Cinema and Pedagogy: An Urban Education Seminar

Abstract

Alfredo: Living here day by day, you think it's the center of the world. You believe nothing will ever change. Then you leave: a year, two years. When you come back, everything's changed, the threads broken. What you came to find isn't there. What was yours is gone. You have to go away for a long time  …  many years  …  before you can come back and find your people—the land where you were born. But now, no. It's not possible. Right now you’re blinder than I am.

Salvatore: Who said that? Gary Cooper? James Stewart? Henry Fonda? Eh?

Alfredo: No, Toto. Nobody said it. This time it's all me. Life isn't like in the movies. Life  …  is much harder.

In Cinema Paradiso (Tomatore, 1988), Salvatore's love of movies came from spending his earlier, young life inside a cinema with the fatherly projectionist Alfredo, now blind and bitter. Alfredo is right. Life is much harder, yes, yet still very much “like in the movies” filled with frustrated actions, performed inside blind and repetitive constellations of every-day-ness and non-stop antinomies. Cinema Paradiso, among other cinematic gems, is curriculum to a seminar in Urban Education that probes, tussles, even attempts to seduce the grand problem of education, as posed by Hannah Arendt: “[F]or the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must  …  preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world” (1968, p. 193). In this essay the authors, characters themselves and co-instructors, tell the story of this seminar and its pedagogy. In the telling, each plays a different role—Meyer recounts the narrative in seven scenes, Vellani weaves in five Counterpoint Moments of its hermeneutics, set up as notes between the scenes. The narrative feature, Matinee Dreams, unfolds an argument in prose, of lived curricular and cinematic moments with teachers from urban contexts—graduate students, at times a weeping audience, and co-authors in children's lives. In front of the screen in a makeshift cinema, all are beholden to the Arendtian question of pedagogy: What does it mean to be a teacher amid the onslaught of newcomers and the unpredictable plurality, in a world, old and weary?

FILMS

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• Doillon, J. (Director, Writer). (1996). Ponette [Motion picture]. France: BAC Films.

• Ghobadi, B. (Director, Producer, Writer). (2004). Turtles can fly [Motion picture]. Iran, France, Iraq: IFC Films.

• Jeong-hyang, L. (Director, Writer). (2002). The way home [Motion picture]. South Korea: CJ Entertainment.

• Majidi, M. (Director). (1999). The colour of paradise [Motion picture]. Iran: Sony Pictures Classics.

• Salles, W. (Director, Writer). (1998). Central Station [Motion picture]. Brazil: Sony Pictures Classics USA.

• Scorsese, M. (Director). (2011). Hugo [Motion picture]. United States: Paramount Pictures. Tomatore, G. (Director). (1988). Cinema paradiso [Motion picture]. Italy: Umbrella Entertainment.