Getting Reel: A Social Science Perspective on Film By Michael D. ...

Nate Gage reports a classic experiment by R.W. Taylor that found that students’ retention of factual material dropped precipitously over time, but that the ability to apply principles or interpret new data showed no loss or even some gain. That experiment is consistent with the most recent research on what Leslie Hart has called the “new ‘brain’ concept of learning.” Hart suggests that the most important learning “turns out to be mainly pattern recognition.” He says that “the process of learning can be defined as the extraction of meaningful patterns from confusion.”

My personal experience has been that my best insights are, indeed, finding a meaningful pattern in a movie that I had thought about. The extensive questions collected in this textbook work as a collection of tools and principles that offer a reasonable opportunity of leading to an important insight into a film one is analyzing and evaluating.

Research also has shown that when students formulate their own questions, they are much more likely to remember the answers (than is the case when they are simply given answers). I tell my students that my primary goal is to help them ask increasingly good questions. Questions beget questions. All the questions in this textbook have helped me do my own study of film. This is a variation of the old saw, “give a man a fish, he eats for a day; give him a fishing pole, he eats for life.” This is a first set of questions to help students start their own study of film. The questions are wide ranging, but open ended, not set. I have found it an effective place to start with my own students.

The good news and bad news is that students will not find the same insights. The questions do give them places to start as they “worry about” the issues in a film that have, perhaps, perplexed them. Every week has the same assignment: run the questions. Which questions end up being most helpful for realizing the special qualities of literally any given film? My current film class has undertaken the challenge of studying Kieslowski’s The Decalogue. Our appreciation of the film has grown deeper as we considered the questions on “the family,” and that the families in the films are probably a lot more realistic than most cinematic depictions.