Question for Film Eggheads

riddle me this, dynamic didacts: let’s say you were assigned to teach a class with the unwieldly title “Popular Culture, Civil Society and the Public Sphere” where at least one unit would focus on comedy, another on historical representation and yet another on critique of the media/culture industry. What films (and affiliated texts) might you wish to teach? in 100 words or less, why? I ask purely out of curiousity and not at all because I am preparing a sample syllabus for such a topic and wish to pick your brains….that would be unseemly.

42 thoughts on “Question for Film Eggheads”

  1. Tough assignment–so many direction in which to move. I’ll throw Robert Altman’s Nashville into the mix because it is my default answer in times of stress. I will also mention Lukas Moodysson’s wonderful Swedish film Together. Sidney Lumet’s Network is also on my mind. And since it is one of arnab’s favs, I’ll also resurrect Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Let’s see: Woodstock, Bowling for Columbine (all M. Moore docs), Sullivan’s Travels . . .

  2. Margo Jefferson’s newest book On Michael Jackson may also be quite useful in a class like this. It’s not to be released until January 10 but the early critical reception suggests it may be on topic.

  3. oy, Michael Jackson–I’ll check it out. Nashville is also an excellent suggestion. if I had my way i’d probably load up the class with 70s films but to the students that seems like an archealogy class. I’d like a mix of films I think they should know and films they already have some familiarity with. after all the controversy it’s stirred up here I’m thinking of the Aristocrats as a taboo comedy that drags secrets into the public light, though somewhat fearful it may scare them. And I’m looking for the Three Stooges short where Curly plays Mussolini, Larry Tojo and Moe Hitler–anyone know its name or availability–that seems to me as brilliant a comic critique of totalitarianism as anything. and perfectly cast, too.

  4. Bamboozled. Comedy, power/politics, media, representation. You get a hat trick.

    How’s Your News?–documentary of a group of people with disabilities filming their own news program. Funny, discomforting, effective.

    I second Sullivan’s Travels.

  5. Part of this class concerns “Punk” and the so-called Do-It-Yourself” Aesthetic. Along those lines, I’d like to include films, videos, etc., put together by “non-professionals” for purposes outside of the film marketplace. Any suggestions? Last year, a video diary, edited on a computer, made a big stir at various film festivals-I believe it concerned a child growing up and dealing with various mental illnesses—if you know the title, more about it, and its availability, please let me know.

  6. It’s called Tarnation and it is pretty remarkable. I highly recommend it even if it takes Warholian self-reflexivity and pushes it to the limits. It’s definitely punk with a DIY attitude (albeit a decidedly queer one). And Spike Jonze made a short documentary about teenagers in Texas who want to be on the rodeo circuit. It’s a good short documentary and is available in one of those compiliations of his music videos. Reynolds owns a copy and can probably share more details.

  7. Oh, and Tarnation, which captured the attention of Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell, can be found at most Blockbusters. Netflix also carries it.

  8. i go to all this trouble to add the comment-editing feature and jeff still can’t use it.

    michael, i might still have that group video we made for kincaid’s comedy class in nineteen dickety four. interested?

  9. excellent, Jeff–thank you.

    Arnab–is the video watchable? would it…er, “translate” to a freshmen class? If so, I’m interested, because I’m putting together a unit on comedy as well.

  10. I know for a fact I have that video. Haven’t seen it in years, but a lot of it is still fresh in my mind (Arnab asking “groins? groins?” etc.).

    Doubt that freshman would make much of it–although I’ve got a loving tribute to Jim Henson on the same tape that might go down well.

  11. I don’t remember the groins part? Will it get me sued for sexual harrassment? And I don’t want to hear about Jim Henson and things going down. I’ve looked up Tarnation and it’s perfect for the punk segment, as the “filmic” representative–and I will make the poor kiddies sit through my obsession with The Ramones, who they will probably think of in the same way as contemporaries of Bing Crosby and Rosemary Cloonery. Wait until I get on the topic of kids today, their hair and their Britney Spears and Usher…

  12. Yeah, somehow in Jerry’s live Vegas Performance “Axl Rose” stood for all that’s wrong in popular music–and this several years after Axl had already disappeared from public view. And didn’t he mention a made-up punk band, like The Enemas or The Suppositories? some kind of anal thing. Then he launched into a tribute to Al Jolson. Al Jolson!!

    your help has been excellent–Tarnation will provide remarkable discussion I imagine. Here so far are the primary texts for each “thematic” unit–thoughts, better examples, etc.?

