There are a lot of non-Film Studies classes that use movies. Gender studies, Ethnic studies, Journalism, Social work. And not as bullshit, but relevant to the course. Heck, entire courses may be structured around them.
I don’t understand why any student would find this different or unusual.
Just out of curiosity, which post was this in response to? I didn’t see any that had that reaction.
When a movie does not portray something as it is in real life, that is not an “error”. It’s done for cinematic effect with the hopes that the audience will willingly suspend its disbelief, or they just don’t know enough about the subject to notice at all. Many people here get enormously hung up on that.
In my civil procedure class, my prof showed lots of clips from Anatomy of a Murder.
I also watched the Big Gay Al episode of South Park in a freshman sociology class once. It was taught by a doctoral candidate (not yet a PhD). I never figured out the point of the episode; I think he just thought it was hilarious. The standard on sociology classes was Roger & Me (I think I saw it twice).
ETA: Oh, and the civ pro prof used My Cousin Vinny, too.
A Clockwork Orange, Sybil, and David and Lisa- all for Psychology classes.
We watched The Name Of The Rose in library school.
When I was taking a course in medieval literature, the professor showed Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Terry Jones is a medievalist and there are tiny details in the film (like Galahad’s shield) that are accurate to the Arthurian tales, or parodied from them by someone familiar with them.
Not a movie, but we watched various episodes of ‘The West Wing’ in my college politics class to illustrate particular aspects of the US political system (I’m in the UK).
We also watched ‘Perfect Dark’ in University, but that was a class on lighting design, so it was the design elements of the movie we were looking at, rather than anything to do with the plot.
Also not a movie but I’ve seen several bits of Fawlty Towers used in proffessional management courses dealing with interaction between colleagues and with interaction with clients.
In fact thinking back on it its hard to think of any "Workshops"of that nature(Hate the “W” word by the way) that haven’t included Fawlty Towers.
I’ve used Pay It Forward as a starting point for a discussion about power and teachers’ responsibility to think through all the implications of an assignment. I routinely use fictional movies to teach ethics (e.g., The Prince of Tides) and intake assessment (e.g., Close Encounters of the Third Kind).
On that note, in my Psychology 101 course we watched Super Size Me, SNL: The Best of Will Ferrell, SNL: The Best of Chris Farley, and SNL: The Best of Mike Myers. There were never any lessons or discussions on any of these. We just watched them purely for fun. And yes, that instructor got fired at the end of the semester. She actually called me at home, crying, and saying “they set me up.” I was like ummmmm, uhhhhhh, errrmmmm . . . wooooowwww, that’s soooooo surprising . . . I’m soooooorrrryy. Heh.
I use Bobby Love Mangoes to show inductive logic/critical thinking
What was the discussion point of To Kill A Mockingbird? I love the book, and I love the movie, and I love Gregory Peck … but the last time I saw it, it occurred to me that if I was Tom Robinson, I would have wished Atticus spent a little less time antagonizing the jury about being racist, and more time playing up the fact that given my one arm, perhaps Mayella was simply mistaken. I know that’s not the point of the book, but I think it might be the point of a defense attorney.
I took a course called “History of Cinema” in which we watched several masterpiece movies (mostly Hollywood or American flicks) and discussed how they contributed to the art of film-making. Films we watched - “Intolerance”, “City Lights”, “Wuthering Heights”, “the Magnificent Ambersons”, “Notorious”, “Double Indemnity”, “All About Eve”, “Wild Strawberries”, and Godard’s “Breathless.” One of my most favorite classes ever!
For a class called “Conflict & Justice”, we watched “Gandhi.”
The same professor taught latin and mythology courses I took. In the mythology class, we watched “Clash of the Titans” for the last two sessions before Thanksgiving break. In latin class, we watched the mythological segment of “Fantasia” on the last day before spring break. (But these were just class fillers before a vacation began.)
In high school, we watched the Zepherelli version of “Romeo & Juliet” while studying the play. We were the first class to do so for many years, because some christian wingnut mother had complained about the “nude scene” (two milliseconds of seeing Romeo’s naked butt) when her kid had been in the class several years earlier.
Well, we saw it in our Professional Responsibility class, so the material covered in the course was of an ethical nature. As I recall things, the idea was to observe how Atticus Finch, as a defense lawyer, adhered to the ethics of the profession: zealously representing his client, remembering that all he needed to do was to raise a reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury, and respecting the other side and courtroom procedure and decorum; all in spite of what was a very tense and volatile situation in the courtroom and in the community.
It may have been better for Atticus to pursue a different theory of the case, as you say. But if my memory of that particular class serves, it wasn’t so much what Atticus did, as how he did it, that was the point of having us watch and discuss the film.
My school here in the Bible belt handled this sort of thing with the use of permission slips and the fast forward button. Nowadays, there’s a special DVD player that loads censorship files from a USB stick, so that it knows what parts censor. With this, they pretty much have the network TV version, if they can’t get that another way.
I remember teachers fast-fowarding through Romeo and Juliet’s morning scene in high school as well. I have heard that since the actress playing Juliet was so young, she wasn’t allowed into the premiere because of her own nudity.
When I read fictional, I thought it meant fictitious movies, ie movies no one ever made.
Then I realized they would be very difficult to “use” in a class.
Not the entire movie, but one specific scene.
It’s the scene where the Mafia guys are beating the tar out of Tyler Durden and the narrator is just looking on, as if it’s someone else that it’s happening to.