Seeing Education On Film: A Conceptual Aesthetics 303033631X, 9783030336318, 9783030336325

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
Abbreviations......Page 7
List of Figures......Page 8
1: Introduction......Page 9
The Educationalist’s Dilemma......Page 10
“Education Is …”......Page 12
Unpacking the Umiak......Page 14
Going to the Pictures......Page 16
Moving Pictures......Page 20
Education on Film: From Phenomena to Concept......Page 22
Structure of the Book......Page 24
Bibliography......Page 26
2: Seeing Philosophically......Page 27
Wittgenstein and Pictures......Page 28
The Privacy of Pictures......Page 32
Descartes’ Division of the Visual......Page 34
Wittgenstein: ‘Seeing’ and ‘Seeing-as’......Page 38
Veiling the Visual: Film Theory......Page 44
Seeing Films in Spite of Theory......Page 48
Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics......Page 51
Conclusion: An Aesthetic Education in Concepts......Page 54
Bibliography......Page 57
3: Seeing Philosophy on Film......Page 59
Philosophical and Cinematic Realism......Page 63
Seeing Philosophers and Philosophy on Film......Page 68
Disenfranchising Descartes......Page 74
Seeing Descartes in Deeds......Page 77
Conclusion: Education’s Disappointment in Its Criteria......Page 81
Bibliography......Page 82
4: Seeing (Re-)education on Film......Page 83
Cavellian Scepticism......Page 84
Cinema’s Staging of Philosophical Scepticism......Page 89
The Remarriage Comedy......Page 93
The Re-education Drama......Page 99
Half Nelson’s Disappointment with Dialectics......Page 103
Re-educating the Educator......Page 110
Captain Fantastic’s Fantasy of Education......Page 115
Conclusion: Teaching to Transgress Oneself......Page 122
Bibliography......Page 124
5: Seeing the Child on Film......Page 125
Wittgenstein’s Child......Page 128
The Naïve and the Sentimental......Page 132
Hollywood and the Myth of a Universal Childhood......Page 139
The ‘Real’ Child......Page 145
A Wandering Gaze......Page 153
Conclusion: The Child’s Challenge to the Educationalist......Page 159
Bibliography......Page 160
6: Samira Makhmalbaf: The Filmmaker as Educationalist......Page 162
Schooling in the Screen......Page 164
The Apple (1998)......Page 169
Blackboards (2000)......Page 179
At Five in the Afternoon (2003)......Page 187
Conclusion: Forming Education......Page 195
Bibliography......Page 197
7: A Postscript on Film Pedagogy: Context, Community, and Criticism......Page 198
Criticism as Conversation......Page 200
Context......Page 204
Cultivating Community......Page 209
Taking an Interest in One’s Own Experience: The Example of Au Revoir Les Enfants......Page 215
Conclusion: Cinema’s Call......Page 220
Bibliography......Page 223
Bibliography......Page 224
Index......Page 230

Citation preview

Seeing Education on Film “This book offers a clear account of the distinctiveness of Wittgenstein’s position and its potential for enabling an aesthetic reconsideration of the concept of education. This philosophical background is deftly elucidated while maintaining the openness and uncertainty this approach invites. With this book Alexis Gibbs has made not only a timely contribution to a current area of interest in educational philosophy, but also one of enduring value, due to its engagement with classical philosophical texts, films, and recurring educational questions. It will be invaluable for both teaching and research in these areas.” —Naomi Hodgson, Liverpool Hope University, UK

Alexis Gibbs

Seeing Education on Film A Conceptual Aesthetics

Alexis Gibbs Faculty of Education, Health & Social Care University of Winchester Winchester, Hampshire, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-33631-8    ISBN 978-3-030-33632-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover designed by Tom Howey This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

The first opportunity given to me to speak on some of the themes addressed in this book was at the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain’s conference at Gregynog Hall, Wales, in 2015. For that opportunity, as well as for subsequent discussions and thoughts on sections of this book, I have to thank Professor Paul Standish. I have also benefitted from conversations with, and feedback from, Ian Munday and Andrew Klevan on the book at various stages of its development. As always, much of the stimulus for my thinking on such subjects comes from my students: their reception of film always encourages me to revaluate my own. Outside the academic sphere, my thanks go to Ed, to Natasha, and to all of my family who have provided support and inspiration in all sorts of ways. Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my grandmother, Muriel Robey, to whom I will always owe so much more than this gesture can repay.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Seeing Philosophically 19 3 Seeing Philosophy on Film 51 4 Seeing (Re-)education on Film 75 5 Seeing the Child on Film117 6 Samira Makhmalbaf: The Filmmaker as Educationalist155 7 A Postscript on Film Pedagogy: Context, Community, and Criticism191 Bibliography217 Index223

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Abbreviations

Wittgenstein CV LC OC PI RPPI RPPII

Culture and Value Lectures and Conversations On Certainty Philosophical Investigations Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology vol. I Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology vol. II

Cavell CR CT CUH CW MWM PH TS WV

Claim of Reason Contesting Tears Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome Cities of Words Must We Mean What We Say? Pursuits of Happiness Themes out of School The World Viewed

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Duck-rabbit drawing, Jastrow 33 Fig. 3.1 Zero for Conduct compared with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone54 Fig. 5.1 Mina in The Mirror148 Fig. 7.1 Julien looks at Jean, Au Revoir les Enfants212

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1 Introduction

Can we see education? Can we point at it? If I said to you, “Show me education!”—where would you begin? Would you walk me over to the gates of the nearest school and point at the building inside? Or go further by entering a classroom and gesturing at rows of desks full of smiling pupils? Or perhaps you would open a dictionary and highlight the various definitions given underneath? Or simply underline the word itself in type on a page: ‘education’? Is the meaning of education in each, or any, of the uses above, clear? If I were as ignorant as my request suggests, then perhaps any of these responses would leave me feeling satisfied that I now know what education is. But are you satisfied with what you have been able to show me? Maybe you leave wishing that you had objected to the logic of what I’d asked for because the idea of education is not really compatible with an act of showing—it can’t be contained in a gesture. It can’t be seen. Or you go away puzzled, thinking instead that I must have been disingenuous in my demand, as I couldn’t possibly have made it in complete ignorance of the word (unless English was not my first language). Immediately, the meaning of education has become clouded by a whole set of contextual considerations, not to mention feelings of frustration, indignation, and insufficiency. © The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_1

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If we imagine conducting the experiment again, but this time with a young child making the request instead of me—how does this change what you do, and how you feel afterwards? Is there a good chance that gesturing at the school or classroom in this instance seems a more than adequate introduction to the word, given that you suspect that the child won’t have encountered it on many other occasions before? And perhaps you leave this time feeling less burdened as to whether you have done justice to the whole idea of education because you have less cause to believe that the child’s view will be narrowed or limited by this picture. Say the child had made the request because her parents had said to her, “Don’t underestimate the value of a good education”, and she hadn’t understood them. Would the pictures of a school or a lively classroom have contributed helpfully to her understanding? If, on the other hand, you had taken the child to a scuba-diving lesson, or handed her a dictionary, wouldn’t this understanding be very different? Wouldn’t you question whether you hadn’t left her a bit confused?

The Educationalist’s Dilemma If I were to call this experiment an investigation into what education is, it might be tempting to say that the exercise had already gone awry. After all, it might be argued that education is simply not something that can be pointed at. And maybe nor should it, because in pointing at one thing we overlook or ignore another. Education, it might be argued, happens not just ‘out there’, in a world that can be pointed at, but ‘in here’, inside parts of me that your sight will never access (surely it would not work to try and point at my mind, my heart, or my soul in this instance?). To point at things in the way suggested doesn’t provide the complete picture of what we feel and understand education to be. But this then begs another question: can there be such a thing as a complete picture of education? This is not just a simple dilemma of knowing what education is or isn’t. The pointing exercise picks up something of an existential dilemma in relation to our knowledge of the concept of education. We think we know enough in order to have a go at showing others what we take it to be, but we immediately feel dissatisfied with our efforts. Or perhaps we

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refuse to have a go, but then wonder about the futility of our purpose as people who should know something about education (I take it that the educationalist feels the dilemma of this particular pointing exercise with greater consternation than most). A variation of this conceptual-existential dilemma is described early on in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, with reference to a particular moment in the writings of St. Augustine: Augustine says in the Confessions ‘quid est ergo tempus? si nemo ex me quaerat scio; si quaerenti explicare velim, nescio’ (PI, §89)

Augustine has stumbled on a similar conundrum to that of pointing at education: if no one asks me what time is, I have no trouble in knowing what it is; but as soon as someone asks me what it is, I doubt my ability to give a true account of it. Wittgenstein follows up on the quote from Augustine by describing the phenomenon as: Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it, is something that we need to remind ourselves of. (And it is obviously something of which for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself.) (ibid.)

This brief observation captures, in large part, the main thrust to this book’s enterprise. It captures, first of all, the fact that we all—in some sense—know what education is, enough to be able to talk about it. After all, it is a word commonly used and spoken of in the news, in parent-­ teacher meetings, and over dinner. There must be some common understanding, and it must have come from somewhere. But under scrutiny, it is a concept that can start to blur, and our tongues trip over themselves in trying to place it. Where has it come from if we can’t point directly at it? And do we really share in the same understanding if none of us would point at the same thing? So Wittgenstein’s observation also captures that moment of doubt, of hesitation, that arises when we are called upon to say what exactly education is (or point directly at it). How is it that education can hover so equivocally between certainty and doubt?

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What the observations from both Augustine and Wittgenstein attest to is a kind of cognitive slippage that arises in our language from a tension between what is known on the one hand (i.e. time), and what is suddenly cast into doubt (i.e. our ability to express what time is) on the other. In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein tells of how he and Bertrand Russell would frequently encounter this slipperiness when trying to pin down concepts logically: Again and again a use of the word emerges that seems not to be compatible with the concept that other uses have led us to form. We say: but that isn’t how it is!—it is like that though!—and all we can keep doing is repeating these antitheses. (CV 30b, quoted in Bearn, 2012, p. 97)

Every time we try and discover consistency among things and across properties, their reality confronts us with other possibilities that refute that consistency, leading to what seems to be a slip ’twixt thought and lip. The pointing exercise—what Wittgenstein refers to as ostensive definition— also enacts this slippage for us. In many ways, none of the things pointed at are necessarily ‘right’ or ‘wrong’, they just have aspects to them that we all commonly recognise as being related to education (i.e. family resemblance), while failing to provide a complete picture of what something is.

“Education Is …” The anxiety over what a thing ‘is’ comes about because we feel we ought to be able to grasp the essence of a thing, a complete picture which is not contingent upon the immediate situation in which we encounter it: We ask: ‘What is language?’, ‘What is a proposition?’ And the answer to these questions is to be given once for all; and independently of any future experience. (PI, §92)

The desire for this answer is the compulsion towards metaphysics, the hope that things somehow can be established beyond our experience of

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them, and can therefore be taken as stable and fixed. The educationalist will understandably want to fix this position also. What exactly is happening when the educationalist takes as a starting point in their discussion of the concept the position of “Education is …”? Let’s consider some examples: Education is … a fostering, a nurturing, a cultivating, process. (Dewey, 1916, p. 10) Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it. (Arendt, 1961, p. 196) Education is what it is and not some other thing … But what it is is seldom made clear. (Peters, 1973, p. 82) [A]ll education is … an aesthetic experience that teaches us both to see and to unsee, to hear and to unhear, to feel and unfeel in equal measure. (Lewis, 2012, p. 53)

In each of these instances, it is probably to say that what our educationalists are really doing in these expressions is simply omitting to say “I think that …” at the beginning. We are being presented with a point of view, much like the pointing exercise except in words rather than gestures: the meaning of education is being ostensively defined from within the sentence as a whole (the point at which we could say that education has no meaning outside of language). What we perhaps don’t know is the degree of assurance being given in each of these instances, the sense in which the worldview (Weltanschauung) being offered via the expression is strong or weak: “How does the degree of assurance come out? What consequences has it?” (OC, §66), asks Wittgenstein. We also don’t know whether these statements are truly meant to reveal the essence of the phenomenon that is education, or simply make an interesting claim upon our judgment. Am I being informed as to what education is, or asked to consider what it might be? And what if I feel as if the definition doesn’t quite ‘fit’ with my own understanding? Am I wrong, ignorant, or simply of a different opinion? And if it is the latter, does this make education always a matter of competing worldviews, or can there be agreement also?

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Wittgenstein points to one of the troublesome things about ostensive definition in philosophical thinking: “the ostensive definition explains the use—the meaning—of the word when the overall role of the word in language is clear” (PI, §30, my emphasis). Definitions are helpful, in that they teach us the use of expressions, avert specific misunderstandings, and confirm shared understandings (Baker & Hacker, 2009). All three of these are essential to our continuing capacity to ‘speak together’ as part of a community with shared interests and ideals, rather than over or past one another. But sometimes the sharedness of words continues in a language where the interests and values attached to them are no longer shared. In this instance, what is shared is no longer a matter of meaning (as definition, as semantics), but a matter of what things mean to us, their meaningfulness. Wittgenstein’s concern throughout Philosophical Investigations is that we shouldn’t take language to stop at the need for clarity of definition, but that we should both be wary of letting mere observations turn themselves into scientific definitions (PI §79), and pay due attention to our capacity to use the same words in different contexts under different conditions. If we don’t attend to the latter, our aesthetic sensibility for different usage becomes dulled in favour of a dictionary mindseti that equates meaning solely with the definition (as something abstract and generalisable), and not the ways in which it is employed contextually (as something contingent and deeply perspectival).

Unpacking the Umiak In his essay ‘Must We Mean What We Say?’, Stanley Cavell provides an interesting example of how the dictionary mindset (perhaps today better understood as a Google or Wikipedia mindset) paints over the existential cracks in a seemingly simple epistemological matter. He asks us to imagine we are sitting in an armchair reading a “book of reminiscences”, and we come across a new word, ‘umiak’: You reach for your dictionary and look it up. Now what did you do? Find out what ‘umiak’ means, or find out what an umiak is? But how could we have discovered something about the world by hunting in the dictionary? (Cavell, MWM, p. 18)

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Cavell’s questions here draw attention to the strangeness of this easy epistemic exercise, whereby we seem to have passed from a state of not knowing into one of knowing, without ever having to encounter in reality the difficulty of the object of our knowledge. Where there was once an empty box in the knowledge warehouse of my mind, now it has been filled. We don’t have to leave the armchair in order to find out what an umiak (a kind of Eskimo or Inuit kayak historically reserved for use by women) is, because the dictionary is on hand to tell us. But does it? Cavell goes on to suggest here that this psychological sleight of hand has not actually filled a gap in our knowledge, but merely confirmed our ability to fill gaps in knowledge (via the use of a resource like a dictionary). It is, he says, a different language game altogether, “a case of bringing the world to a dictionary”. Our knowing how to use the dictionary in order to seek knowledge, then, has remained the same; our finding out about the ‘umiak’ allows simply to proceed with our reading of the book of remembrances without a feeling of unease. If suddenly the whole notion of looking for a canoe in a dictionary and not in the world has become a little uncanny, it should be, as Cavell says, “because we forget that we learn language and learn the world together, that they become elaborated and distorted together, and in the same places” (MWM, p. 19). And as soon as we consider just how precariously contingent such situations are, the umiak that had previously presented itself as a sequence of five neutral letters on a page, now looks to us less like a neutral fragment of information and more like a relic transported from its native lands, stripped of its natural character, reduced to the sterility of typographic script, mounted on a page with a display label that translates a living culture to a museum exhibit. Indeed, the dictionary and the museum (and Wikipedia as a digital amalgam of the two), as well as crosswords and quiz shows, are all grammatically much closer in kind than the form of life in which the umiak finds its true raison d’être. The Yupik and Inuit have no need of dictionaries or museums to preserve the umiak’s function in their lives; their relation to it does not demand that they know what it is in the sense provided by these institutions. Ultimately, what is preserved in the life of the dictionary researcher is the

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role of the dictionary itself, not knowledge that brings language into contact with a world outside of it. If we accept that we learn language and learn the world together, where then does that leave us with the word education? Unlike a canoe, it is—as discussed—not easily pointed out. How does this fusion of word and world occur in this instance, such that we are able to give a meaning to education? There are a number of things to take away from the umiak example in exploring our concept of education. Firstly, that once again language assumes meaning within a context, within both language games and the broader forms of life in which their expression, according to Wittgenstein, has become necessary: “It is only in a language that I can mean something by something” (PI, §38). Secondly, if we are to truly explore that meaning, and not simply affirm modes of knowing already in existence, then we must begin by assuming a position of relative ignorance in relation to that which we hope to explore, to look up from our books that would define education for us, and back at the world around us: “Don’t think, but look!” (PI, §66) is the Wittgensteinian injunction. Thirdly, the umiak is a reminder that we cannot traverse borders between forms of life through the abstraction of knowledge. The kind of knowledge abstraction that occurs in dictionary definition is itself part of a form of life that often makes it hard(er) for us to see what is happening elsewhere.

