Film is for Everyone with Prof. David Thorburn (S1:E5)

Key Takeaways

I swore to myself that if I became a lecturer I would never more my students that that was a worse sin than almost any other a teacher could commit was to be boring today on the podcast the film experience in this episode we'll explore what it takes to reframe historical artifacts things like classic plays books and films for a modern audience and I said to him what did you actually think Shakespeare's environment was he somehow had managed to disconnect the literary power of Shakespeare from the fact that it was done on this incredibly popular stage and it was so sensational and it was so much more like television or the movies than it was like some process of sitting in a in a library in wood-paneled splendor reading words in silence that's not what Shakespeare was [Music] how can we compare media so that students today might better understand what it originally was welcome to chalk radio a podcast about inspired teaching at MIT I'm your host Sarah Hansen from MIT OpenCourseWare my guest today is a longtime professor at MIT I'm David Thorburn I'm a professor of literature and comparative media I've taught the film experience for 39 years at MIT we'll be talking about professor Thor Byrnes class 21 l01 won the film experience and like all of the classes we talked about on this podcast you can check out the film experience on OCW website at ocw.mit.edu professor Thorburn made a splash in the academic world by bringing in media that traditionally hadn't existed there we'll start with how this all came about and what it was like for him to challenge what might be considered unholy in the sacred space of the classroom the story of what made me into a film scholar or a media scholar is at least interesting to me and so it still surprises me I had been teaching at Yale for for seven or eight years and I was offered a chance to do a visitation at the University of California in Santa Barbara and I was trying to introduce the students to the idea of conventions what it means when you begin a story once upon a time and every story begins that way or what it means when you say they lived happily ever after to take the simplest example of what a convention is I was trying to illustrate how in fact we internalize these things and we understand the conventions of the narratives of our own time in our blood without even thinking about it so what I needed to illustrate the principle were shared texts so I began by asking them this was in the 1970s in the early 1970s and I asked the students there these are bright california public school students how many of you have ever seen a John Wayne movie maybe 15% of the students raised their hand then I said well how many of you have read Huckleberry Finn maybe 30% I tried other novels classic novels I tried Shakespeare plays I was at a lot member this is in the early seventies finally I said how many of you have seen all in the family for those in the audience too young to know this all in the family was a television program a classic and transforming one that appeared in 1971 on American television and involved a working-class hero who had never such characters had never appeared on television before was a very important program and of course a hundred percent of the class had seen it and I began to take my examples from television programs and I became either this maybe I worried on me as the term went on and I what I realized was that the literature of our own day the story forms that belong to my students and to the generation of kids I was teaching were visual not literary so I became interested in television as a narrative medium and then I came to realize as I began to think more seriously about the role of television in American like remember by 1970 American television was the dominant form of entertainment and narrative in American life and in fact this initial understanding out of which my whole interest in media developed has shaped I realized now just in talking about this my way of teaching the film experience when I got back to Yale after my years visitation I introduced a course called literature and popular culture in which I explored these ideas in greater depth I read some bestsellers I ended the course by looking at the honeymooners and I remember I was teaching the course in a room at Yale College Kalindi Chittenden Hall in which legendary figures had laid lectured on Shakespeare and one of these legendary professors the man who had actually hired me at Yale Maynard Mack of great a great literary scholar poaches headed and while I was teaching the honeymooners and then later called me into his office and expressed great disappointment over the fact that I was polluting this this environment so then I and when we then had a serious conversation and I said to him what did you what did he actually think Shakespeare's environment was and that was when it struck me how narrow my education had been because he really had not even though he was a great man and agreed he knew the history but he somehow had managed to disconnect the literary power of Shakespeare from the fact that it was done on this incredibly popular stage and it was so sensational and it was so much more like a television or the movies than it was like some process of sitting in a in a library with wood-paneled splendor reading words in silence that's not what Shakespeare was [Music] part of why we wanted to talk about professor Thor Barton's film experience class is because teaching film changes as technology and student life evolve I asked him what this evolution means for the ways in which he presents his materials his answer start from the very beginning when I begin the film experience I asked the students to do something they find increasingly difficult in the old days before the proliferation of smartphones and visual media all over the place and everyone being able to make his own video and so forth and the you know the ubiquity of DVDs before those days I was able to tell the students look we live in an audio-visual age we live in a televisual age I want you to think that stuff away I want you to get think yourself back to an age before people understood that there is such a thing as a film and think about the original meaning of movie is go back to the roots meaning it's a metaphor that is a dead metaphor for us but it actually it's it tells you what the most fundamental aspect of the movies were for the original audiences and why they were so fascinated by the capacity of this new technology to capture motion it seemed like and it was a tremendous new advance in technologies of the representation of human experience because it captured humans in motion it captured the movements of the world the first films as I try to show my students were so preoccupied by this wondrous capacity of the medium that it's almost the only thing they filmed and you can see the evolution of the medium embodied in the way in which after an initial profound fascination with the novelty of movement begins to wear off other properties of the film medium begin to be discovered so I tell my students this principle and I asked them to try to think their way back into the attitude of these first viewers