Pedagogies of the Cinematic Cube: Godard, Huillet and Straub, Learning Film Group
- Event type
- Seminar
- Series
- Marxism in Culture
- Address
- IHR Wolfson Room NB01, Basement, IHR, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
- Speakers
- Nicolas Helm-Grovas (Goldsmiths, University of London)
- Event dates
- Contact
- ihr.events@sas.ac.uk Email only
In the aftermath of May 1968, questions of pedagogy, education and learning were central in French radical cinema. In Jean-Luc Godard’s work, for instance, these concerns can be found in Joy of Learning (1969), in his television programmes made with Anne-Marie Miéville, and in the ‘blackboard films’ produced in various collaborative configurations (notably with Jean-Pierre Gorin). The latter films sought, in critic Serge Daney’s words, to ‘transform the scenographic cube into a classroom … and the film-maker into a schoolmaster, tutor or supervisor’. Meanwhile, one might draw a line through Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub’s work passing through History Lessons (1972) and arriving at En rachâchant (1982), which dramatises a conversation in a classroom between a schoolmaster, parents and a young boy who doesn’t want to go to school.
Taking a cue from Daney’s writing, this paper will consider these works with reference to the antagonistic positions, pivoting on the subject of pedagogy, of Louis Althusser and Jacques Rancière. Rancière – Althusser’s student – writes in his significantly titled Althusser’s Lesson (1974) that ‘Althusserianism is a theory of education’, centred on the ‘authority of professors’. Much of Rancière’s project afterwards investigates the possibilities for radical learning while sternly criticising the figure of the teacher and the discourse of pedagogy. Unpacking this dispute in relation to the cinematic objects of Godard and Huillet and Straub, as well as Learning Film Group’s The Grenelle Agreements (2009), which documents a seminar on May ’68 with a group of Russian nightclub workers, the paper will consider models of political learning, cinematic or otherwise, that avoid the impasses of Althusser’s and Rancière’s stances, which, although opposed, operate within the same structure of the hierarchical master-student relation.
All welcome- but booking is required.
Taking a cue from Daney’s writing, this paper will consider these works with reference to the antagonistic positions, pivoting on the subject of pedagogy, of Louis Althusser and Jacques Rancière. Rancière – Althusser’s student – writes in his significantly titled Althusser’s Lesson (1974) that ‘Althusserianism is a theory of education’, centred on the ‘authority of professors’. Much of Rancière’s project afterwards investigates the possibilities for radical learning while sternly criticising the figure of the teacher and the discourse of pedagogy. Unpacking this dispute in relation to the cinematic objects of Godard and Huillet and Straub, as well as Learning Film Group’s The Grenelle Agreements (2009), which documents a seminar on May ’68 with a group of Russian nightclub workers, the paper will consider models of political learning, cinematic or otherwise, that avoid the impasses of Althusser’s and Rancière’s stances, which, although opposed, operate within the same structure of the hierarchical master-student relation.
All welcome- but booking is required.
This is an in-person only session.
All welcome- but booking is required.