Going to the Pictures But what does paying attention to our words in this way have to do with films? One way to think of the definitions of education provided above is to think of them less as definitive statements pertaining to a particular word, and more as ‘pictures’ of education as a concept. In his previous work, the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had suggested that the world is made up of atomic facts, and that “We make to ourselves pictures of facts” (TPL, 2.1), and that each of these pictures makes up a model of reality. Later he came to suspect something of the immutability of the relationship between picture and world that these statements suggested, not least because our picture of language itself, as one in which individual words

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are linked to particular objects, is misconstrued. So what if we were to say that any statement of “Education is …” acts less like the picture that fits with our understanding of the word education, and more like a portrait of education at any one time? Then we have a sense that, much like a portrait, it is something that has been given shape and form, and will hold that shape and form even as its subject continues to age and change. Definitions and theories of education often behave in exactly this way. But if we were to treat our concept of education like Dorian Gray, as the living embodiment of its unchanging definition, we would overlook the decay of the reality that the concept conceals. In short, if education is to be meaningful, it has to find meaning in both the reality we actually observe and the language with which we speak of it, rather than in definitions that would seek to transcend either. What Wittgenstein is hinting at in his discussion of Augustine and the concept of time, then, is that our understanding and appreciation of phenomena and concepts is not static, that it does actually change with time and context, and our understanding of these concepts entirely depends on their meaning in use, rather than trying to abstract the meaning from the use. More than this, it is an almost physical activity on the part of the speaker: “When we mean something, it’s like going up to someone, it’s not having a dead picture (of any kind)” (PI, §455). And yet, it seems, we continue to feel “as if we had to penetrate phenomena” (PI, §90), when actually our attention should be drawn not towards the essences of phenomena “but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena” (ibid.). The whole notion of possibility lies not so much in establishing once and for all what a thing is, but how we might encounter any one thing in different ways under different circumstances. Accepting the possibilities contained within our encounters with phenomena requires the development of a particular sensibility, by which we come to appreciate different pictures of things, rather than striving for the complete picture. My own sense is that the development of such a sensibility is often better in the arts than it is within scholarship (whether in philosophy, education, or film) because they permit us to rethink the world through what Robert Sinnerbrink calls “aesthetic disclosure”, making them “forms of thinking that use different means than philosophy in order to think, create, and communicate experience” (Sinnerbrink, 2011, p. 37). The arts can show

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us the pictures to which we have become attached, without trying to force upon us a different picture (of what something is) altogether. Pictures of education in the arts abound. Let’s take an example from literature. Here is Charles Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind conversing with his friend My Bounderby in the novel Hard Times: I have systematically devoted myself (as you know) to the education of the reason of my family. The reason is (as you know) the only faculty to which education should be addressed. And yet, Bounderby, it would appear from this unexpected circumstance of today, though in itself a trifling one, as if something had crept into Thomas’s and Louisa’s minds which is—or rather, which is not—I don t know that I can express myself better than by saying—which has never been intended to be developed, and in which their reason has no part. (Dickens, 2003, p. 24)

Mr. Gradgrind here presents us with a picture of education. It looks something like this: Gradgrind takes education to be about the development of the mind, more specifically the faculty of reason; he has contrived to be systematic in his following of a distinctly rule-bound approach to this education, but his rules have been disobeyed, and by his own children no less. Gradgrind’s systematicity is therefore also his undoing, something which we can hear in his speech. His famous mantra, that “Facts alone are wanted in life”, has been shaken by recent events (his two older children going to visit the local circus), introducing an epistemological tremor in his voice (the re-iteration of “as you know” echoes like a projected anxiety upon his friend and interlocutor, the performative utterance trying to disguise its nervous passion). On the defensive, he has become more verbose, as if his philosophy were flooded by doubt, and he is now trying to bail the unintended consequences out by dismissing them as ‘trifling’. Gradgrind’s admission that his own intent seems to have been insufficient to guard against his children behaving otherwise than intended is one that betrays doubt in the power of his sloganism and sheer force of will to bend a child’s behaviour into a desired shape. Later in the novel, Mr. Bounderby, Mr. Gradgrind’s close friend and the man who will subsequently marry his daughter, Louisa, presents an alternative picture of education:

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Education! I’ll tell you what education is—To be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That’s what I call education. (Dickens, 2003, p. 233)

Though Mr. Bounderby’s picture has elements in common with his friend’s (a degree of discipline and rigour), it reveals something very different about the character delivering it. It is a picture void of happiness or hope, signifying nothing but an eternal recurrence of the dismal. As readers, though, we recognise the pictures of education presented to us by both Gradgrind and Bounderby. They are very clear, and we know where we stand with the characters who put them forward. Even if we disagree with them, they are familiar and brought alive by Dickens’ keen sensibility for credible dialogue. They live in the language of those that would speak of them. Let’s look at some other ‘pictures’ from literature. Consider these two instances from novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte: There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil— a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome. (‘Mr Darcy’, Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice) I let you go as a babe, because you were pretty, and I feared your loveliness … In my experience I had not met with truth, modesty and good principle as the concomitants of beauty. A form so straight and fine, I argued, must conceal a mind warped and cruel. I had little faith in the power of education to rectify such a mind. (‘Mrs Pryor’, Charlotte Bronte, Shirley)

The chances are that a majority of native English-speaking adults could read these passages and understand the use of “education” in both instances. If we were pressed for something like the meaning of the word in each case, readers might register a note of parity (or family resemblance) between the two, and suggest that “education” in both seems to recognise the limits to which teaching can form or reform the innate character of the child. But we require the context (of the character speak-

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ing, of the language they are prone to use, of the conversation they are engaged in, of their interlocutor, whether their speech is to be read as mimetic or reducible to the voice of a narrator) to lend weight to this understanding. Nevertheless, one thing we do know (without having to ask) is that Mr. Darcy and Mrs. Pryor are not talking about being “tumbled out of doors”, as Mr. Bounderby puts it, even if they are all talking about “education”. So, who is confused here? Is it possible that they are all speaking incorrectly, given that, as R.S. Peters has said, “education is what it is and not some other thing”? As I hope the examples above demonstrate, we do—in some sense—already know what education is, and what it is seems to be many things (though it can’t be simply anything). We do actually understand what Dickens, Jane Austen, and Charlotte Bronte are talking about without needing to consult a dictionary or John Dewey. And we would lose sight of its meaning very quickly if we did try and consult these authorities because the use would become governed by their authority, and the failure to use it correctly would see Austen banished from the curriculum for talking nonsense. Unlike the pictures presented by Dewey, Arendt, etc., these are ordinary pictures of our everyday experience. It simply allows them to talk about the things they want to talk about—to ‘go on’, as Wittgenstein frequently puts it.

Moving Pictures To approach education via pictures is to remind ourselves that we first discover education both visually and verbally; not intellectually or theoretically. This means that our initial, pre-conceptual encounters with the word education, whether at the kitchen table or school assembly, will provide us with specific experiences of the word that shape and form our later understanding of it. And these utterances are themselves (almost always) bound up with a set of basic phenomena which come to give their expression meaning: teachers, learning, schools, and children are most commonly what are at stake in the welding of education as a word to a world of our early experience. This visual-verbal approach to exploring educational meaning runs somewhat counter to the notion that the study

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of education is a discipline still in search of its definition, its concept, or its theory, and that if we could only determine these things once and for all, we’d have the picture of education we needed. This attitude actually expresses some contempt for what we do already know, which is that we do recognise education in all sorts of given instances—and that definitions and theories can do much to cloud or obstruct our ability to recognise it. So it is instead the ordinary sentences in which we speak of education that bring the concept to life, and the more points of phenomenal experience we have as reference, the richer our concept will be. But if we discover education via the verbal and the visual, why don’t we (i.e. those who would study, research, reflect upon, take an interest in, and teach about education) rediscover it via our ordinary language and imagery also, rather than through scientific and theoretical abstraction? The first reason for calling upon film to remind us of education’s embeddedness in our language (as opposed to an abstract idea or theoretical notion) is to show how films can restore us to the sites of our initial encounters with the basic phenomena of our pictures of education, to show how we experience them as part of a form of life. In capturing time on film, in motion pictures, we are provided with the opportunity to revisit and re-evaluate repeatedly that which ordinarily passes through our experience in a great Bergsonian flow. D.N. Rodowick has described the camera’s ability to offer up the human experience of time for interpretation as follows: Time floods us and overwhelms us; it divides us from ourselves. Yet through its capacity to capture this flux and render it expressive, the moving image provides a new medium for pondering the grounds of our conviction in reality, or what we believe reality conveys or can convey in the image. (Rodowick, 2015, p. 223)

Film is able to retrieve and revisit meaningful moments of the human experience in motion, allowing it to frame objects and human encounters with them in ways that are unique to the medium in registering the effect of those encounters (e.g. through close-ups). When it comes to thinking about education, film can be seen as framing and dramatising educational phenomena as meaningful in motion: it assumes, for instance, that

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we have all, for better or worse, had some experience of schools and teachers, enough to make those experiences seem worth revisiting in— and comparing with—those represented in films as various as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Dangerous Minds. In making that assumption, they can therefore also ask of us whether we would have things differently, whether we see things differently and would do things differently based on what we see. Film thus summons our prior experience of things and invites us to re-evaluate them according to our present understanding.

 ducation on Film: From Phenomena E to Concept Perhaps, then, what we are looking for is not so much the right picture of education, but greater exposure to a greater number of pictures, such that we can develop an appreciation for what education looks and sounds like in different contexts, different situations, and in which of those contexts it seems to be good education, and in others when the fit is not quite right. A conceptual investigation, on this view, seeks not the El Dorado of educational meaning, but a sensibility for its meaningfulness in any given context. This kind of sensibility is alluded to by Wittgenstein when he remarks that in his teaching he always strove to demonstrate the “morphology of an expression”: I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept a certain way. What I do is to suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it … Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it. (Quoted in Malcolm, 1958, p. 50)

Like Wittgenstein’s own mode of pedagogy (according to Norman Malcolm largely conducted through asking questions and then exploring the possible answers), film also both suggests and invents other ways of

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looking at the existential and conceptual questions that continue to bother us. And for viewers, the benefit of thinking of film in this way is not so much concrete gains in knowledge, but a greater sensibility for the different realities in which our concepts can be taken up, for those in which they are most meaningful, and also for the worlds in which they seem to have lost their meaning entirely. (Of the latter, for example, it is possible to think of all sorts of films set in high schools in which the school itself—and therefore the whole concept of schooling—is inessential to the plot, and therefore largely ignores the roles that schools have in shaping our experience.) To think about how we come to see the concept of education differently through film is to think of the study of education as one which requires an aesthetic sensibility and not just a sophisticated capacity for explanation, theorising, or analytic interpretation of data. This sensibility is developed through a combination of experience, appreciation, and judgment, all of which are expanded, honed, and refined through greater consideration of a large number of possibilities. An aesthetic approach to conceptual investigation stands in contradistinction to approaches to thinking about education that think it necessary to decide upon just one understanding of education’s meaning or purpose, and stand by it, in Gradgrind fashion. So how do we go about developing such a sensibility? To develop an appreciation for education in its different contexts, why different pictures provide us with better understandings of the good that education can do, and its meaningfulness under different circumstances, may require more than reading about education, or doing fieldwork, or gathering empirical data. It may require looking again at the most basic building blocks of our understanding of education—things like schools and teachers and children—to see how their relations and interrelations reveal a concept like education to be meaningful, or how it becomes meaningful in our language. These basic phenomena are not only a reminder of how children first come to discover the language of education, but those discoveries form part of the inheritance of our understanding of it in adulthood also. Well before they are able to give the word itself any meaningful expression, children are introduced to schools, and teachers, and textbooks and classes. They acquire the language and experiences associated

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with that language, which will assist them in talking about education meaningfully later on. This process is put most succinctly by Wittgenstein: “We talk, we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life” (PI, xii, 209). Wittgenstein here describes exactly the motion that takes us from an experience of phenomena to an appreciation of them as concepts. Elsewhere, he will distinguish between phenomena—as anything “that can be observed” (RPP II, 75)—and concepts, which are “the expression of our interest, and direct our interest” (PI, §570). We see schools and teachers; we learn to say the words; later we will form pictures of them as part of the concept of education. This book attempts to follow the motions of this process, beginning with the whole question of ‘seeing’.

Structure of the Book Chapter 2 of this book explores Wittgenstein’s concept of seeing as key to what has traditionally been called Part II of his Philosophical Investigations, but which some are now inclined to think of as a fragment of his Philosophy of Psychology (elsewhere collected more extensively in two separate ­volumes). That Wittgenstein devotes so much time to an investigation of this concept demonstrates just how important he took it to be in overturning some of the great ‘myths’ of Western philosophy: metaphysics, introspectionism, scepticism, intellectualism, and solipsism. Philosophers since Plato, through Descartes and Kant, have given us cause to believe that our senses are in some way limited, that the true nature of the world lies beyond them, and that our best chance of grasping that true nature is to overcome them through the mind’s development and application of reason. Wittgenstein’s efforts are to draw our attention back to the things seen so as to resist the pull of suspicion or metaphysics that make us inclined to misrepresent reality by reducing it to simple pictures or definitions. He does so by emphasising the importance of seeing ‘aspects’ to phenomena, how they can be viewed in different ways, and not trying to overcome their variousness by means of theoretical explanation. To see education in its multiplicity and complexity is to see it in its reality, not in some idealised sense. Chapter 3 brings aspect-seeing into play by looking at how we can easily confuse the real and the ideal on

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screen, simply by virtue of a thing’s being represented. When we see a child, or a philosopher, on film, what is it about them that makes them seem real? Is it simply the fact that they look like children or philosophers, or must they also have something childlike or philosophical about them? The chapter explores how a certain understanding of philosophical realism might feed into an idea of cinematic realism that privileges the ‘realistic spirit’ or representation, rather than its fidelity to life or specific criteria. Chapters 4 and 5 then look at how cinematic realism (as a spirit of filmmaking) presents the viewer with new aspects to educational ­phenomena, specifically the teacher and the child. In each instance, the mode of filmmaking allows for phenomena on screen to be seen differently (in tune with Cavell’s notion of things ‘becoming’ on screen); in the case of the teacher, this takes place under the burden of scepticism, the moment at which the teacher is required to cast their inherited notions of good into doubt; in the case of the child, it is the figure of the child in Iranian cinema that calls into question the viewer’s preconceptions about how such a person does and ought to behave. Chapter 6 then turns to the films of just one filmmaker, as an extended study into how Samira Makhmalbaf might be thought of as an educationalist along the lines I have been describing. Looking at three of her films, in turn, I explore her seeming fascination with, and return to, educational questions, ones which merit investigation in a way not dissimilar to Wittgenstein’s pursuit of phenomena such as pain, thought, and games in Philosophical Investigations. Makhmalbaf ’s films are seen to adopt a combination of harsh realism and rich symbolism in their exploration of educational themes, particularly the question of whether education can justify itself at all. The final postscript to this book is really a note on pedagogy, thinking about how film might be used as an education in education (the study of education, or Education Studies). As such, it introduces something after the event: criticism. If films return us to the site of our learning word and world together, then criticism is the moment at which we, as viewers, put those words back to work, to test the ways in which our words do justice to (our experience of ) the world. While the previous chapters engage in film criticism with the aim of seeing aspects to education on film that are otherwise overlooked, this last section gives a name to criticism as the

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expressive counterbalance to the experience of film-viewing. The kind of criticism I have in mind involves what Cavell describes as “the persistent exercise of your own taste, and hence the willingness to challenge your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic conscience, hence nowhere but in the details of your encounter with specific works” (TS, 11). Herein lies the practical implication of considering education in terms of a conceptual aesthetics: in the Education Studies classroom, film prompts the exercise of a student’s own perception and voice in relation to the concept of education, a conversation in which they must be just as able to ­participate as any other, if they are to form an appreciation of education and not just be informed of its various definitions and theoretical approaches.

