Meaning mainstream movies and/or documentaries meant for general audiences, rather than films made specifically for educational purposes.
Someone online mentioned seeing “Troy” in class for its educational value, so that’s made me wonder what other teachers are showing these days.
I teach AP European History in high school. This year I showed The Agony and the Ecstasy when we were doing the Renaissance. After the AP test, we go film-happy and show The Quiet Man, Help! and Shogun. 
I’m going to show An Andalusian Dog next week to art history survey, but that’s probably not pop.
I haven’t shown a complete movie in years (takes up too many precious class days) but when I did, I occasionally showed:
Glory
The Right Stuff
Shawshank Redemption (in a Street law class)
All Quiet on the Western Front
Rasputin (HBO film)
Nixon
Platoon
Sullivan’s Travels
and a few more that I can’t recall at this time
BTW, I primarily teach US history, if you haven’t already figured that out.
Bits and pieces: Excaliber; Oedipus Rex; Fantasia 2000 (all for my myth class).
Whole films: Oedipus Rex (world lit); lots of different Disney films (some shorts, some full length)(various writing classes centered on Disney’s cultural impact). The best is when I got to teach a class on Arthurian lit.; it featured quite a few films, culminating in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
I showed Glory as a sort of coda to a US history course i taught last semester.
If it’s out on DVD in time, i’ll be tempted to show Good Night and Good Luck later this semester.
It comes out on March 14.
I have a cousin who works in a video store.
Cool, thanks.
I’ll have to get the university library to order it, because i believe that copyright law prohibits me from showing a regular rental or purchased DVD in a classroom. I think the library pays a higher price in return for permission to show the movie in undergraduate classes.
I’m only a TA, but in this year’s introductory Japanese history class we showed:
Rikyu
Twilight Samurai (Tasogare Seibei)
The Last Samurai (only sections)
The Makioka Sisters (Sasameyuki)
You’re quite welcome.
That’s one thing I’ve never understood. You’re not charging admission, nor trying to profit from the viewing, so why is that a violation of copyright law?
I don’t understand the idea of wasting classtime in such a manner…Assign the damned thing for viewing on the students’ time, and use the class time for review, discussion, actual work. Use class time for actual learning beyond the material. Hell, use class time for a run-through of the thing, and use excerpts from the film as support. Drag in auxiliary texts, but really, why use class time like this?
As a bribe to a class (English as a foreign language) of young teenagers, I promised that we would get to watch a movie for the final class if the achieved certain goals. They overwhelmingly voted for a cartoon/animated movie so I chose Finding Nemo. They loved it.
I’ve never shown a movie in my class, nor do I intend to do so.
I show the opening sequence of Armageddon, which is a very nice computer animation of the K-T impact and illustrates quite vividly how a large impact can affect the entire planet.
Plus, it’s fun to list all the things that the voiceover gets competely, utterly, totally wrong.
Really? Uh, oh, I’m in trouble…
Actually, having looked into it further, i might be wrong. If the film is being shown to a class for purely educational purposes, this could fall under fair use.
But i don’t claim to be an expert in this stuff, so if you want proper advice you’d be better off asking your school/college’s legal department or the library.
I did try to look this up a few years ago. This is another one of those obnoxious cases where there are tons of exceptions to a rule, but there is no direct exception that easily applies in this case. Basically, as near as I can tell, fair use applies. (…and if anyone from “the industry” wants to agrue with me, I will point out how much free advertising they are getting out of my use of said videos in class…)
Last time I had a question about “fair use,” someone pointed me towards this site. Clicking on their “Video & Broadcast” link gives the position of Austin Community College on showing vidoes (and, one assumes, DVD’s). They give instructors a free pass with non-entertainment showings of videos.
The actual copyright codes are frustrating - a lot of it is quite vague and there are a lot of situations (and new technologies) that it simply doesn’t cover. For teachers, there’s this handy little guide available though. It’s one person’s interpretation, but it’s as good as anyone else’s, I figure.
I am the distance learning specialist for a university department, so I get to research copyright issues as it pertains to electronic dissemination of materials all the time. I’ve concluded that common sense serves you just about as well as anything else!
Because it’s not a waste of time.
Frequently, the films I’m using aren’t widely available. They can’t find them at Blockbuster, and I can’t send 130+ students to the media center; there just aren’t the facilities to handle that crush.
Also, in cases where I’m showing an excerpt, it seems pointless to have students pay a full rental fee for 10 minutes worth of a film.