Читать книгу Short Films in Language Teaching - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Why work with (short) films in language teaching? A simple answer to that question is: because they exist. We study music; we study painting; we study architecture; we study literature; so we study film. (We might even consider film a form of literature.) In any case, film is an art form with a history spanning well over a hundred years (see Faulstich 2005). Film has developed genuine aesthetic codes, for example cut and montage, and specific genres, for example the Western, the Road Movie, the Thriller (see Hickethier 2007: 201ff.; Kammerer 2009). And film has brought forth renowned auteurs and œuvres – or slightly less pretentious: film makers and works. Think about Sergei Eisenstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, to name but a few. In his voluminous yet highly readable study The Big Screen. The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us, David Thomson (2012) traces more than a century in which films have been shaping our thoughts and feelings, about the world and ourselves. If one purpose of higher education is to open up legitimate cultural objects and processes, there is no way around film – unless we exclude film from an elitist concept of a supposed »high culture«.

To pronounce film a legitimate part of our culture and the cultural heritage (Bildungsgut) is all very well. Yet in these days, education aims not so much at cultural goods (like Shakespeare’s sonnets or Beethoven’s symphonies) but at abilities and skills which enable us to fulfill tasks, to solve problems, to cope with our lives. This focus on competences rather than contents is basically a sound idea. Cluttering up one’s mind with declarative knowledge makes little sense in a world in which knowledge evolves rapidly and becomes obsolete fast. On the other hand, competence-oriented education poses a latent threat to all things lacking immediate usefulness and to all abilities that have no tangible and measurable outcome. Art is such a thing; aesthetic sensitivity is such an ability. So why deal with films?

If the idea of film as a learning object will not suffice, film certainly qualifies as a learning medium, especially in teaching foreign languages and cultures:

 Characters in foreign films speak foreign languages, so film may be used for listening to authentic native speakers.

 Although films are never reflections but always models of reality (see Surkamp 2010: 94), they still convey images of historical or contemporary realities. We watch the melodrama FAR FROM HEAVEN (2002) and get an idea of what 1950s’ suburban culture in the U.S. was like. We watch HOUSE OF CARDS (2013 to present) and get an idea of how contemporary politics and government (probably, and horribly) work in the U.S.1

 Films call for explanation and interpretation and thus provide occasions for speaking, reading, and writing: Is the ending in FAR FROM HEAVEN a happy one? What keeps the couple Frank and Claire in HOUSE OF CARDS together?

But neither FAR FROM HEAVEN nor HOUSE OF CARDS are short films. Short films can be defined as films not exceeding 30 minutes in duration (see Behrendt 2011: 396). Film history began with very short short films. Due to technical limitations early films (most notably by the brothers Lumière) would not even exceed one minute; and they were mainly used as entertainment attractions at vaudevilles and fun fares. Today, shortness is not so much a technical necessity but an artistic choice. And short films are no longer a means of ›lowly‹ mass amusement but rather a domain of ›high-brow‹ expertise. Apart from commercials, music videos, and the like, short films are no part of the popular cultural mainstream. They tend to appear at specialized festivals (e.g. Oberhausener Kurzfilmtage), on quality television, and usually far removed from prime time slots (see Abraham 2013: 7).

If short films occupy cultural margins, why give them center (or any) stage in education?2 For one thing, public education is not merely to replicate cultural practices and aesthetic experiences students know from their everyday lives. Public education is to broaden and to deepen those practices and experiences. School is the place where especially children and young adults from underprivileged educational backgrounds (bildungsfern) may access cultural spheres otherwise beyond their reach: the library, the theater, the short film. A more pragmatic, if not trivial, reason for dealing with short films lies in their brevity. A full-length movie such as FAR FROM HEAVEN and even more so more than 50 episodes of HOUSE OF CARDS are hard to fit into the time frames of everyday teaching. The necessity turns into virtue, though, as precisely for their shortness, short films may be especially rich learning objects. Let us look at a case in point.