Bibliography Arendt, H. (1961). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Viking Press. Baker, G.  P., & Hacker, P.  M. S. (2009). Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Bearn, G. (2012). Sensual Schooling: On the Aesthetic Education of Grownups. In N. Saito & P. Standish (Eds.), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. New York: Fordham University Press. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Macmillan. Dickens, C. (2003). Hard Times. London: Penguin. Lewis, T. (2012). The Aesthetics of Education: Theatre, Curiosity, and Politics in the Work of Jacques Ranciere and Paulo Freire. London: Bloomsbury. Malcolm, N. (1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press. Peters, R. S. (1973). The Philosophy of Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rodowick, D.  N. (2015). Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sinnerbrink, R. (2011). Re-Enfranchising Film: Romantic Film-Philosophy. In H.  Carel & G.  Tuck (Eds.), New Takes in Film Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

2 Seeing Philosophically

Like Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, most of us have pictures of education in mind when speaking of it. And even if we take these pictures to be significantly more liberal, open, humanitarian, or student-centred than those of Dickens’ Victorian sticks-in-the-mud, there is no telling whether they aren’t equally as stubborn in determining how we see education, and whether we refuse to see particular activities, sets of practices, or outcomes as constituting a ‘good’ education, simply because they don’t accord with our particular picture of what “the good” consists in. In Gradgrind’s case, his adherence to a picture not only crushes the spirit of the classroom but blinds him to the interests of his own children. But, we might ask ourselves, how do we know that we aren’t Gradgrinds also? Are there ways in which my own pictures of education make me equally blind? In the second part of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein examines how we can allow pictures to hold us psychologically captive in this way through what he calls “aspect-blindness”. This chapter explores what Wittgenstein meant by aspects in this context (and how we might come to be ‘blind’ to them), as a way of affirming a need to always be attentive and sensible to the world as it appears before us.

© The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_2

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Wittgenstein and Pictures Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations begins as a response, an answer across time to St Augustine’s Confessions in which Augustine puts forward a theory of language that suggests that every individuated thing in existence has a name, that the “meaning is correlated with the word”, and the task of assuming language is a matter of learning names. Wittgenstein notes immediately that “Augustine does not speak of there being any difference between kinds of words” (PI, §1), and that while the process of learning various nouns such as “table” and “chair” through the process of having them pointed out to you as children, this says nothing of all the very many other words that we use to link these other words together. And while Augustine grants a physical dimension to the learning of object names (“the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice”), he sees this physicality as facilitating the communication of an object. Wittgenstein recognises a degree of aptness in this description of language-­learning, at least to the extent that imitation and repetition do play a role in our early language acquisition, but he also raises the possibility that “not everything that we call language is this [Augustine’s] system” (PI, §3). In the learning of named objects, there is nothing to indicate an associative, or affective, character to learning words here, such that we come to understand why certain words function the way they do in particular circumstances. They are value-neutral in the Augustinian world because they find their proper way in sentences and not in relation to the world. But Wittgenstein says that words actually could not take on the meaning that Augustine would like them to have unless they were part of a wider environment of meaningfulness, the ‘forms of life’ that don’t just include the spoken word, but all manner of gesture and behaviour (PIII, xi, 296) which accompanies vocal expression (and our acculturation into them). As such, language and our assumption of it are highly dependent upon the way it is used to express particular things. What’s more, when we start to think about the meaning of these words in an Augustinian sense of their being objects, a conceptual ‘fog’ starts to build around individuated words that wasn’t there previously in our use of them. Wittgenstein describes this process as trying to “grasp the essence of the matter”:

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When philosophers use a word—‘knowledge’, ‘being’, ‘object’, ‘I’, ‘proposition’, ‘name’—and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (PI, 116)

If philosophers are drawn to the abstract essentialisms of objects, it is because, as Cavell puts it, there is a desire to speak “outside” of the language games in which words discover their use and meaning; by contrast, in reminding us that we always think from within the language that we have acquired and learned, Wittgenstein finds greater clarity is to be gained in trying to uncover the “bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language” (PI, 119). The “pictures” of things, of language, and of knowledge that we acquire as ways to both stabilise and therefore feel more stable within our language can also serve to obstruct our clear view of how it really works, or how we really use it. As Wittgenstein puts it, it is as if a picture “held us captive” and then we “could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (PI, §115). But what might such pictures look like? Pictures can be either small-scale (like the picture of time as a clock), or they may occupy a much more macro position in any one culture’s worldview. We might take the example of visual literacy within Western culture as one which informs our capacity to “read” the moving image. The motion picture’s birth from within a culture that very much bears the influence of both the Gutenberg press and Brunelleschi’s experiments with linear perspective has meant that it has made significant adaptations from print and painting also: the former allows us to follow sequences of images just like words, while the latter helps us to take in the whole picture in a frame (through foreshortening and placement) and not just one detail on a screen. In observing some of the narrative criteria of the novel also, “movies” have come to replicate many of the rules for readability that we experience in relation to the written word, to still images, and to our storytelling. But societies that do not share in this same cultural

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­ istory will not have the same relationship to visual media. Marshall h McLuhan makes this observation in The Gutenberg Galaxy (2011) when quoting from the work of Professor John Wilson, who in the early twentieth century had attempted to teach people in remote Ghanaian villages about sanitation via the medium of film. Wilson’s observations went as follows: The next bit of evidence was very, very interesting. This man—the sanitary inspector—made a moving picture, in very slow time, very slow technique, of what would be required of the ordinary household in a primitive African village in getting rid of standing water—draining pools, picking up all the empty tins and putting them away, and so forth. We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seem and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn’t know that there was a fowl in it! So we carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame … This was all that had been seen … Why? We developed all sorts of theories. (Quoted in McLuhan, 2011, p. 36)

McLuhan is less interested in Wilson’s theories than the picture of visual literacy that is emerging from his account. Literacy, he says, is a matter of power derived from being able to focus our attention: in the case of the painting or moving picture, focus must be a little distance from an image so as to take in the whole frame. But understanding that the frame presents a complete picture requires training (an anthropological challenge to Heidegger’s notion of technological Gestell, or ‘enframing’ of the world). People who are not trained to adjust their sight in this way will only be able to focus on one thing as it appears on a screen, rather than as part of the screen as whole images with interacting elements. Hence, the anomalous concentration on the chicken: nothing else drew the attention of the viewers, let alone demanded either learning or interpretation in making associations between acts happening on screen. The basic message is that perception is (to some degree) cultural and not universal: we may all perceive, but we do not all perceive images, let alone moving images, in the same way. Paul Standish has also described this literacy as a textuality, which “draws attention to the way that our

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e­ xperience and understanding of the world is thematised or framed or worded in particular ways, and this inevitably means that that understanding is perspectival and partial” (Standish, 2017, p. 186). The problem with this partiality is that once we come to see things in a certain way, it can also be hard to see them otherwise. Wilson’s chicken inadvertently exposes a particular dependency on certain rules and criteria for seeing if the world is to be viewed as intended. This dependency taps into the kinds of concern that Wittgenstein explores in relation to our use of words at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations, and the ways in which we come to experience the meaning of images. The villagers in Wilson’s experiment are expected to be able to form a narrative link between all the various components in a story, all of which they have names for in their daily lives, and therefore should be able to see the connection being made between them. But the suggestion is that unless linear perspective, and montage and framing and narrative are already embedded as parts of one’s culture (form of life), such relations are not necessarily going to occur to the viewer. That our perception may become responsive in different ways according to material changes in our cultural consumption has been noted by McLuhan, Walter Ong (1982), and Walter Benjamin, whose ‘Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ argued that “the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence. The manner in which human sense perception is organised, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well” (Benjamin, 2000, p. 676). Linear perspective, after all, taught the viewer to see in a way that did not replicate human vision, but shaped it: Erwin Panofsky described the development of linear perspective as that of a window through which “we are meant to believe we are looking through this window onto a space” (1991, p. 27). The picture frames our belief in the world it depicts, and by extension cinema does the same. Further to this, the shaping of our vision does not therefore mean that we discover the right way to see things, but rather a way to which we become accustomed. Just as the viewers of the sanitary inspector’s film did not see in it a message that exceeded the appearance of a fowl, so just as easily can

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­ hilosophers take up the study of an abstract idea without seeing its p embeddedness in, and connections to, a wider whole: “there is a picture in the foreground, but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey” (PI §422). McLuhan points outs that training is required to view photos and moving images in the way that they are intended to be seen. But whereas McLuhan expresses some suspicion towards this kind of training, Wittgenstein is inclined to argue that training in seeing “the bigger picture” need not be viewed solely as indoctrination into the kind of passive consumerism that McLuhan discovers in literacy more generally; rather, the significance of training is that it will eventually come to allow for the seeing of connections between things. These connections, however, are confronted with their own obstacle in the form of yet another picture: that of privacy.

The Privacy of Pictures McLuhan’s (overly romanticised) view of the orality of African cultures at the time of writing The Gutenberg Galaxy makes his argument a fairly reductive one: orality is set up and celebrated as a publicly oriented culture that runs counter to the consumerism and privacy of the visual order inaugurated by the printing press. Books require us to shut out the distraction of others to be alone with our thoughts, whereas oratory unites its audience as a listening public. Importantly, Augustine’s picture theory of language also invites people to believe that we experience language privately, the idea that once we know the names of things we begin to form combinations and sentences from them within ourselves, some of which we share with others, some of which we find unshareable. Wittgenstein famously called out the ‘private language argument’ as fallacious. His grounds for doing so were not meant to deny any one person the possibility that they had experienced things unique to their own situation; it is instead the ‘picture’ of one’s own experience as somehow uncommunicable to others that is suggested as being harmful here because it generates a suspicion of other minds, of their ability to accept and understand one’s own:

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The essential thing about private experience is really not that each person possesses his own exemplar, but that nobody knows whether other people also have this or something else. The assumption would thus be possible— though unverifiable—that one section of mankind had one sensation of red and another section another. (PI, §272)

The suspicion that gathers around others’ experience of things is a product of the picture theory of language’s disconnect between objects and our emotive or affective appreciation of them in their wider context. For the most part, we all acquire the same words as a linguistic toolkit for communication but are often acutely aware of how the experience of those words—‘pain’, for example—might distinguish my experience of that thing from another person’s. Wittgenstein suggests that we continually bring this frustration upon ourselves through our competing attempts at attaining objectivity and preserving privacy, which together conspire to reproduce the insecurity (around what we know for sure, particularly about the minds of others) that entrenches them. We are, he says, held captive by the pictures we use to organise our world: the pictures which are also surprisingly the captors of our own construction. Cavell would later go further than Wittgenstein in The Claim of Reason and argue that the “fantasy of a private language” actually starts to operate psychologically almost as a form of self-protection, to prevent ourselves from being known to others because of the risks that such exposure involves. “The fantasy of a private language”, he writes, “… can be understood as an attempt to account for, and protect, our separateness, our unknowingness, our unwillingness or incapacity either to know or be known” (CR, 369). This is not always such a bad thing: Cavell is certainly not suggesting that everyone attempt to externalise a kind of stream of consciousness as a mode of overcoming this self-protection. What he is insisting on, following Wittgenstein, is the possibility of being known, of a fundamental shareability to our experience in and through language. I want to explore this shareability as grounds for film criticism in the classroom in the final chapter of this book, but for now, it is raised in the context of what it hopes to overcome: the constraints placed upon personal expression arising from a fear that not all (perceptual) experience is universal, a fear that often leads us to try and find metaphysical answers to ordinary anxieties.

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The fantasy of private language, for instance, may ensure that we do not either make fools of ourselves in language, or risk exposing the more general foolishness of being human (the anxiety that “anything and everything a person does [could] be doodling”). But it also prevents us from becoming more known to one another, confronting both the reality of other people and the world. It is as if we are putting (false and unnecessary) filters up between our perception of things and our expression of them: “So the fantasy of a private language, underlying the wish to deny the publicness of language, turns out, so far, to be a fantasy, or fear, either of inexpressiveness, one in which I am not merely unknown, but in which I am powerless to make myself known; or one in which what I express is beyond my control” (CR, 351). The idea that pictures of language are incompatible with personal experience is what perpetuates the two polarities of powerlessness in expression. As Wittgenstein has demonstrated, this disposition towards a private language is not one grounded in the philosophical facts of our language acquisition, but one that has developed as a kind of intellectual nervousness concerning both speech and perception as they are ordinarily encountered. Immanuel Kant introduced one such obstacle to our facility for “saying what we see” by making it seem as if concepts have to be thought before they can be talked about. But in one sense Kant was only continuing a tradition already established well before him, the idea that the world of our perception was not truly to be trusted, and that only our minds should be relied upon to sort truth from deception. While this tradition has precedent dating back to Plato’s allegory of the Cave, the key figure in installing a kind of intellectual suspicion and paranoia within the modern Western psyche is Descartes.

