduce lower division college students to international film. My specific goal was to make available to college faculty a sorely needed address to bright but parochial students. My teaching experience had shown me that there were already plenty of usable textbooks for teaching the complexities of the best of American cinema, but I could find no books that would lend themselves to dealing with student subtitle phobia and student resistance to the much slower narrative pacing of so many international classics. How to open the door to Jean Renoir’s surgical autopsy on the body of 1930s French class structure in Rules of the Game? Or to the fascinating but unfamiliar (to American students) sex god of poetic realism Jean Gabin? Or even the high action cinema of Akira Kurosawa and Wong Kar-wai? I longed to open doors for unprepared students to the masterful battlefield choreography of Ran and enable them to enjoy it while inhaling the translated dialogue at the bottom of the screen. I hoped to help them take in Kurasawa’s narrative themes, by making familiar to them the unfamiliar values that ignited the flames of war in medieval Japan. I planned to help them make the effort to suss out the meaning of the odd translations of Wong Kar-wai’s Hong Kong conversations set within a context of speeding images and incomprehensible situations. There were too many students who never guessed that there were enormous pleasures from which they were blocked.
But I did not long to write a textbook. Textbooks are fabled throughout the academy as gruntwork. Let’s see, I thought, weighing the pros and cons: drudgery, necessity, drudgery, necessity. Necessity turned out to be the mother of excitement. Working on World on Film was as much an adventure as working with Lynch’s films, albeit an adventure of a different kind. I was not headed where no one had ever gone before, but every decision I had to make brought new insight. Which film cultures? (A balancing act.) Which films? (Oh, no, I’ve got to talk about that one. And that one. And…..that makes too many.) Post World War II globalization? (When does national culture lose traction?) What’s available? (Without buying a two thousand dollar return air fare ticket.) What’s not? (Or will it be in a couple of months?) What historical and cultural fallacies have been perpetuated by cut and paste textbook composition? (That is, textbooks that merely assemble incorrect information from previous textbooks and regroup it.) How shall I structure World on Film to accommodate the best possible pedagogical approach?
Part of the fun was excavating deeper and deeper into European film cultures I already knew well. (And spending time with Jean Gabin and Marcello Mastroianni.) Part of the fun was stunning my Indian friends, who had little regard for any Indian filmmaker but Satyajit Ray. They never dreamed of the depth and breadth of their own cinematic history. (Or how interesting Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan’s contribution to Indian cinema really is.) Part of the fun was renewing an old acquaintance with Japan whose cinema is so appallingly underrepresented in libraries and video catalogues, and forging new bonds with China, which is currently permitting independent filmmakers like Jia Zhangke to produce independent film, and submit it to European and American film festivals. (And interviewing Jia at the New York Film Festival.) NOTE: If these names are unfamiliar to you, you might consider reading World on Film. Part of the fun was discovering that Netflix, the much maligned ‘red envelope gang,’ has a better catalogue of old Indian and Japanese films than most university libraries. However, it was discouraging to find the paucity of women filmmakers available, and gut wrenching to negotiate between my interest in exposing my readers to the filmmakers who had most crucially influenced national traditions and cinema in the global village on the one hand, and my desire to expose readers to the contributions made by women. There were no instances in which both categories completely overlapped.
But the greatest fun I had was developing my image-based pedagogy. For a long time, I had been concerned with the poor use of film frames in too many film studies textbooks. The chapters were all logocentric. Images dangled off the expository paragraphs like obligatory decoration. Since logocentrism is the crucial problem with the way our students look at movies, and since this problem is compounded in the study of international film because in films made outside America there tends to be a parity between film and image, not a subordination of picture to prose, the very composition of most film textbooks seemed to be sending the wrong message. Trying to anchor my chapters in images as the impetus to reading the prose showed me why others had done it the other way. It’s a challenge. If you read World on Film, you will be the judge of whether my ‘What are you looking at?’ feature that opens every chapter succeeds in changing the game.