    The Popular Text: How much room for Critique? Robocop
    Challenge to the Mainstream #1: Gambling–California Split
    Challenge to the Mainstream #2: Punk and Do It Yourself–Repo Man and Tarnation
    Comedy as Public Performance: Lenny Bruce’s 1962 Concert; King of Comedy (I’m going to put The Aristocrats and Jesus is Magic on the reserve list, so students may write about them–I may use our debates as fodder for discussion)

    What I’m still missing is something good for the unit I’m calling “News as Storytelling” in which objectivity is shown to depend on all the qualities of “fictional” storytelling–any good suggestions? I hesitate to use Network both because it’s rather crude and perhaps too dated for a good response from freshmen (also too hung up on issues of male menopause in that Paddy Chayefsky way).

  13. michael, why not use control room, the al jazeera doc from last year?

    edit to add: if you have to go for a feature rather than a documentary, how about the sweet smell of success?

  14. News as storytelling:
    –Well, would that Ace in the Hole were out on dvd–but John has a video?

    –Broadcast News is mainstream but still reasonably effective.

    –I second Control Room–or any good selection of Daily Show items, maybe from their Indecision 2004 dvd?

  15. Thanks–I’m unfamiliar with Control Room but I’ll check it out. For the unit we’ll be emphasizing not that news is controlled or manipulated (a good point but not my focus) but rather that news uses the strategies of storytelling, so that the distinction of narrative vs objectivity is not really a valid one–in other words, news stories use characters, imagery, etc. Ace in the Hole might work since it emphasizes the construction of the “human interest” story. I typically tape a news program at random and the students are amazed to see the “narrative arc” it follows both within stories and in the program as a whole, moving from purportedly “most significant” stories to “human interest” stories. From Iraq, let’s say, to the puppy that saved its family from a fire; from Bush’s domestic spying to the squirrel that looks like Abe Lincoln. by the end of things the crazy world is back to a collection of homey little heartwarming episodes.

  16. i think control room will work quite well–not because it illuminates the “strategies of storytelling” thing but because it may work well with that to show how our own expectations of what qualifies as “news” or “propoganda” or “fiction” are overdetermined. plus it has the immediacy factor–it depicts incidents fresh in students’ minds but from a completely different perspective from that they might be familiar with, and from a source many of them will be primed to dismiss as “not a reliable news outfit”.

  17. There was a bit in last week’s NYTimes Magazine on the “Hollywood Style Documentary” that sees March of the Penguins as part of a recent trend in documentary filmmaking: the tendency to “mimic the tried-and-true conventions of Hollywood” in order to provide “narrative satisfaction.” Although brief, the piece might be worth looking at, because it sets up the false idea that “Hollywood” and “documentary” are inherently separate (documentaries “mimic” conventions???. The earliest documentaries (such as Flaherty’s Nanook of the North) used Hollywood conventions even as they positioned themselves as “alternatives” to typical Hollywood fare). Good stuff to argue against.

    I don’t think Control Room would work very well. Why not show a documentary that actually struggles with the clashing tendencies (objectivity vs. storytelling) and find ways of discussing how each reveals the pretentions of the other, rather than show a film that is, itself, a critique? And I don’t think the freshness of the events will aid the students in any significant way.

    Try something stale. Two films come to mind: the Maysles’s Salesman and Morris’s The Thin Blue Line. The former has the feel of observational cinema verite and employs all of its strategies, but the film cannot help but feel the pull of dramatic stroytelling. A great question to ask the students is whether or not the filmmakers are “cheating” by using looping, editing techniques more commonly associated with fictional film, dramatic arcs, etc.

    The latter is more relevant: it’s subject is the human interest story and how to tell (and retell) it. Not only does it raise interesting questions about Randall Adams’s case, it raises even more interesting questions about the importance of storytelling (tell the story again, and again, and again. Tell it again. Once more. And again). Altough narrative is necessary, it is also inadequate. The event itself (the murder of a policeman) exists only in its versions. Is the film a precursor or a forewarning of “America’s Most Wanted”-style “dramatizations” and “reenactments”?