Descartes’ Division of the Visual In the third of his meditations on first philosophy, Descartes opens with an exercise in which he shuts his eyes and blocks his ears, declaring that the sensory world is potentially one of illusions that will distract him from accessing the true nature of what it means to be a thinking being:

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I am a thing that thinks, that is to say that doubts, affirms, denies, that knows a few things, that is ignorant of many, that wills, that desires, that also imagines and perceives; for, as I remarked before, although things which I perceive and imagine are perhaps nothing at all apart from me and in themselves, I am nevertheless assured that these modes of thought that I call perceptions and imaginations, inasmuch as they are modes of thought, certainly reside [and are met with] in me. (Descartes, 1968, p. 179)

Despite the many verbs in this monologue that betray the subject’s dependence on and interaction with a world of stimulus, Descartes comes to the conclusion that it is the “I”, the “thing that thinks”, that is the only thing of which he can be certain. Knowledge of all other things proceeds from the thinking thing, the “I” of the cogito; thinking must precede the processing of sense-data. The legacy of this view is the idea that thought is sovereign and placed before immediate experience in the order of our understanding of the world. “Descartes’s proof of existence”, writes D. N. Rodowick, “requires the action of a consciousness fully present to itself independently of any body” (Rodowick, 2015, p. 222). A deep suspicion of senses (perhaps sight as most suspect among them) has entered the epistemological frame, and therefore of the uniqueness and individuality of perspective that situates the sensing body in any one time or place. As Cavell puts it, Descartes has placed seeing “under suspicion; and the suggestion enters that the senses form an insufficient foundation for knowledge” (CR, 130). Cartesian suspicion, then, describes a state in which sensory perception is understood as the source of much-misguided belief, and therefore leads to our trusting only in that which sits behind and interprets sensory perceptions, the picture of mind as the control room. Cavell is among those philosophers, including Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, to have discussed this moment in intellectual history as signalling the entrance of a kind of solipsistic madness into our ways of viewing the world (Cavell, 2004a; Derrida, 2001; Foucault, 2006). Nancy Bauer has also argued that Descartes instituted a kind of ‘madness’ into philosophy, the mind’s distrust of the sensory world but also its desire to escape from being trapped inside a body: “And it could be said that in the three hundred and fifty years since the publication of the Meditations, we

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philosophers have been trying to regain our sanity” (Bauer, 2005, p. 44). The sanity we are attempting to recover, then, is the sanity of a faith in what we perceive, rather than believing that everything we see is potentially a trap to ensnare our thinking (as per the ‘simulation hypothesis’ associated with films like The Matrix and The Truman Show), and that therefore demands ever more sophisticated ways of thinking and theorising to avoid or escape the trap. In many ways, Philosophical Investigations represents an attempt to restore faith in the world that one sees, not as a world of semblances and simulacra, but one in which appearances are our reality. This removes something of the neurosis and anxiety from seeing, allowing the philosopher-viewer to interpret what is seen, rather than question either its reality or one’s own ability to engage with that reality. The Cartesian mind, then, is “a private place accessible only to the one whose mind it is and mental events, thoughts, feelings, intentions and all the rest are private objects forever inaccessible to another” (Tilghman, 2006, p. 42). Wittgenstein’s later work not only challenges this perspective on the grounds that it does not make sense to shut out the world in order to understand it but contends also that introspective statements such as that made by Descartes in the Meditations say more about the sayer (and how he is psychologically disposed towards the world of his perception) than saying something true about the world itself (RPPI, §212).1 By contrast, Cavell writes of Philosophical Investigations that the text doesn’t deny subjectivity in the way that Descartes does, but instead accepts its own limitations, and thereby “seems to turn all of philosophy into psychology—matters of what we call things, how we treat them, what their role is in our lives” (MWM, 85). In the instance of the cogito, for example, this would mean reappraising Descartes’ meditations in terms of his picture of the world, and not in terms of whether it is a picture that fully explains the world. To consider Descartes in this way provides insight both into the conditions for his wanting to think the world differently and the extraordinary  This is the same psychological claim that Wittgenstein reportedly made about his friend and colleague, G.E.  Moore, whose examples of achieving epistemological certainty were dismissed by Wittgenstein as Moore wanting “to produce in himself the feeling of knowing” (quoted in Malcolm, 1958, p. 88). 1

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effort that went into doing so. To assess Descartes’ individual intervention in the history of thought on these grounds is one thing, but to take this psychology as the picture for thought itself has had altogether different consequences. Cartesianism—in its most basic formulation, the act of placing reason before experience—describes a conscious attempt to protect the mind from being misled. But in constructing the illusion of protection, the mind is left with little other option but to only trust itself. In this state, the person that sees is someone who simultaneously gains in confidence that their perception is the only one to be trusted as data for rational processing (a private obsession), while also gaining in anxiety over whether one can communicate that processing of private data to others. Descartes has provided Western thought with a picture of reason’s relationship with the outer world that will hold it captive right through to the present day. It is a picture of psychological suspicion that plays out as philosophical scepticism. The Cartesian psychology of suspicion, and its instituting of the sovereignty of mind as that which is intended to overcome that suspicion, has few stronger images than that described by Descartes in the second meditation, where he reflects that he has no way of being sure that the men passing by his window aren’t artificial machines dressed in hats and cloaks. The philosopher initiates a psychology so sceptical of human behaviour that it refuses to admit of its very ordinariness, the fact that on a day-to-­ day basis we willingly accept others as humans rather than suspect them of not being so. Scepticism since Descartes has taken many forms, from doubting the existence of others to doubting the intentions of others. Cavell does not dismiss scepticism in terms of its expression of an existential doubt about the world but holds that it is our response to it which matters. The Cartesian response has been a damaging one because it retreats into the mind, intellectualising experience for the better avoidance of doubt, rather than seeing doubt as the necessary condition for exploring experience. Only a philosophical attitude that compels us to see the world (for what it really is), rather than pre-figure it (in ways that provide stability and reassurance) will offer perspicuity on issues that most trouble us. As such, seeing can be surprising, enlightening, and therapeutic.

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Wittgenstein: ‘Seeing’ and ‘Seeing-as’ The accomplishment of the first part of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is that it defenestrates so much philosophical baggage that gets in the way of our achieving a ‘perspicuous representation’ on the actual environment about us—what we see, how people behave, our natural ease with a lot of things that thinking serves to make uneasy. Introspection, the appetite for explanation, the scientistic dependency upon theory—all of these are presented as modes of thinking which express a deep mistrust of individual perception, and the ability to respond to experience without recourse to a priori mechanisms with which to process it. In place of these mechanisms, we are told by Wittgenstein: “Don’t think, but look!” To consider phenomena as they appear in both our spoken and visual grammar is to question what we know about those phenomena, rather than provide answers for them. Wittgenstein does not underestimate the enormity of the challenge, writing that we “We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough” (RPP II, 372). But it is the investigation into seeing that will allow the philosopher to see more clearly. Questions of seeing (and how we speak of seeing, and how we speak of what we see) then become integral to the discussion in the second part of Investigations, for the way the term combines perception, expression, and the connections between the two. Wittgenstein introduces us to the concept of seeing-as in the second part of Philosophical Investigations by distinguishing between two uses of the word ‘see’ (being careful not to say ‘verb’, as this would imply syntax): The one: ‘What do you see there?’—‘I see this’ (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: ‘I see a likeness between these two faces’—let the man I tell this to be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself. The importance of this is the difference of category between the two ‘objects’ of sight. (PIII, xi)

The first kind of seeing is the one that we take most for granted: that we see objects before us, individuated and replicable in our language much as

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Augustine would have them. We therefore see things in the world, the phenomena Wittgenstein describes as anything “that can be observed” (RPP II, 75). Most phenomena pass through our line of sight as untroubling, and therefore we do not trouble them with the invasion of curiosity (much like Wilson’s villagers). But some draw the attention, and for certain individuals, the attention is drawn sufficiently for their interest to be summoned. Tides, trains, insects, and trees draw the attention of different people for different reasons. Once its attention is drawn, though, the curious mind seeks satisfaction.2 Upon observation, the instinct of the scientific mind is immediately to try and explain the phenomenon—its origin, its essence, and/or its existence—according to some pre-existing explicatory framework (a mode of categorisation, a theoretical ‘lens’, etc.). In PI §90, however, Wittgenstein says that his own mode of philosophising is not to establish explanations or essences but to compare phenomena and the ways in which we speak of them, to discover ‘family resemblances’. Grammatical investigations are not a matter of ‘penetrating phenomena’ such that we arrive at some definitive explanation for their existence or use, but of directing ourselves towards the “‘possibilities’ of phenomena” (italics in original). The second kind of seeing (i.e. of likenesses) lends itself to this (altogether more poetic) possibility. Although it is there in our language, it receives very little attention. It is the seeing of an association between things, even if we would be hard-pressed to identify in concrete terms the thing seen (what does a likeness look like?). Faced with the conundrum of identifying the nature of likeness, the scientist predisposed towards explanations for things might immediately at this stage suggest a full psychological investigation into the neurological foundations for seeing likenesses between faces. But already this would be to draw attention away from the existential curiosity of the likeness experience, to seek some kind of intellectual security in a different language game—that of scientific explanation, for instance, whose “causes are of interest to psychologists”, says Wittgenstein, whereas the philosopher’s problem “is not a causal but a conceptual one” (PI II, xi, emphasis  The relationship between attention, curiosity, and satisfaction is likely to be underwritten by complex combinations of genetic, developmental, and libidinal factors that attempt to ground our understanding of that relationship in just one biological, psychological, or psychoanalytic theory will often overlook the significance and contribution of the other components. 2

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in original). The philosopher is not interested in explanations because any explanation will then require further explanations of the grounds for its explanation. Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is not a cognitive discipline. Rather, it is characterised by positive and negative aims, summed up by Wittgenstein scholars G.P. Baker and P.M.S. Hacker as follows: Positively, philosophy aims to attain an overview of a conceptual field, to arrange grammatical data so that the manifold relationships become perspicuous. Negatively, philosophy aims to disentangle conceptual confusions, to destroy metaphysical illusions, to undermine mythologies of symbolism and of psychology. (Baker & Hacker, 2009, p. 284)

For Wittgenstein, then, his concept of seeing is closely aligned with his concept of philosophy. In their most simple formulation, this is about seeing things clearly for what they are and how they ordinarily behave, rather than what we would have them (ideally) be, or what our extant understandings of the world would prove them to be. Philosophy is not a matter of finding definitive answers, or placing things without the realm of our observation and understanding, but about seeing things differently and more clearly. How is it that we come to see things differently? We might think that seeing aspects requires extraordinary effort and expert instruction, and a failure to do so “a lack of special experience, training or familiarity” (Affeldt, 2010, p. 277). But Wittgenstein points out that we actually perform this kind of seeing already in our most ordinary experiences: I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’. (PIII, xi)

This is the first occasion upon which Wittgenstein mentions the concept of an aspect, and it arrives as unexpectedly as the experience of an aspect. Why is there a need to call this experience “noticing an aspect”? An aspect refers to something about an object that has gone unseen; once

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noticed, we see (something about) that object differently, though the object itself remains unchanged—just as a portrait would remain materially unchanged, even when we become pleasantly surprised to learn of the sitter’s relation to someone we know. The dawning of semblance or recognition changes nothing of the image itself, only the way we behave towards it. Here, Wittgenstein develops his discussion to look at the famous duck-rabbit drawing by Jastrow (Fig. 2.1): In this image, I might initially see the representation (for it is only representation) of a duck. Either by looking more closely or having the suggestion made to me, I might suddenly see the image as a rabbit. In doing so, another aspect of this image has ‘dawned’ on me. From here on, I might see the image as ambiguous, seeing it now as a duck, now as a rabbit. But what is unique about these cases of seeing is that we both see a change and see that nothing has changed: “The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged” (PIII, xi, 130). Aspect-seeing, or ‘seeing­as’, is established not so much as a lifting of a veil of any illusion but simply the presentation of possible viewpoints and considerations—some of which we may accept, others which we may reject, and others which we may not yet be able to see.3 Some people may initially struggle to

Fig. 2.1  Duck-rabbit drawing, Jastrow  Wittgenstein recognises that we might at this point want to suggest that it is a fault in our language that is allowing us to describe one experience with the same word (‘see’) as another, and that we might want a different description for the “indirect” phenomenon of seeing-as when we say “I see this face as a likeness of the other”. Indeed, an issue that he keeps returning to in Part II of Investigations is whether seeing-as is really a kind of seeing or an interpreting (“Doesn’t this really amount to ‘Is it interpreting? Is it seeing?’”). But in anticipating this point, he defends the use of the word ‘see’ on the grounds that we ought to be able to refer to this experience in our language directly, and not just indirectly: “As I can speak of red without calling it the colour of blood” (PIII, 3

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discern the rules of American football from being accustomed to watching rugby, or they may fail to understand how late Picasso paintings distinguish themselves from those of a child because they are used to masterpieces painted in linear perspective. Sometimes further ostensive definition (a mode of pedagogy) is required to point us in the direction of other possible ways of seeing these things. The discussion of aspects is significant because it is not simply a matter of increasing the number of perspectives on a thing but of exploring why some perspectives are more meaningful than others. This comes about through the introduction of what Wittgenstein calls our “attitude” towards the phenomena we observe, and the aspects we tend to favour. He follows the example of the duck-rabbit with a drawing of a ‘picture face’. The face has a kind of a benign smile on it, and Wittgenstein says that “In some respects I stand towards it as I do towards a human face. I can study its expression, can react to it as to the expression of the human face. A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals, can treat them as it treats dolls” (PIII, xi, 119). Here the physiognomy of the face enters the frame of seeing-as; we find the face charming, despite its formal simplicity, as it seems to smile back at us. In referring to a child’s ability to relate to inanimate and fantastical objects as they would to other humans, Wittgenstein argues that the child sees those things as human (though it does not mistake it for a human face, or take it as the illusion of a face). They must, of course, manifest qualities that the child associates with being human (such as a friendly smile), but the point is that if they didn’t have those qualities, the child couldn’t make that association. A face, then, is something that we can be responsive to, whether it is a picture face or the face of a friend—or even the face of a word. The possibility of our relating to our words in as meaningful a way as we do to paintings or to friends will be significant to the exploration of education as a concept (i.e. as the expression of an interest in education) in this book. This possibility is alluded to by Wittgenstein when he describes a word’s ‘physiognomy’: xi). That the phenomenon of ‘seeing-as’ arises from within the grammar of the word ‘see’ is thus necessary to our description of the immediate experience. What’s more, it must be necessary to the communication of what we are seeing to others.

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The familiar physiognomy of a word, the feeling that it has taken up its meaning into itself, that it is an actual likeness of its meaning—there could be humans to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words.)—And how are these feelings manifested among us?—By the way we choose and value words. (PIII, xi)

Our words are at their most meaningful when they have been carefully chosen, just as our relations with other humans are more meaningful when we aren’t suspicious of them, either because we don’t know their thoughts, or because we think they might not be human at all. It may indeed be that because human relations are so complicated in this regard, that we look to language to be the value-neutral vehicle of our interpersonal volatility. But Wittgenstein insists on meaning being something to which we can relate, rather than something which simply transports our relations: “Meaning is a physiognomy” (PI, §568). He offers us a sensuous awareness of our relation to language, the fact of expression’s significance in generating the responses that we, in turn, will find satisfying. Cavell also follows this line that words are much like human expressions, and that therefore, like words, human expressions ask to be both read and interpreted: “I have to read the physiognomy, and see the creature according to my reading, and treat it according to my seeing” (CR, 356). Words therefore take on an aesthetic quality in the sense that facial expressions and gestures have an aesthetic dimension to them also. This will become more significant in the discussions of criticism in Chap. 7. Wittgenstein takes it that philosophy qua seeing ought to be “completely simple” (PR, 52). We overcomplicate philosophy just as we overcomplicate the nature of seeing by overlaying it with anxieties concerning deception, suspicion, and intention. Psychological anxieties, particularly those concerning a desire to know things, and to know them for sure, prevent us from seeing things as they are, and from seeing their different aspects also. These anxieties prevail less upon the child mind than that of the adult: children both accept the world that they see, and are able to entertain many aspects without being troubled over the nature of perception. It is for this reason that Wittgenstein frequently evokes the figure of the child as one that harks back to our more primitive modes of taking

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up the world, to remind the reader of the more simple character of thought-as-seeing, rather than its complex and metaphysical transfigurations. This is not to suggest that we, as adults, can see as children, nor are we to understand ‘seeing-as’ as a necessarily childlike view of the world; after all, more sophisticated expressions of seeing-something-as-­something do presuppose what Wittgenstein calls “mastery of a technique” (PI, §150; PIII, xi), which does mean achieving a degree of familiarity with phenomena and concepts before new and more nuanced aspects to them might present themselves.

