Breaking into Movies: Pedagogy and the Politics of Film

The ubiquity and importance of film as a mode of public pedagogy offers educators both an opportunity and a challenge to connect film as a cultural practice to broader public issues, social relations, and institutional formations. Taking film seriously as a vehicle of public pedagogy means, in part, examining how a given film’s practices and values embody relations of power and ideological assumptions – admittedly in contradictory ways – that both mirror and construct the interests, fears, longings, and anxieties of the periods in which it was produced. Accordingly, this insight suggests developing pedagogical practices that promote political engagement, that challenge conventional ways of thinking about film as simply entertainment, and that use film as a cultural text to bridge the gap between the academic discourse of the classroom and those social issues and public concerns that animate the larger society.

The integral (Slovenian) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!