    Something even more fun: Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia?

  18. There is this Canadian television series and this Australian television series (one may be based on the other) that satirizes television news program. I can’t remember their names but I watched them on PBS back in the mid-nineties. Anybody know to what I’m refering?

  19. I have Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival) on DVD. If anyone wants a copy for noncommerical, strictly educational purposes, let me know.

  20. There is this Canadian television series and this Australian television series (one may be based on the other) that satirizes television news program. I can’t remember their names but I watched them on PBS back in the mid-nineties. Anybody know to what I’m refering?

    frontline? i don’t think it would work very well. just kidding–i haven’t seen it, though i should try to find it.

    john, michael seems to be looking for things connected more directly to “news”.

  21. It may seem that I’m taking the concept of “news” broadly. Strictly speaking, both films deal with news, or, at the very least, the “newsworthy.”

    I should remind all that American cinema verite is a bit of a misnomer, since it developed not from cinema, but from broadcast journalism. The Maysles brothers worked for Robert Drew, the Managing Editor of Time-Life Broadcast.

    I’m also thinking that The Thin Blue Line is in the “Frontline”/”Dateline NBC”/”60 Minutes”/”News Hour” style of reporting. The last in that list was, when it was known as the “McNeil/Lehrer News Hour,” considered groundbreaking (and doomed to failure), in that it didn’t show “news” in 30-second bytes, but in longer, “in depth” segments (i.e. “narrative”).

  22. The Canadian show is “The Newsroom.” I haven’t seen it yet, but they have it on Netflix.

    Didn’t Morris do a television show, briefly run, with his “interrotron” and re-enactments? A kind of true-crime thing?

  23. Thin Blue Line would definitely work, as the emphasis there is on dramatizing a real-life story–the students would see how techniques associated with fiction are used to tell a “real” story. because the topic already poses problems for students who are used to regarding news as unabashedly “true” and “objective,” I’d like to find something a bit more straightforwardly about how a news story used fictionalized techniques to have a certain impact. along these lines the two films about the “West Memphis 3” might work–whose names, like most things, elude me now. the book about the case is called Devil’s Knot.

  24. Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, which, strangely, I just mentioned over on the “Obsessive Herzog” thread. I’m not sure these docs will achieve your intent as they don’t really play around with the narrative techniques you’ve mentioned above. I think The Thin Blue Line is the best example mentioned thus (what about studying Jason Blair or someone like him or maybe the film Shattered Glass). I’m still thinking Capote fills this gap well.

  25. Paradise Lost–yes, thanks. Capote would work well but I can’t have them read all of In Cold Blood and the movie Capote doesn’t serve my focus on news. The reading they will do is Joan Didion’s essay on the Central Park Jogger case in the 1980s where she addresses narrative ideas about New York City and how they affect both the construction and reception of the story. Nothing I can think of in film does exactly what Didion does here, but right now the frontrunners are The Thin Blue Line (and crime works particularly well for discussing how news makes stories) and Medium Cool, which has a political edge but may not interest them much. I haven’t seen Medium Cool in a while but I suspect it doesn’t date well. I’m not sure that the problem isn’t me and my own hang up with narrative–really the ideal thing would be to just tape whatever news shows happen to be on that day, rather than using a film as a sort of crutch for this unit. It’s t that I don’t get to use so many different texts and I hate to lose the chance–I’m going to cram everything into them!!

  26. >

    This currently on one of the 3 PBS stations in L.A., and we’ve caught it a few times. It’s quite funny, well acted and well written in a very Curb Your Enthusiasm / The Office kind of way.

    Speaking of good TV, I was very sad to see that John Spencer passed away. I hope they give him a nice big tear jerking send-off on West Wing.

  27. I was also thinking about the way M. Moore manipulated his footage in Farenheit 9/11 so he could construct an artifical narrative arc around the woman in Ohio whose son died in Iraq. As I recall, he met the woman after her son had already died, but he edited the footage so it appeared as if he met her first and then her son died later in the process, providing him with a great ending to his documentary. I remember thinking when I saw the film how perfectly all the plot points had fallen in line. But I did a little digging the next day and was a bit taken aback by his process.