Veiling the Visual: Film Theory So, why do we find the whole business of seeing so difficult? As I have suggested, particular pictures of how we think and see can force themselves upon us to the extent that we cannot think or see outside them: “It is like a pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at. It never occurs to us to take them off” (PI, §103). The fact that we are so accustomed to hearing speak of ‘theoretical lenses’ through which we are supposed to read and interpret the world of our experience shows just how metaphorically wedded our thinking is to wearing the glasses of theory. Theorising, whether in the study of film or education or others, cannot avoid tendencies towards abstraction and generalisation. In fact, according to Roland Barthes, these tendencies are essential to its nature and to theory’s aspiration towards a science: “Theory is essentially a scientific discourse, one that is not only an abstract and generalizing, or foundational discourse, but also … one that turns back on itself. A language that turns back on itself ” (quoted in Rodowick, 2015, p.  1). D.N. Rodowick argues that it is this self-reflective character to theorising that redeems it from its metaphysical drift, but it is also the case that theory risks becoming caught up in the anxieties of its own self-criticism and introspection by assuming an abstract and general character. Which is to say, doesn’t theory institute the very problems to which it then requires a new solution? In seeking a status that approximates to science, theory—much like Descartes—attempts to climb outside of, or above, the flux of our experi-

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ence and the problems of our perception, by generating new explanations for phenomena and existence which carry with them the burden of doubt and anxiety of those that generated them. Cavell describes this compulsion to search for order beyond human sense as “a search or demand for the absolute which [Wittgenstein] more generally names the metaphysical” (CW, 4). It is necessarily a causal orientation towards the world, summed up ambivalently by André Bazin as something which arises in sterile periods of thought as “a fruitful source for the analysis of the causes of the drought, and it can help to create the conditions necessary for the rebirth” (Bazin, 2005, p. 95). So, before I consider what it might mean to return to the things of our educational experience themselves, by seeing how they are presented to us on film, I want to briefly explore how “the demand for the absolute” manifests in film theorising, and how theory extends the Cartesian gaze (of both doubt and the aspiration to knowledge as a response) and generates a picture of film as Cartesian demon, by considering one of the more notorious texts in the study of film. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ remains, according to Andrew Klevan, “perhaps the most studied and cited in the history of film scholarship” (2014, p. 147), while D.N. Rodowick calls it “the most influential and intensely debated essay in contemporary film theory” (2014, p. 253). As such, it is worth revisiting its main points. Mulvey’s feminist-psychoanalytic critique of (predominantly Hollywood) narrative cinema broadly rests on the charge that the camera and its characters are complicit in the enactment of a ‘controlling male gaze’, which reduces women in its films to the status of objects within the narrative. The seductiveness of typical Hollywood narratives is that they sustain the illusion for viewers, male and female alike, that they are looking in voyeuristically and unseen on a private world; ergo, if the female is objectified within that world, the viewer (whose voyeurism disenable any critical function in relation to the film) sees the story simply as ‘the way things are’—with the woman’s role always defined by a Male Gaze. On Mulvey’s view, while we might think that the camera is an impartial observer, it actually recreates a world of projective ‘scopophilia’ for us, and one that is inevitably patriarchal (because of its origins as a male-­ dominated art form):

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The cinema satisfies a primordial wish for pleasurable looking, but it also goes further developing scopophilia in its narcissistic aspect. The conventions of mainstream film focus attention on the human form. Scale, space, stones are all anthropomorphic. Here, curiosity and the wish to look intermingle with a fascination with likeness and recognition: the human face, the human body, the relationship between the human form and its surroundings, the visible presence of the person in the world. (Mulvey, 1975, p. 17)

Mulvey’s key concept of scopophilia is easy enough to illustrate by means of a memorable scene from the 1962 James Bond film, Dr No. About midway through the film, once Bond has already been established as protagonist and hero, the camera finds him sleeping on the beach. He wakes to the sound of someone singing. Because the identity of the singer is still an enigma, the viewer (according to Mulvey) is inclined to identify with (the gaze, or psychology, of ) the character who is also deprived of that information: James Bond. He listens to the siren call and looks around to discover its origin: the camera affects a sympathy with his desire to visualise that which he can only hear. We follow his searching-­desiring gaze until it lights on the figure emerging from the sea: Honey Ryder (played by Ursula Andress). The sequence of images situates the camera as our lens on this world; my eye is co-extensive with its viewpoint. And because the camera is both guided by a male, and depicts a male fantasy of the world, my own vision is fused with that of an objectifying male gaze also (the comparisons with Botticelli’s Venus, particularly in the alignment of the horizon and the waistline of the woman emerging from the sea, are aesthetically obvious). When Bond sees Honey emerge from the water, the change of expression on his face registers his delight and his fulfilled desire, thereby doing the same for the viewer. The fact that the woman remains unaware of Bond’s presence evidences her lack of consciousness, an inability to exercise her own gaze as the object of one. He is the one that sees, she is the one that is seen. Mulvey’s point is that, irrespective of gender, the viewer will come to align their own gaze with that of the male in narratives of this kind because the woman is constructed within the patriarchal unconscious as someone who symbolises the threat of castration but exer-

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cises no agency of her own due to her castrated status. Thus, both men and women will go on to reproduce these attitudes in their own lives. By means of the psychoanalytic theory, Mulvey is able to reveal evidence of the male gaze in any number of films because by definition narrative cinema confines female subjectivity within its frames. The thesis demonstrates the ways in which the Male Gaze not only subjugates women within films, affirming the view that men already possess of women but invites a female audience to submit to the patriarchal order which the visual pleasure of cinema imparts. Mulvey declares even the mise-en-scène to be part of the architecture of the Male Gaze also.4 Female subjectivity and agency are totally suppressed through objectification, whether for the male or female spectator. Looking at Hollywood movies of the period in which Mulvey’s essay appeared, we might find plenty to support her thesis. But the problem is not so much with the accuracy of analysis when it comes to those films that support the thesis, but whether (a) the thesis itself supports a worldview that we would wish to endorse, and (b) whether there aren’t exceptions to those films that seem to support the theory that might be considered more interesting, and possibly even affirmative of a woman’s status within cinematic representation. Like many other theories, the theory of the Male Gaze struggles to admit of exceptions to consider the possibility of Nancy Bauer’s caution: “Not always, and not everywhere”. To do so would be to allow itself to leak interpretation to the point at which it no longer has a hold. In order to transcend exceptions to its rule, theory is obliged to climb outside of context, as this might put a limit on the lifespan of its applicability. In not admitting of individual or time-­ bound exception, the theorist reveals an attitude towards both knowledge and cinema that cannot leave it open to interpretation otherwise, that is, to think it differently.5 Film theorising (though admittedly also not  John Gibbs provides a useful working definition of Mise-en-scène as “the contents of the frame and the way that they are organised”, which includes “Lighting, décor, properties, and the actors themselves” but can also include the movement of the camera (Gibbs, 2002, p. 5). 5  The film critic Pauline Kael, for example, was particularly scathing of the Cahiers de Cinema critics’ attempts to elevate the director to the status of auteur by making of the notion a theoretical construct, not least because it encouraged a kind of blindness to when good film directors produced bad films (Kael, 1963). Theory, as such, can prevent against good judgment. 4

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always, and not everywhere) seeks to attain that higher, detached ground from which Descartes hoped to observe other people, to contemplate the possibility of their not being human, despite evidence to the contrary. In short, film theory risks reducing human activity to scientific analysis of what happens on screen, but must necessarily retreat from the individual instance in order to generalise from afar. It places itself at a distance from humanity, but some sense of human subjectivity is lost in the process. It is possible, even in the case of Andress’s Honey Ryder, that a swing towards focusing on the fact that the screen does not show us a live human being, allows the theorist to overlook the fact that it still shows us—in Cavell’s words—“a human something”. To ignore such a fact makes of the theorist a dehumaniser, as much as the director.

Seeing Films in Spite of Theory To look at what a film is and does before our eyes, instead of trying to peer behind its images into its intent, may make us more attentive to the individual instances and exceptions that continue to cultivate a sensibility for phenomenal aspects. Cavell takes the focus on the individual instance, particularly in moral thought, to be an Aristotelian innovation that is distinct from the theoretical and a priori orientations of Plato and Kant: “Here it is the exercise of my perception of a situation—not an intellectual grasp of necessity, but an empirical judgment, an a posteriori cognition, of practical intelligence, of course one that has been educated in a certain way—that determines the course I shall take” (CW, 357). The suggestion here is that only an education in certain ways of seeing the world, including the theoretical, will allow us to then see the world simply for what it is. It could be argued that only an awareness of the Male Gaze theory really attunes us to the instances in which it is not applicable—indeed counter-productive—in the cultivation of practical intelligence. To be alive to the ways in which our concepts appear on screen is to be alive to the fact that cinema, as Bazin believed, reveals (a) reality to us—and that sometimes that reality will affirm the Male Gaze, and sometimes perhaps expose it. Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1960 film The Truth is a good e­ xample:

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made two years prior to Dr No, it is a courtroom drama about a young woman (Brigitte Bardot) accused of murdering her lover. The film is unusual for its depiction of a female who is effectively on trial for her sexuality, and the kind of louche behaviour that would not have provoked any public interest if it were a man in the same position at that time. Bardot plays the character of Dominique as someone who refuses to court/viewer sympathy by being unapologetically motivated by self-­ interest, while at the same time questioning whether such an attitude merits a different treatment (from men who behave in the same way) in the eyes of the law. In centring a lot of the action on the courtroom, Clouzot draws close attention to the gaze of an all-male high court, which censors almost every opportunity the desperate Dominique has to express herself. When the camera first opens on the courtroom, a long take is used to allow for a number of different players in the film—including the bereaved parents of the victim, the judge, the defence and prosecuting lawyers, and members of the public—to enter the shot at various points, gathering them all into the same social fold marked only by the absence of the accused. She is thus designated as socially undesirable from the outset. Later, the responsibilities of the jury to be impartial are read out over a panning shot of their faces, gathering together a group of severe men with disapproval already registered in their expression. A picture of womanhood seems preconceived, and it will keep Dominique captive throughout. In this instance, the director is making self-conscious choices to alert the viewer to the duplicity of a Male Gaze, as opposed to simply affirming its totality, and it is in the space provided by duplicity that a viewer’s own judgment is allowed to enter into the frame. Do we also condemn Dominique perhaps purely because of her unlikeability? The irony drawn forth by the title, therefore, is that the actual question of Dominique’s role in the murder of her lover is not what is at stake in terms of truthfulness, but rather how we arrive at “the truth” according to those procedures which most serve our own interest (whether of desire, expediency, or social stability). Dominique is neither an innocent nor a particularly ‘good’ person, but she is neither bad nor guilty according to the moral criteria that this society would have her convicted.

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To suggest that films do not simply operate as an extension of a particular worldview, but sometimes invite the questioning of it also, is to make available a dialogue with film that theoretical approaches such as that of the Male Gaze would deny. What is not acknowledged in Mulvey’s analysis of social control through screen imagery, in particular, is the way that the analysis exercises its own form of control over film interpretation and the visual. The theorist may view Bond as the avatar of a particular gaze, but is unable to reflect on the way that she herself imposes a different kind of gaze upon him: the explanatory gaze, say, one which governs and determines how he will behave as that avatar throughout the film. This is by no means a defence of Bond’s highly dubious feminist credentials, but a way of drawing attention to the problem of what it means ‘to see’ in the first place, and how often we mistake an ability to explain what is seen (according to a theory) with an ability to see things as they appear to us (and to interpret them for ourselves). Theorising can therefore present us with ways of seeing (or pictures) that act as obstacles to seeing things for what they really are, and for seeing things as other things. In using the term theorising, I have in mind that mode described by Nancy Bauer as the “attempt to describe and explain phenomena systematically in an internally consistent way that mandates or predicts what should or will happen in relevant future cases” (Bauer, 2015, p. 106). In order to accept Mulvey’s theory as true, we have to see cinema as she sees it, that is, through the a priori lens of the Male Gaze. And then this way of seeing becomes inevitable. In this, Mulvey overrides the potential for interpretation in film-viewing the possibility of seeing things otherwise. But if we do see film otherwise, or do not take the theory to account for the whole image, then the potential for cinema to be more than just a reproduction of the patriarchy becomes possible, and theory is just one perspective on issues such as gender as communicated through film. If all ‘Grand Theory’ of the Male Gaze variety is sometimes criticised on the grounds that it aspires to the condition of science, Cavell has also expressed his frustration with Mulvey’s critique on the grounds that it attempts to account for all experiences of pleasure in film-viewing as ones of which we should be suspicious, even ashamed. This denunciation of pleasure, and its articulation within a scientific mode of explanation,

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again expresses a singular contempt for the ordinariness of our experience, our warming to and caring for certain characters and modes of representation, our wonder at style and space, and the things that remain ‘obscure’ in our experience. Wittgenstein himself compares the work of art to a visit to a friend, in that I do not set out with the intention of making my friend manifest feelings of a certain kind towards me. To approach a work of art with the feeling that its only unconscious desire is to subjugate the minorities of its representation suggests that I am not prepared to listen to what it has to say because my mind is already made up (as is the impression given by jurors at Dominique’s trial in The Truth). But just as it would not make sense to visit friends if I already knew everything that was going on in their minds, it makes sense to not presuppose that the work of art is thinking something other than what it displays. “[T]he work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself ”, Wittgenstein says (CV, 58e). Theory (or ‘bad theorising’, on Wittgenstein’s view) can overprepare us for the minor miracles of ordinary existence, a kind of preparedness that always threatens to be unsatisfying, by virtue of a mismatch between the theoretical criteria with which we are equipped to explain and account for experience, and the experience itself. Rodowick suggests that a Wittgensteinian humanist philosopher must not rely on a theory to explain the phenomena that she has seen, but “must examine phenomena that may be shifting before her very eyes. She must account for change in the course of its becoming, while she herself may be in the process of self-transformation” (2007, p. 101). If film theory so often places the theorist outside of the course of events at an objective and objectifying distance from the phenomena she seeks to explain, then she does an injustice to both the film and herself because the fixity of this position says nothing new of either, and affirms only the theory in the process.

Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics In disputing the notion that we can ever have objective and external criteria for our relation to language, and therefore to others, Wittgenstein stakes out an aesthetic claim in his discussion of aspects, which is that our

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appreciation of art and what is beautiful is also contingent upon the circumstances of our appreciation, and the language in which we express our appreciation. This sits in contradistinction to those aesthetic approaches which might only be concerned with, say, the form of an artwork, an idea that was ridiculed by Søren Kierkegaard as one unable to see that its straining for the universal left it always at risk of becoming outdated. “[A]n aesthetics of this kind”, says Kierkegaard, “could only sustain itself for a definite time, that is for as long as no one was aware that time mocked it and its classic works” (Kierkegaard, 1992, p.  66). Kierkegaard here identified not only the transitory nature of aspirations towards the universal in art but that the aesthetic had to be tied to its commitments and responses to the ordinary world if it was to be of value: in short, that the aesthetic must also be ethical. Wittgenstein would follow this line in his own reflections on aesthetics, with his declaration in the Tractatus that “ethics and aesthetics are one”. A Wittgensteinian aesthetics is somewhat continuous with the lines of thought that informed the second part of Philosophical Investigations and large parts of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology. In the ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ delivered in 1938, he took issue with any notion of aesthetics that appeals to criteria external to the object under appreciation (metaphysical notions of Beauty in particular), and expounds a view that asserts the cultural conditions of aesthetic appreciation. Particular scorn is reserved for the kind of dilettantism that resides in expressively admiring something as ‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’ when there is no other comment to support the meaning of these words at all. The use of such words within the language game of approval either leads to their redundancy (think of the word ‘amazing’ as it is currently used), or to their having currency only in the mouths of those recognised and/or endorsed as legitimate authorities. The former leads to a lack of attention to the expressive function of our language, while the latter allows for anyone other than the recognised authorities to default on an engagement with the aesthetic (because of its inaccessibility as a private experience). Again, if our attention is drawn back to the way we use words, rather than who gets to use them or why they are misused, we start to see that everyone is qualified to make aesthetic judgment—and via expression that might also be described as aesthetic.