who didn't know about the visual media to play a kind of thought experiment today it's much harder to make them play that experiment because I have to tell them as I do in that first lecture think away your iPad's imagine a world without iPads imagine a world without smartphones imagine a world without instant communication and of course this is much harder for the students to do and of course at one level they are much more capable of processing audio visual information than I am and then my and my parents generation and then and and all of the generations older than their because they've grown up in an environment in which essentially they're surrounded 24/7 by audio visual stimuli by audio visual signals this many people might see this as dangerous perhaps it is but it develops new capacities and the and one can see this in the history of television in which at a certain point there are certain kinds of television programs that become too complex for older generations and only the younger generation that was used to going to the movies and had been watching television and had been watching MTV they were able to understand this very easily professor Thor burns class includes a two-hour lecture with one more hour of discussion in our conversation he talked about the changing popular opinion surrounding lectures namely that their outdated and less effective than other styles of teaching in short he disagrees I'll let him explain I've thought a lot about what it means to lecture to undergraduates I hated bad lectures I thought they were the the pits of higher education and I swore to myself that if I became a lecturer I would never more my students that that was a worse sin than almost any other a teacher could commit was to be boring and I have also felt that in recent years especially although it's always been an undercurrent in education there's been a kind of growing negative feeling about lectures as if they're they're hurting students into a herd experience and it doesn't give them hands-on experience and I think intellectually that's a foolish perspective professors know more than students it's appropriate for students to listen to professors sometimes professors should take the responsibility of taught when they talk to students very seriously and in the in a small classroom they should certainly encourage discussion and interaction and I think at my best I'm not sure I always am at my best I know I'm not but when I am at my best I think I'm doing something that that can't be captured in printed form or couldn't be captured if you gave the students a transcript of what you had done which is that I'm modeling thinking I'm modeling how you make connections it seemed to me as I thought about the most inspiring lectures that I had as an undergraduate there was one professor I had especially he's now dead but he was a wonderfully inspiring man's name was Lawrence Holland his lecturer was on American literature and his strategy in lectures I've tried to copy one thing he always did was he presented an outline it wasn't it was not the text of the lecture but it was three or four central digestible points that organized the lecture in sequence it didn't capture the whole lecture but if you could use that sheet to organize your understanding of the lecture I thought that was a wonderfully helpful I found it wonderfully helpful but the both for review but also because what it showed me was that Professor Holland had planned what he was doing that he was presenting material to me that he had thought long about that he had organized in a serious way but the second great thing about Larry Holland's lectures was that they were not completely written out there were parts of them that were written out very eloquent moments often at the beginning at the end and I've sometimes imitated that but the greatest part of his lectures with his lecture seemed spontaneous even though he was following his lecture it seemed as if he was not he was speaking to me and I tried to capture I've never been as good as he was there was a kind of passion a kind of feeling in what he did and I realized that the another aspect of what he was showing me was how not just intellectually engaged but how passionate engaged how emotionally valuable studying literature could be maybe the most telling feature of this course is its intended outcome for students professor Thorburn isn't trying to create film critics or even experts in his classes his school is much more significant one of the ways of the study of literature the study of film differs from the study of technical things and the reason I teach it is that it belongs to everyone that it's valuable for everyone not everyone needs to know about quantum mechanics but I believe everyone should and if they don't I feel they're impoverished know how to read a good story enjoy plays know how to enjoy the movies so I feel that what I'm giving my students is in some sense something even more valuable to them because it will be something that they'll have with them for their whole lives their whole career one of the things MIT students sometimes often do not realize is that a very large number of them do not end up making their living in the areas in which they majored but all of them end up wanting to go to the movies all of them end up with a capacity to read and enjoy literature and I hope that coming out of my classes they'll do those things with greater joy and with greater intelligence but one thing I've thought about that you know I don't know I I don't I haven't actually said this in in in my courses yet but I I think implicit in my film course is an admiration for a certain kind of achievement an admiration for a certain kind of artist an artist like Jean Renoir the great filmmaker or Monet the great painter whose Cathedral series I often talk about in my teaching and I realized that I shouldn't leave it implicit because I want to set up as a candidate for their admiration an alternative to Wall Street an alternative to entrepreneurial genius I admire John Renoir is genius or Orson Welles is genius or James Joyce's genius universe is more than I admire what entrepreneurs do I respect what entrepreneurs do but I am in awe of what great artists do and of what great doctors do what while we're on the subject we become so preoccupied by what we might call commercial or financial success instead of the kind of lasting success that great art or the practice of medicine or the practice of Nursing or dare I say it the practice of teaching might also embody professor Thorburn shares additional thoughts on teaching the film experience in a series of videos within the instructor insight section of is OCW course you can find them at ocw.mit.edu and while you're there download the teaching resources from his course and find so many other materials shared by faculty across all of the schools at MIT thank you for listening we're so glad that you're tuning into what makes MIT is such an exciting place to learn conversations with people passionate about impacting the world in positive ways we hope you'll open MIT to more people by sharing this podcast and OCW with your own colleagues and friends until next time I'm Sarah Hansen from MIT OpenCourseWare [Music]