  28. well, you were all terrifically helpful. after much obsessive consideration and page after page of notes for the syllabus, the film choices boil down to this. little do the students know but they will be entering my feverish mind and will have to deal with my own cultural obsessions, from urban guerrillas to punk music to shtick. what the hell will they make of it all?

    #1 Is Popular Culture Good for Democracy? Film: Robocop
    #2 Challenging the Mainstream: Punk and the Do It Yourself Aesthetic: Film: Tarnation
    #3 Cultural Practices of Resistance? #1 Comedy: Scorsese King of Comedy (with nods toward the Aristocrats and Jesus is Magic, thanks to you lot) #2 Addiction/”Vice:” Le Samourai

    #4 News as Storytelling: Guerilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst, a documentary which I have just watched and which will be useful to discuss competing narratives ‘about’ America. I am obsessed with the SLA. and it works well with a Joan Didion essay on Patty Hearst.

    will this course and these films repel these 18 year olds or capture their imaginations?

  29. Michael,

    This thread is long cold and you might not be interested any more, but a propos of your comment:

    I’d like to include films, videos, etc., put together by “non-professionals” for purposes outside of the film marketplace,

    I was put in mind of Ross McElwee’s wonderful “Sherman’s March”. If you don’t know it I can describe it. Interestingly, he went on several years later to make another documentary called “Six O’Clock News” in which he interacts with people who were featured in six-o’clock-news disaster-style stories. I don’t remember much about I except that I liked it, but not as much as “Sherman’s March.” But it sounds like it may speak to your interests concerning narrative techniques in news stories, etc.

  30. I think Ross McElwee would be hurt if you called him a non-professional to his face as he has been making films for a living for over twenty years. Sherman’s March is certainly a wonderful introduction. I’m also quite fond of his latest documentary/cinematic memoir with digressions Bright Leaves.

  31. Simon,

    thanks for the recommendation–that film sounds like it might work with my class extremely well. disaster is a favorite narrative on the news, especially local news–I remember two stories ‘teased’ by the LA news in the following way: “How your house can kill you. Next.” “How getting your nails done can be fatal. Next.”

  32. Jeff,

    Thank you for asking! I only had the chance to use the films Dirty Harry, Rock and Roll High School and Sin City to any great extent, though Mean Girls, Rent and Friday Night Lights emerged as cult favorites among the late teen Northeastern set. I’d say the class was only a partial success–too much of my own dated (to their minds) sense of lively popular culture and not enough of their own. Too much assumption on my part that the topic of “popular culture” would naturally bring out thrilling debates and radical insights (though it did sometimes, but never as much as I had “dreamed”) Ultimately the work they did was impressive–analyses of The Real World worthy of Adorno, intelligent critiques of the drinking culture at Lehigh, analyses of “The Facebook Generation,” among others–but discussions in class suffered from the assumptions I just mentioned. In a revision of the course I would put more at the center texts (like Harry Potter) that they find compelling and use them to introduce the notion of cultural analysis, rather than assuming my dinosaur enthusiasms for 70s film and The Ramones would translate effectively. I’d give myself a B.

  33. in spite of having spent hours discussing facebook and its radical potential with the student activists at the university of miami (who knew they existed???? what a lovely surprise), i have only the foggiest idea of what on earth facebook is. and i cannot find any, ANY reason to actually find out. what does that say about me? the sad thing is, i think i would have been exactly the same in my late teens. i knew of the beatles only because my sister had this tape collection of their songs, and never understood what the big deal was about their whiny music. when i was in high school i listened only to the inti illimani (left-wing chilean band), and when i was in university i didn’t listen to any music at all.

    anyway, sound like the class was rather interesting and stimulating, in spite of the B grade. good job!

  34. Gio–thanks very much. I’m not sure I see the radical potential for Facebook–it seemed mostly a place for kids to post pictures of themselves drunk. As for Tarnation, Jeff, I didn’t use it after all–my whole unit on punk and the do-it-yourself aesthetic was going nowhere so I scrapped the whole thing. perhaps in another class if I ever get the chance to teach again.

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