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Rules are also at play in aesthetics. Wittgenstein doesn’t talk about painting or sculpture in this respect, but uses the non-typical example of tailoring to demonstrate how we come to form judgments about what looks “right”: In the case of the word ‘correct’ you have a variety of related cases. There is first the case in which you learn the rules. The cutter learns how long a coat is to be, how wide the sleeve must be, etc. He learns rules—he is drilled— as in music you are drilled in harmony and counterpoint. Suppose I went in for tailoring and I first learnt all the rules, I might have, on the whole, two sorts of attitude. (1) Lewy says: ‘This is too short.’ I say: ‘No. It is right. It is according to the rules.’ (2) I develop a feeling for the rules. I interpret the rules. I might say: ‘No. It isn’t right. It isn’t according to the rules.’ Here I would be making an aesthetic judgement about the thing which is according to the rules in sense (1). On the other hand, if I hadn’t learnt the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgement. In learning the rules you get a more and more refined judgement. Learning the rules actually changes your judgement. (Although, if you haven’t learnt Harmony and haven’t a good ear, you may nevertheless detect any disharmony in a sequence of chords.) (LC, 5)

Here Wittgenstein helpfully brings attitudes into the conversation that situates rules in relation to aesthetic appreciation. Either I have an attitude towards the tailoring of a coat that is determined by rules, or I have an attitude towards it that is informed by a ‘feeling’ for them, that is, an appreciation of the purpose they serve in general and also their limitations in particular instances. It is, of course, the latter attitude that Wittgenstein favours, while conceding that an understanding of rules is not completely necessary to pick up on aesthetic incongruity (this is partly because of the role that experience has to play in aesthetics also). Wittgenstein does not go along with the view that there is a causal relation between a work of art and an individual’s experience of it (i.e. that seeing the Mona Lisa gives me an ‘understanding’ of Beauty), but sees the two as being inextricably bound up in one another. Severin Schroeder (2017) describes the link between work and experience as “conceptual”, a reminder that perception is both of something and informed by experi-

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ence. Judgment is the attempt to do justice to this conceptual tension, made more complex by the degree to which our dispositions affect our ability to see aspects of the work in any particular case. The important point here is the exercise of judgment in aesthetic appreciation: “[I]f I hadn’t learnt the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgement”, as Wittgenstein says. The refinement of judgment comes from knowing the rules, and there is no denying that this therefore leads to judgment being an exercise of appreciation within a particular culture or form of life, rather than an absolute measure of quality. Ray Monk observes that Wittgenstein’s aesthetics allows for aesthetic appreciation to be linked in different cultures and art forms by ‘family resemblances’ of response (e.g. disgust or satisfaction), but that “Appreciation takes a bewildering variety of forms, which differ from culture to culture, and quite often will not consist in saying anything” (Monk, 1991, p.  405). Saying nothing can therefore mean a lot in terms of aesthetic judgment, while saying a lot can also mean nothing. And both are responses to how a work or thing is ‘with’ the person making the judgment, whether the work means something for them. I will return to these comments on judgments as criticism in Chap. 7, but suffice to say that they cannot be taken independently of the seeing that prompts them. What Wittgensteinian aesthetics set up is the notion that no work has qualities independent of our judgment of them. Whether that ‘work’ is a tailored suit, a film, or a school, it will always prompt expressions of our appreciation that are expressions of both attitude and experience. This appreciation, then, is never something that is wholly right or wrong in its judgment but can always be refined, transformed, or misled depending on the environment in which it is explored.

 onclusion: An Aesthetic Education C in Concepts Wittgenstein’s lectures on aesthetics lend themselves to the idea that intransigent criteria of the ‘good’ or ‘beautiful’ in relation to cinema will not in and of themselves satisfy our appeal to seeing education through

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film. Nor can there be any one quality or style that marks out any one film as one which invites us to rethink education definitively. A film makes its claim upon our appreciation and revaluation in the instance of its viewing. Further, the aesthetic judgments made in the context of seeing film as education are difficult because they are not made within the confines of strictly defined rules. Students who are familiar with formal techniques in filmmaking may be able to make better judgments about certain aspects of the conceptual representation of education on film, but the others are not excluded from it. After all, to fully describe the concept of appreciation in any context is, as Wittgenstein says, impossible because “to describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment” (LC, 7). This is not to hand aesthetics over to pure subjectivism either: it is simply a matter of situating ourselves slightly differently in relation to artworks. Instead of asking “how can I know it is good?”, we look at what happens when we make claims about our appreciation of something. For Benjamin Tilghman, following Wittgenstein, this means engaging with a work of art because “it connects us personally with one another so that in our shared appreciation of art we can appreciate not only the works of art, but one another” (Tilghman, 2006, p. 171). Works of art that prompt this connection are frequently those with many aspects to them, and it is in aspect-seeing that we find a prompt for interaction with others also. In the rest of this book, I want to concentrate on the idea that a Wittgensteinian aesthetics (of seeing-as, of seeing aspects and connections, of attitudes, and of concepts) is one that allows us to see certain films as conducting their own conceptual investigations over a fixed duration, during which time our attention is drawn to the meaningful relation between various (educational) phenomena so as to provide a perspicuous representation of the concept(s) at stake. It is a requirement of film’s conceptual investigations that they be seen in their entirety so that we are less inclined to abstract from particular scenes the information needed to support arguments that aren’t sustained throughout the work. As Wittgenstein remarked of Investigations, this is about reading a text in respect of the idea that “the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks” (PI, vii). The temptation to instrumentalise particular scenes or moments from either

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book or film leads the reader/viewer down the path of illustration over evaluation (Gibbs, 2017), and away from the possibility of a perspicuous view of the film’s conceptual expression. A Wittgensteinian perspicuity is arrived at by tackling first the difficulty we have in commanding “a clear view of our words” because of the desire to somehow see them from above, or outside, their meaning in use: Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases. (Wittgenstein, PI §122)

We are no longer talking about clearness in terms of theoretical explanations, precise definitions, or agreement upon origins and objective criteria, but according to the connections we are able to make between things, seeing one thing as another thing. According to Cavell, perspicuity means “discovering a new manifestation of the concept in discovering something new about the ordinary” (2004b, p. 252), and it is this project that reveals the aesthetic character to Wittgenstein’s own work also. The Investigations, for Cavell, acquires a literary quality by virtue of the way it explores its own concepts, in dialogue with itself and with the most ordinary instances of the things it attempts to describe. The text evinces a care for the concepts it explores, which is sufficient unto itself to do justice both to expression and intent, the ethical, and the aesthetic as one. The Investigations, then, provides a model for the exploration of concepts and what we mean by them that both allows for a practical method of exploring educational phenomena as they are represented on screen, and how the viewer might come to learn something different about education in the process. Both Tilghman and Cavell draw upon Wittgenstein to argue that aesthetics is fundamentally a sharing of humanity and that artworks exist and have their greatest merit when bringing people into conversation. In this they agree that meaningful descriptions of people, their feelings, and their behaviour cannot be a part “of some theoretical scheme nor are they in any way pre-theoretical and awaiting incorporation into a properly developed science of psychology and human behav-

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ior” (Tilghman, 2006, p. 49). Instead the conversation is about things that matter, and is itself, as Cavell puts it, “a matter of meaning it”. This conversation can be broadly interpreted—it can be with the artist, with the work, even with imagined interlocutors as in Wittgenstein’s case— but it serves nonetheless to draw out from the viewer or listener, their attitudes on a work’s aspects, and to come to see different aspects through that conversation. Representation and response constitute the two movements of this (ethical) aesthetics, and it is in exploring these particular examples that greater perspicuity as to their educational significance— what is meant by them and what they might mean for us—can be demonstrated. The next chapter begins with one such example.

Bibliography Affeldt, S. (2010). Seeing Aspects and the Therapeutic Reading of Wittgenstein. In W.  Day & V.  J. Krebs (Eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baker, G.  P., & Hacker, P.  M. S. (2009). Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Bauer, N. (2005). Cogito Ergo Film: Plato, Descartes and Fight Club. In R. Read & J.  Goodenough (Eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bauer, N. (2015). How to Do Things With Pornography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bazin, A. (2005). What Is Cinema? (Vol. II). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Benjamin, W. (1999). Illuminations. London: Pimlico. Cavell, S. (2004a). Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (2004b). The Investigations Everyday Aesthetics of Itself. In J. Gibson & W. Huemer (Eds.), The Literary Wittgenstein. London: Routledge. Derrida, J. (2001). Cogito and the History of Madness. In Writing and Difference. London: Routledge. Descartes, R. (1968). Discourse on Method and The Meditations. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Foucault, M. (2006). History of Madness. New York: Routledge.

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Gibbs, J. (2002). Mise-en-scène: Film Style and Interpretation. London: Wallflower. Gibbs, A. (2017). ‘Not to Explain, But to Accept’: Wittgenstein and the Pedagogic Potential of Film. In M. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations. Singapore: Springer. Kael, P. (1963). Circles and Squares. Film Quarterly, 16(3, Spring), 12–26. Kierkegaard, S. (1992). Either/Or. London: Penguin Books. Laugier, S. (2010). Aspects, Sense, and Perception. In W. Day & V. J. Krebs (Eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Malcolm, N. (1958). Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. London: Oxford University Press. McLuhan, M. (2011). The Gutenberg Galaxy. London: University of Toronto Press. Monk, R. (1991). The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Mulvey, L. (1975). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen, 16(3), 6–18. Ong, W. (1982). Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. Panofsky, E. (1991). Perspective as Symbolic Form. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books. Rodowick, D. N. (2007). The Virtual Life of Film. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodowick, D.  N. (2014). Elegy for Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rodowick, D.  N. (2015). Philosophy’s Artful Conversation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schroeder, S. (2017). Wittgenstein and Aesthetics. In H. Glock & J. Hyman (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Standish, P. (2017). Seeing Connections: From Cats and Classes to Characteristics and Cultures. In M. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations. Singapore: Springer. Tilghman, B. (2006). Reflections on Aesthetic Judgment. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing.

3 Seeing Philosophy on Film

In 1933, Jean Vigo screened his film Zero for Conduct about a group of schoolboys leading a rebellion against their absurdly doctrinaire boarding school. The film was quickly banned by the Board of Censors for a portrayal of childhood so exuberant that it was seen as a threat to public order (Dixon & Foster, 2013, p. 145). Vigo’s film was only 41 minutes long but packed a powerful punch: its disorientating camera shots and fragmented narrative went entirely against the conventions of sequential storytelling to present a picture of youth as the antidote to adulthood’s slavish adherence to rule and regulation. Vigo’s young boys, amateur actors playing roles based on the director’s own experience, embodied both Romantic ideas of freedom and innocence, as well as a mischief and ebullience that made the four walls that contained them resemble the paranoid architecture of Enlightenment rationality. And in dispensing with both narrative and any attempt at either the centrality or the sentimentality of character development, Vigo chose to foreground something else: the wholly problematic concept of institutional education. Zero for Conduct, in depicting a school’s authoritarianism as being overthrown by precisely the spirit it seeks to suppress, instead expresses an inter-

© The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_3

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est in schooling—both in its current use and in its future potential.1 With regards to the latter, it would seem as if Vigo’s anarchist leanings looked to dispense with formal schooling altogether, finding him in sympathy with the likes of deschooling educationalists such as Ivan Illich and Paul Goodman. But school is most certainly what is at stake in this film: the questions of whether it has any use, whether it has any meaning—whether we care for it at all. School, for Vigo, must be taken down from the inside, just as it would be by Lindsay Anderson’s public schoolboys in his 1968 film if …. Zero for Conduct might thus be seen as the first instance in which schooling undergoes some form of conceptual revaluation on film, in the sense that this dwelling upon the nature and function of the school is something that is stretched out over its duration, in its every frame, such that we come to see the school differently as a result. At no point does Vigo release us from his attitude towards this phenomenon either—we know where he stands, not because he has defined education for us, but because he has shown how he feels about the problems of its institutional character, using the camera lens to do so. And whether we agree with Vigo’s antiestablishment sentiment or not, it is hard to deny the deftness with which it is captured: through humour, conviction, and pathos. Although mistaken for politics by the authorities, the film is not propaganda; it is meant to capture the way things really are, and how people really behave, as a way of questioning whether they might/could/should be otherwise. That a film might be read as investigating a concept such as schooling might seem a curious notion in itself: we are more accustomed to following characters on film, not concepts. But this is simply a matter of how the eye/mind has been trained—the novel, in particular, has encouraged this emphasis on seeing character as a narrative’s driving force. In his essay ‘What Becomes of Things on Film?’, Stanley Cavell opens the door for making our ordinary and everyday concepts as much the focus of our critical observations as character. In the process, we come to see the important conceptual relationship that is continually being re-established between the humans who give it meaning and the world from which that meaning is drawn. In the films of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, for  The fact that the film was made in 1933 need not detract from its enduring significance as a critique of schooling, inasmuch as schooling remains something whose value remains under criticism. 1

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example, Cavell suggests that both “make a comedy of the fact that such a creature as the human being is fated to pursue happiness” (Cavell, 1978, p. 251). It is humanity itself that is of interest here, not the psychological development of the protagonist. The pursuit of human happiness necessitates the transformation of things, from one thing to another—Chaplin is seen to turn an old boot into a meal for two, and later on he plays with a pair of forks as if they were dancing legs. In relation to Zero for Conduct, then, we might say that the students in the school are demanding that the institution become something else through their revolution, so that it will contribute to their happiness as a result. This investigation of schooling, though, is not simply a matter of representation, but of filmic representation. Our conception of schooling achieved by the film is not just dependent upon the physical presence of a school on screen, but is there in the way that the camera is deployed to articulate that understanding: in its angles, its shot size, its framing. Rather than use these elements to contrive a kind of consistency of perspective throughout the film, such that the viewer comes to feel comfortable that they are seeing the film either from an objective remove or from the particular point of view of an individual character, Vigo’s camera ­frequently moves in such a way so as to remove that sense of comfort altogether. In the opening sequence to the film, for example, two boys meet on the train to return to school. One of them first sits in the carriage with just another man asleep opposite him, and he looks about restlessly. The camera briefly holds both figures in shot, contrasting the youth with the older man, one alert and one indifferent. As the train stops in at the station and the boy is reunited with his schoolfriend, the camera angles themselves become more excitable. The new arrival’s boarding of the train is shot from both inside and out, preventing a full view of either of the boys’ faces, and then views from above as the boys begin to play around in a sequence of childish amusement. The movement between a medium high angle shot that establishes the intimacy between the two boys, and close-ups of their individual hand movements and faces, suggests that their relationship is built on both affinity and uniqueness. A further low angle shot of the boys smoking a cigar acts almost as a reminder that there is someone standing behind the camera, someone who can’t achieve the right angle from which

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Fig. 3.1  Zero for Conduct compared with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone

to fully capture the essence of the boys’ personality, requiring them to shift from viewpoint to viewpoint. The boys, meanwhile, laugh and smoke as if unawares that they might be observed (Fig. 3.1). Let me contrast this moment with another very similar scene of more recent cinema, one in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (2001), to demonstrate how important the role of cinematic technique is in configuring the representation of childhood and its relation to the school as institution, independent of character-driven representation. In the scene where the 11-year-old Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) meets his soon-to-be best friend Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) for the first time, an establishing aerial shot follows the train from a soaring height, and then we cut to seeing inside the carriage where Harry is sat, the camera at head height, face on from medium distance. Already there is the sense that we, as viewers, share a vantage point co-extensive with the director/camera, one that sees from wherever it desires to see. The camera is in full control of its subject. As soon as Ron arrives in the carriage, we see him as if from Harry’s perspective, forging the connection between them. The two then sit opposite each other, with camera alternating between them, replicating their lines of sight. The interactions between the two boys are highly regimented, their mode of line-delivery is stiff, each waiting patiently for the other to end their line before they politely begin theirs. Instead of the actors, it is the camera, the direction, and the dialogue that are doing the boys’ work of getting to know one another for them. The impression given, then, is that the young actors are not to be trusted to communicate a friendship by themselves, and therefore require the facilitation of that representation

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via technical and directorial means. These 11-year-old boys, upon repeat viewing, in their every gesture and utterance, seem increasingly automated, unreal. They may be boy wizards, but they haven’t any of the magic (or mischief ) of boyhood about them.

