It’s a dream for many students.
The professor pauses his lecture to play a clip from a major motion picture. The projection screen descends over the blackboard and the hall darkens. The film begins.
It’s not the most common component of a Northwestern classroom experience, but some creative professors use pop culture to emphasize greater lecture points.
English Prof. Jules Law said there are numerous reasons to include popular films in lecture — and it’s not just to keep the students awake.
“There’s the obvious reason that it’s more accessible and familiar,” Law said. “But more than that, it shows the distinctiveness among various media.”
For Law, comparing and contrasting narrative techniques in different genres is important. He mentions the classic “Some Like It Hot” with Marilyn Monroe and Jack Lemmon as an example.
“In the movie, camera angle establishes identity and puts viewers in special relation to what they’re seeing,” he said. “That’s how the movies do it, but how can text position the reader? These are the kind of overlaps the clips can show.”
In some language classes, movies do not merely supplement the classroom experience, they also are teaching necessities.
Spanish lecturer Anna Diakow said movies emphasize “that language is a communicative process, not structural.”
“We look for something that deals with young people to show them real life situations and difficult situations they can understand,” Diakow said.
Watching and listening to native spanish speakers helps NU students to speak with similar fluency, students said.
Communication freshman Govind Kumar said “by watching films over and over, you’re forced to stop speaking ‘Spanglish.'”
English Prof. Jeffrey Masten similarly uses films to enliven the classroom environment and “bring the text to life.”
“There is ambivalence in a lot of Shakespeare texts,” said Masten, who teaches an Introduction to Shakespeare class. “Movies give you a particular interpretation that would take much longer to unpack in lecture.”
Sirish Vullaganti, a Weinberg freshman, said clips from movies “definitely enhance” the lecture.
“I think that showing us the movie clips really brings to life what we read and visualize what the author was perhaps thinking,” Vullaganti said.
On the other hand, the “seductiveness” of these films can foster a bias toward the text among readers.
Masten offers Kenneth Branagh’s “Henry V” as an example of a movie that can be shown in class that he “loves to hate.”
Literary critics have long debated the pacifist sentiments of the play, but according to Masten, Branagh’s charismatic depiction of the young warrior king discounts the play’s antiwar implications.
There are disadvantages to presenting only one interpretation of any literary text, but many students think the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
“By seeing a specific depiction, we have a concrete image of the play, which is good,” Communication freshman Marco Minichiello said. “By knowing different versions out there, you begin to see how versatile the text is.”
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