Film education otherwise: A response to Bergala’s dialectics of cinema and schooling

This paper engages with the question of whether education itself goes undervalued in Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis. Bergala identifies schools as being key in providing a space in which all young people should be able to access a cinema education, but in doing so situates the school simply as a means to the end of cinephilia. While this approach does much to nurture film appreciation via educational institutions, this paper argues there is insufficient justification for why schools should engage with film education to this end in a way that distinguishes it from other forms of art provision within current curricula. An alternative approach sees the school not just as a place for teaching film, but as a place in which perceptions of teaching, learning and schooling could also be transformed by the experience of film-viewing and criticism. In re-examining the four parts that Bergala prescribes for the role of schools in fostering programmes of film education, the paper questions whether his approach promotes film-as-art at the expense of school-as-education, and suggests that the two might have more to offer one another in classroom practice than their seeming opposition implies.