Philosophical and Cinematic Realism To understand why it is that Ron/Grint and Harry/Radcliffe come to appear to us as unreal, the most simple explanation would be to say that their behaviour is actually largely subservient and beholden to the narrative, which has a lot to accomplish without the distraction of children behaving as they “normally” would—which is to say animatedly, distractedly, like Vigo’s boys. They both fall into a general pattern of directed behaviours, convincing in their portrayal of children if only for the fact that they are played by boys of an appropriate age. A director keen to do justice to the story more than to the child will be more likely to gloss the characteristics of the latter for the sake of the former. The behaviour of the boys is therefore sufficient unto the story, but there is nothing about this behaviour that invites us to see boyhood in any different light here. Indeed, the representation relies on our not questioning anything about our preconceptions of boyhood for the story to make sense. This need not affect the pleasure or entertainment factor of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. But if we are to consider the possibility of film’s as visual texts with the capacity to rethink and revaluate our concepts, then we will have to turn to those films, which allow the things of our perception to appear in their reality. Irrespective of whether the world represented is that of 1930s France, or a magical wizard-filled realm, the question of the ‘reality’ of the subject can still be posed. It is a question of whether children really behave in the way that are presented as doing (because if they don’t, aren’t we doing them some kind of injustice through misrepresentation)? I explore this question in relation to the child in more detail in Chap. 5 of this book, but for now I want simply to suggest that the issue of the boys’ reality is one that should be taken seriously, whether by filmmakers, philosophers, or educationalists. It is a question that Stephen Mulhall has posed as

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regards our use of language because words don’t just assume their reality by obeying grammatical structure and rules; they must feel real also. Mulhall stresses the significance of language use not just in terms of semantics, but “how we actually use words in this vicinity” (Mulhall, 2012, p. 10, my emphasis). The question of a thing’s reality, then, is a question of whether we affirm the specificity of conceptual expression, or we allow the use of our concepts (verbally or visually articulated) to collapse into generality, non-specificity, and automation. Mulhall points out that anyone, including a philosopher or educationalist, can easily fall prey to the inclination towards the general application of concepts (the “craving for generality” as Wittgenstein calls it), especially if they have been articulated convincingly and forcefully in a certain way: But if—like any other representational conventions—this set of signature concepts is sufficiently substantial or robust to acquire a life of its own, then they might on occasions stand between us and an ability simply to acknowledge how things really are; rather than helping to subvert our tendency towards the imposition of a philosophical ‘must, they may actually subserve its further expression. (Mulhall, 2012, p. 10)

The danger is that we will then view and read the world in a certain way because a picture of reality has imposed itself upon us through force of conviction. Philosophical realism involves confronting that Augustinian moment of doubt in which we no longer see things in their comfortable familiarity, and instead recognise that they are not quite as they seem, or demand to be seen differently. (This might involve, for example, recognising that 11-year-oldness is not just a matter of age and physical characteristics, but ways of talking and behaving also.) Mulhall reminds us that there is sometimes a paradox involved in wanting to return words to their “rough ground”, as this would seemingly involve restoring them to their ordinary language games, with all the connotations of conceptual conservatism that that entails. But in some instances, it is recognised that perhaps these words are not comfortable in the language games within which they are most commonly used. So “to

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register the essential nature of a difficulty of reality asks us to acknowledge the capacity of reality to shoulder us out from our familiar language-­ games, to resist the distinctively human capacity to word the world, and thereby to leave us as bewildered and disorientated as a bird that suddenly finds itself incapable of constructing a nest, or a beaver of building a dam” (Mulhall, 2012, p.  19). What Mulhall has identified here is the need for reality to always surprise us, when philosophy is so often motivated to remove the element of surprise. Philosophical realism must keep the door open to the moment of Cavellian scepticism, whereby our doubt as to whether we know a thing at all is accompanied by a doubt as to whether the thing we think we know belongs in the place we would normally assign it in our language. Mulhall helpfully distinguishes between what he calls (after American philosopher Cora Diamond) Wittgenstein’s “realistic spirit”, and the various problems we encounter when trying to justify that spirit via the signature concepts that spirit embodies. As with any other concepts, Wittgenstein’s own conceptual grammar risks “impoverishing or narrowing down our sense of what the ordinary or the everyday might be” (ibid.). The task of following the realistic spirit, then, is less one of allegiance to the concepts but attentiveness to how it manifests in different instances. Sandra Laugier seems to sympathise with Mulhall and Diamond’s endeavour to cast the Ordinary Language philosophers in the ‘realist’ mode, saying that they propose a new species of realism, which we will call ordinary realism. This is a realism based not on a metaphysical link between language and reality, mind, and world, but on our attention (another ordinary sense of mind) to the practices and life of language, to language as it is used within a form of life, but also as it is used to create new forms of life. Ordinary realism construes language both as a human practice and as a precision tool for the description of what matters. (Laugier, 2015, p. 227)

It is this attentiveness to the ordinary practices and language within forms of life that constitute the parallels with philosophical realism and the cinematic realism I propose to explore in what follows, as the concep-

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tual aesthetics that emerge from cinematic realism. Philosophical realism, according to Mulhall, confronts the viewer with “the world’s refusal to conform to any conditions one might lay down for it”. In the case of Vigo’s youths, this means the camera’s acceptance that their nature will always somehow resist attempts to represent it; with Chris Columbus’ Harry Potter and Ron, their capacity to appeal to anything other than the most conventional criteria of boyhood bows to the will of the camera (hence why the more you look at them, the less real they appear). Cinematic realism, then, as understood in this book, is the attempt to put things before the viewer without offering anything by way of explanation.2 But how do we go about suggesting that any child, or indeed any thing, on film is ‘real’, when films project representations of phenomena, and not the things-in-themselves? One way to approach this issue is to say that the matter depends on the mode of representation—if cinema can be said to be realist in its aesthetic, then what it represents is as real as what we see in our everyday lives. One of the principal defenders of a cinematic realism was the film critic André Bazin (1918–1958), who specifically emphasised a departure from realism in the novel in this regard. Realism, for Bazin, was the cinematic mode by which an objective reality could appear to the viewer because it refrained from overly technical and/or formal interferences with representation (which smacked of subjective preference), such that reality was largely left to ‘represent itself ’. But Bazin’s celebration of cinematic realism was by no means only that of the Enlightenment rationalist viewing cinema as the art closest to the scientific recording of human behaviour; instead, he saw in realism the opportunity to simultaneously expose “the medium’s mysteries, which were rooted in mysteries intrinsic to reality itself ” (Rothman & Keane, 2000, pp.  13–14). Unfortunately, this mystical side to Bazin’s writing was largely overlooked in favour of his emphasis on film’s capacity to become “objectivity in time”, whilst the more scientific leanings of Bazin’s thoughts on realism have perdured into the developments of film theory as the underpinning of disciplinary study in the field.  This is consistent with Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy, in which “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain” (PI, §126). 2

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For Cavell, film’s dramatisation of the ordinary does not distinguish it from reality; if anything, it brings it closer to reality.3 In The World Viewed, Cavell describes cinema as a medium that discovered a way of simultaneously drawing a viewer’s attention to people and objects, and of letting those things just be: “to let the world happen, to let its parts draw attention to themselves according to their natural weight” (WV:25, my emphasis). Films, as such, place things within our line of sight; they make choices about what they want us to look at, what we should concentrate on. There is, of course, an intervention on the part of both director and camera in this presentation and framing of the world, but this intervention need not be taken as a deception, idealisation, or an aestheticisation in any pejorative sense. Instead, a film is simply an expression of a perspective on the world—it presents us with a picture of the way things are (according to its maker(s)). Cavell writes that “Movies convince us of the world’s reality in the only way we have to be convinced …: by taking views of it” (WV, 102). Some films will, in this respect, press and impose certain pictures upon their viewers more than others. Some will present pictures with more assertiveness, and others with greater generosity. Further, the thesis put forward in The World Viewed is that style need not determine the distance from reality in its dramatisation: “theatricalism and realism are not, as we are now likely too suppose, opposed; rather, the acceptance of theatricalism is then a condition of our accepting a work as the depiction of human reality” (WV, 90). Once again, Cavell is keen to point up the fact that our suspicion of film’s non-reality is not borne out by our tolerance and acceptance of the theatricality going on all around us: “… the ease with which we accepted film reality came from our having already taken reality dramatically” (ibid.) Actually, then, a film’s realism is not measured by its closeness to our reality, but by the degree to which we accept its reality (an important point when it comes to criticism). If I feel that Ron and Harry’s reality is unacceptable, it has nothing to do with the fantastical settings (because there are plenty of fantasy films that feel remarkably real), and everything to do with the fact that I have never really observed boys their age behave the way they do.  He speaks of Wittgenstein’s style in the same terms, as one which dramatises “the idea that philosophy does not speak first”. From its first phrase, Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations is a dramatisation of thought. 3

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Seeing Philosophers and Philosophy on Film We have seen how a film like Zero for Conduct might go about questioning the very nature and character of education through a realist representation of children and the school on screen. Vigo’s filmmaking operates so as to let the contradictions and inadequacies of the schooling system reveal themselves via the boys’ behaviour, rather than through any explicit critique. The film is intended to show the viewer what is going on in schools, rather than tell them how schools should be otherwise. I now want to turn to the work of another director, the Italian Roberto Rossellini (1906–1977), to explore how his early innovations in realist filmmaking evinced a deep trust in the viewer to make judgments and interpret concepts for themselves. By contrast, Rossellini’s later disillusion with cinema would subsequently evolve into a mode of didacticism, seen in a series of ‘pedagogical films’ made for television that display an increasingly distrustful attitude towards an audience in their ability to learn something from movies without being informed of what was important for them to know. Rossellini’s career can thus be seen to chart something of a trajectory from realism to metaphysics, which makes discernment between the two all the more difficult when they originate in the same creative mind. It is, however, precisely this discernment that compels both the ‘realistic spirit’, and a conceptual aesthetics, in evaluating the representation of education on film. If Vigo is most commonly associated with the early tropes of realist cinema,4 Rossellini was a pioneer of what has come to be termed ­neorealism. Neorealism is defined by both traditional (literary) realism’s preference for historically situated, everyday subject matter and impartiality, as well as material predilections for low-budget productions and amateur actors. But it is also characterised by elements of style (the long take, deep focus shots) that demonstrate its self-aware directedness; choices  Guy Austin describes the early incarnations of poetic realism as characterised by the transition to sound cinema, and therefore moving from location shooting to studio production; set design is “a stylisation of reality, in which the guiding principle was realism, simplified, exaggerated and rendered symbolic” (Austin, 1996, p. 8). Themes often focused on the plight of the working class, and characterisation was “based in reality but was also larger than life”. Filmmakers associated with the genre are Jacques Feyder, Marcel Carne, and, most famously, Jean Renoir. 4

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made in terms of style are a reflection of the philosophical attitude that informs them. Bazin, for instance, argues that “the neorealist film has a meaning, but it is a posteriori, to the extent that it permits our awareness to move from one fact to another, from one fragment of reality to the next, whereas in the classical artistic composition the meaning is established a priori: the house is already there in the brick” (Bazin, 2005, p. 99). This openness in cinematic language provided a distinct contrast both with Soviet Formalism’s construction of a “grammar” of film whereby images could be constructed so as to be read in a specific way, and against the German expressionism which was concerned with realising the psychology of characters via the mise-en-scene. Bazin suggested that neorealism “by definition rejects analysis (whether political, moral, psychological, logical, social or whatever kind you like) of the characters and their actions” (Bazin, 2011, p. 159). Accordingly, Rossellini’s films— at least from Rome, Open City onwards—are seen to be ones which abandon the ‘given’ nature of any of these positions, preferring to see cinema as a mode of enquiry. Jacques Rancière describes Rome, Open City as the “manifesto of neorealism” due to its treatment of “people who die without talking, anchored in the representation of everyday life and using only the gestures and intonations of real people” (2006, p. 125). This new cinema attempted an extreme asceticism and restraint in terms of style in order to capture what Bazin eulogised as a “natural freedom”, drawing attention to the ways in which humans interact as opposed to staging that interaction as a means to ideological ends. Christopher Wagstaff writes that “Neo-realist films ask, rather than confirm; they wonder, rather than reassure” (Wagstaff, 2000, p. 40). This enormously influential and highly praised aesthetic made much of cinema’s potential to make its audience feel closer to reality, especially through the lack of closure it so often provided in and through narrative. Whereas cinematic realism was somewhat bound by the centripetal force of moral unity, neorealism was not so constrained. Bazin’s 1955 ‘Defence of Rossellini’ argued that neorealism “does not mark out a refusal to take a position towards the world or to judge it, but it does suppose a mental attitude: it is always seen by an artist, refracted through his consciousness” (2000, p. 159). The artist’s idiom was essential to the art work for Bazin, whose writing would pave the way for the auteur-driven

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theory of the French New Wave, an altogether more self-consciousness exercise in reflecting on the character and nature of cinema (we might say that filmmaking itself is the concept under investigation in a number of French New Wave Films). Neorealism, inasmuch as Rossellini cared to give a description of it, meant simply “an urge for self-clarification, an urge not to ignore reality, whatever it may be” (2000, p.  150). Given these propensities, it is perhaps surprising that Cavell has not written more on Rossellini or the other neorealists, although it is arguably Rossellini’s refusal of sentiment in his films that places him at odds with Cavell’s preference for filmmaking, which is more expressive of an artist’s position and “his reasons for calling his events to our attention” (1979, p. 98). But it is perhaps more surprising that a cinematic mode which tallies quite neatly with Cavell’s notion of philosophy as the ‘education of grownups’, not least in its pulling the dramatic carpet from under the viewers’ feet to confront them with the ordinary questions of reality, then took such a dramatic turn in Rossellini’s later work. In Rome, Open City (1945), Paisà (1946), and Germany Year Zero (1948), Rossellini developed a style that was intended to express both the ordinary and open character of filmic representation, rather than the closed fields of meaning and metaphorical symbolism constructed by both Eisenstein’s montage or German Expressionism. By removing all ornament from cinematic representation, he hoped to expose his viewers to what was really before them, which invariably meant a world of contradiction rather than the dialectics of montage’s contradistinction. Rossellini was devising a cinema that almost embodied the Wittgensteinian imperative not to think, but to look. Post-war Berlin in Germany Year Zero is not shown to be a place filled with defeated evil Nazis and their heroic conquerors, but a world of skeletal buildings and rubble in which everyone is struggling for both survival and for traces of humanity.5 In both style and content, Rossellini hoped to steer cinema back from the world of the impossible and the extraordinary, to discover the magic of people’s everyday experience—even if that meant showing that the reality of our everyday experience often ends in non-redemption, or a lack of closure.  Again, it is hard not to see parallels with Wittgenstein’s concern in the Investigations that he should not be seen as a wanton iconoclast so much as the destroyer of “houses of cards” in order to clear up “the ground of language on which they stand” (PII, §118). 5

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Jacques Rancière (2006) finds Rossellini’s characters in these films to be defined by an impatience with which they “throw themselves into harm’s way” and “hurl themselves into the trap” of their storylines, impetuously disregarding the determinism that both narrative and ideological motif might require of them. Rancière identifies in Rossellini’s neorealism not the expression of an ideology, but simply an attempt to bring “antagonistic elements” into encounter with one another, to let their consequences happen. They are exercises against causality because causal laws are constantly interrupted by improvisation, inconsequence, and the assertion of the “incorporeal” in the corporeal movement of bodies. The search for the soul of the film, as a guiding force of moral conviction, is everywhere made more problematic by the pictures that each human body presents. Rancière cites a particular moment in Germany Year Zero in which the young boy, Edmund, deliberately poisons his own sick father because he believes it will be the most caring course of action for the whole family. In the poignancy of a moment that goes against normative morality, and that kicks against both Abrahamic and Oedipal interpretation, Edmund even insists that his father not offer the drink to any of the other convalescents in the hospital, as it is intended just for him. “All ideologies and all explanations that appeal to the dangers of ideology are disarmed by this coincidence of opposites”, says Rancière, revealing an almost spiritual dimension to the boy’s humanity that simply cannot be contained by attempts to explain his actions. Rossellini’s neorealist films can thus be read as having much in common with Wittgenstein’s efforts in Investigations “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (PIII, §116), through stylistic intervention that placed an emphasis on ordinary experience, and close attention to it (through, for example, the long take).6 It is precisely this  Deleuze, in Cinema I, cites neorealism’s achievement as lying not in its departure from false images of childhood on screen, as if it were going phenomenologically ‘back to the things themselves’, but in embracing the representation of the ways in which people engage and indulge in reproducing clichés among themselves, as part of their ordinary existence. Deleuze observed that: 6

… what rises to the horizon, what is outlined on this world, what will be imposed in a third moment, is not even raw reality, but its understudy, the reign of cliches, both internally and externally, in people’s heads and hearts as in the whole of space Cinema in this vein could not try and retrieve a pre-war, pre-fall, primordial image of the world. If it was to be true to life, it had to be true to the fact that life was fallen, cities were devastated, and that in that situation the kinds of things that flourish are not representative of an entirely new world, but rather rehashed images of previous utopias.

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kind of stylistic innovation that, in subsequent chapters, I will argue can allow for the seeing of aspects and the expression of attitudes in response, which are both key to an aesthetic rediscovery of educational concepts on screen. For an example of how a particular picture of education can narrow film’s potential for the seeing of aspects and connections, however, I want finally to look at why Rossellini’s turn to making ‘pedagogical’ films sent him back on to the slippery ice of privileging knowing over seeing. Around 1963, Rossellini turned his back on feature films and towards the project of educational film, specifically via films made for television. He declared cinema to be “on the point of dying”, and said that “if cinema is to have a social function it must be educative, it must teach people something, it must speak about humans to other humans” (2000, p. 166). Rossellini was not satisfied with film’s potential to educate through the showing of human drama on screen; he wanted to instruct the viewer in the significant individuals of history’s unfolding drama. What’s more, his vision had both a theory of education and an idea of the curriculum in mind. Theoretically speaking, he was inspired by John Amos Comenius’s concept of ‘autopsy’ (“seeing with one’s own eyes”) in his assertion that people required a mode of instruction that celebrated the directness of the visual and rejected the verbosity of formal education that both confuses the student and cements the status quo (through stultification). He foresaw that television would be the medium best positioned for this mass dissemination of knowledge, and that he would therefore make films for television’s “dialogue of each with all” (2000, p. 128). In principle, the sympathies with Wittgenstein’s linguistic realism are still somewhat in evidence in Rossellini’s educational turn: in particular, the emphasis on directness and observation over metaphysical abstraction and overt didacticism. But where the two differ strongly, and where Rossellini’s pedagogical films will ultimately, to my mind, be seen to fall prey to his own criticisms, is on the matter of worldview. Where Wittgenstein tended to be culturally pessimistic,7 Rossellini’s outlook was Utopian, and he hoped to transform civilisation through a comprehensive reminder of its greatest achievements, recounting a quasi-Hegelian narrative of rational progress through a vast output of films, stretching  As discussed in Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.

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from The Iron Age to films about the invention of the daguerreotype, the steam locomotive, and communications revolution. In a letter to a journalist who had inquired about his motivations, Rossellini wrote: “When all of these programs are in release, I believe I will have completed a work which, in its entirety, will give a cultural orientation, in a general way, to vast masses of the public” (2000, p. 163). The affinity with Comenius, as well as the Enlightenment encyclopaedists (Rossellini says that they “bring further order to general knowledge” and make men “more rational, and therefore [enable] them to advance”), is more than evident here. In this letter, Rossellini revealed the twin poles of his pedagogy: culture and reason. Both, he believes, are things that must be taught, and the best way to teach them is through seeing the very best examples of their kind. The seeing, though, is of Wittgenstein’s first usage (“‘What do you see there?’—‘I see this’”), that is, the seeing of representations as if they were objects of knowledge, not of association or allegory. Cartesius, one of a trio of films about philosophers in his ‘Historical Encyclopedia’,8 is a good example of where these films fall short in the sense of ‘seeing-as’ that I have outlined above, in that the film is not intended to invite the viewer to ‘see connections’ outside of the visual representation of Cartesianism that the film devises. This approach remains in keeping with Comenius’ Orbis Sensualium Pictus, the picture book designed to provide the child with a glimpse of the entirety the world has to offer. Rossellini chooses to reproduce this effort in the pedagogical films not through the use of amateur actors but through the heightened unactorliness of the actors, such that the actor (as human) is not a distraction from that which he or she is meant to represent. He said of the philosopher films that “In these films, I show the customs, prejudices, fears, aspirations, ideas and agonies of an epoch and a place. I show a man—an innovator—confront these” (2000, p. 162). Man (sic.) is reduced to his role of innovator, removing from him his humanity (and removing him from his humanity). The explicatory instinct takes over as direct commu In Socrates, the intention is to show the “developing methods of persuasion, and with Socrates’ character, we show hios method of developing logic and intelligence” (164). In Blaise Pascal, “the drama of a man who develops scientific thought which is in conflict with the dogmatism of his deep religious faith” (ibid.). In Cartesius, “the advent of a method in which human thought becomes more rational and definitively moves toward the age of technical and scientific development” (ibid.). 8

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nication assumes preference over the interpretative spaces of neorealist representation. Peter Brunette writes that in Rossellini’s most “methodologically uncompromising work”, the “typical emphasis on the everyday and aleatory is less pronounced … as much more time and energy must necessarily be devoted to the explanation of Descartes’ philosophy” (Brunette, 1987, p. 328). But whilst Rossellini might have succeeded in communicating a picture of Descartes’ philosophy (in the same way I could point to a picture of a rabbit and tell a child it was a rabbit), there is little sense in which he has created an image of Cartesianism by doing so (just as my pointing at the picture of a rabbit carries no guarantee that a child will recognise a rabbit in a field as a result). What I want to concentrate on now is the conceptual confusion—around what philosophy is, or what it means to be a philosopher—contained in this representation.

Disenfranchising Descartes Rossellini’s Cartesius depicts Descartes the innovator initially as a young man responding to an intellectual malaise among both the scientists and theologians of his time, all of whom were still in thrall to Aristotelian ideas of logic and the soul. The questions of whether the problems of the age demanded a Descartes, or whether Descartes himself defined the problems of the age, are somewhat counterposed. The ambiguity is played out in the aesthetics as much as the characterisation: Descartes’ restless nomadism, his insistence on experiencing as many ‘real’ faces of Europe as possible, the microscopic attendance to realist detail and minimal camera trickery in the mise-en-scène, the wars and pestilence that frame his interrogation of the human mind—these contingencies are all weighed against Descartes’ steadfast self-belief and stability of character, also reflected in the juxtaposition of his mode of dress throughout with that of the various costumes adopted by the others that he encounters. Their uniformity in uniform seems to confirm Descartes’ suspicion that other people might really be automata or figments of his imagination, and their dialogue is composed almost exclusively as staging for the philosopher’s rational critiques.9  This woodenness of dialogue is, paradoxically, even more pronounced in Rossellini’s Socrates.

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There is a sense throughout Cartesius, then, that Descartes is only present on screen to persuade others of what, in himself, he already knows to be true, rather than with the challenges to truth presented by the world and other people. In this, the director is keen to clear the screen of characterisation. Rossellini’s collaborators on the picture have themselves admitted that Rossellini was not even slightly tempted to give a psychological dimension to Descartes’ ‘doubt’. In several scenes, courageous for the toughness of style, he documents instead [Descartes’] genuinely methodological and coldly rational character, demonstrating once again his faith in the autonomous force of the intrinsic content of the information he wanted to convey to the public. (Luciano Scaffa and Marcella Marian Rossellini, quoted in Brunette, 1987, p. 327)

In disavowing the psychology of Descartes-as-human, Rossellini attempted to elevate the metaphysics of a method, which was to present itself as pedagogy. Jacques Rancière wrily observes of the dialogues between Descartes and his respondents that “Embodiment here clearly has the illustrative function of dressing up declarations” (2014, p. 86). And yet the physical presence of Descartes on screen still remains a distraction for the viewer because he cannot help but present himself as a person, towards whom the viewer would like to experience some ­relation—either in terms of how he fits with their imagined image, or by force of renewed character (as was achieved, for example, in Miloš Forman’s Amadeus). The dilemma, as Stanley Cavell describes it, is one in which direct representation poses problems for aspect-seeing: “You want Descartes to be there, but if you just say ‘This is Descartes’ you’ve killed it” (2005, p. 191). The more explicitly Descartes as a human being with his own desires comes into play, the more he becomes an undesirable and immutable presence in the conversation of concrete ideas. To reward the philosopher with a psyche is to act against the pedagogical need—as Rossellini sees it—to fill the gap in our philosophical and historical knowledge. A Descartes of human emotion invites our suspicion, the very suspicion and paranoia of Cartesian scepticism.

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The problem (if other people are a problem) is that we mistake the portrait of Descartes for a picture of Cartesianism. Jacques Rancière has elsewhere expressed the difficulty of addressing this dualism: “In its strictest sense does the portrait of the philosopher not mean the portrait of a body that conceals the thought it contains?” (2014, p. 89). The confusion of revelation and concealment is confusing, even if Rossellini was seeking to delimit the possibilities for interpretation. He wanted this Descartes to be seen as pure reason, and yet the viewers’ disposition is otherwise: our allegorical and imaginative eye desires to see him also as a person, as personality. Either he is the image of Descartes we had in our minds previously, from our readings of the Meditations or from having seen his portrait by Franz Hals, or he falls short of that image. When Wittgenstein asks “What makes my image of him into an image of him?” the answer is clear: “not its looking like him” (PIII, iii). Wittgenstein is not interested with degrees of likeness or approximation, but rather what is meant by the image and how it is experienced. So, if we ask the question, “What makes me learn from the philosopher on film?”, we might also want to respond: “not its looking like the philosopher”. We do not need to see the philosopher in order to see the philosophy; indeed, the former might even prove to be a distraction from the latter because we behave differently towards it. It is as if the duck-rabbit image were able to quack, making it harder to see it as a rabbit at all. There are those who would defend Rossellini’s historical films on the grounds of their taking his austere cinema to new extremes, “stripping everything that was still typically cinematic out of his language” and “renouncing all temptations of creativity” (Aprà, 2000, p. 134). The idea seems to be that cinema, in order to be educational, must not be creative, imaginative, allegorical. There must be a directness of language that refuses ambiguity and the potential to see different aspects because that way misunderstanding lies. Rossellini, like Godard during his Dziga-­ Vertov phase,10 felt that cinema’s easy accommodation of passivity and entertainment meant that a more assertive, instructional cinema was  The Dziga-Vertov group was a collective of filmmakers, founded in 1968, who sought to create work that neither indulged the bourgeois desire for individual artist’s signature upon a work, nor promoted an idea of art that existed independently of its use value. 10

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­ ecessary. But in his concern for cinema, Rossellini refused the possibilin ties of education, which in his view remains a matter of transmission, and not of sensibility. In doing so, he rejected the pedagogical character of his neorealist films (i.e. their capacity for showing over telling) in favour of something altogether more instrumental.11 Stripping cinema of its cinematicity in order to educate suggests that education must not have an aesthetic dimension to it, that ambiguity and the potential for aspects are undesirable elements in teaching. And it reveals something of the messianic force behind the project as a whole: whilst Rossellini’s expressed intention was to get away from any emphasis on intention, he did so by asserting the sovereignty of the ‘given’. In this instance, the given is Descartes’ unqualified genius and his powers of rational methodology. As a consequence, other aspects to Descartes’ existence become harder to see, and it is impossible to say whether this is a film about Descartes-man or Descartes-idea because ultimately it is simply ‘Reason’ that is being affirmed. Rancière concludes his reflections on Rossellini’s pedagogical project with a similar sense of conceptual confusion, saying that the audience is forced “ to choose at every moment between pedagogy and cinema, with the permanent risk of finding neither” (2014, p. 100). We sense we must learn, but we suspect there might be art in it also (dispositions are in conflict here). And in this distracted state, there is no attitude towards a protagonist as someone about whom we might care (and why care for his thought then either?).

Seeing Descartes in Deeds Cavell, both in The Claim of Reason and in later writings on film, finds that there is something to admire in the figure of Descartes, but it is neither Descartes-man nor Descartes-idea (the first is mere biography, either  Rancière is right to say that “Rossellini is first and foremost a film director before being an educator keen to introduce everyone to thinking of great masers of the mind”. In particular, Rancière notes something about Rosselini’s great forte in film, which was to present the viewer with “paradoxical bodies”, people who aren’t supposed to find themselves in places that they do, or whose bodies are still a mystery to them. In trying to teach, Rossellini takes from cinema the pedagogical value of this paradoxicality. 11

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genius or accident, whilst the second is an abstraction, and maybe even a dangerous one). Instead, Cavell discovers the affirmative in the spirit of Cartesianism, an attitude which is able to discover its likeness not exclusively within the body of the man to whom it gives its name (René Descartes), but in others also, and in works of art. The Cartesian spirit is characterised by the mind’s response to the dissatisfaction it experiences with the way that the world is currently spoken of or configured in thought. It is described by Cavell as “the rediscovery of philosophy”, a notion derived as much from Thoreau, Emerson, and Nietzsche as it is from Wittgenstein, in that it refers to a diurnal effort to both overcome and come to terms with philosophy as lived experience. The conclusions Descartes came to may have been erroneous, misleading, or dangerous (because he sought to bring the philosophical conversation to an end, particularly by removing the body from it), but he was guided by the same spirit of dissatisfaction and rediscovery that motivates these other admired thinkers. Indeed, it is a spirit of dissatisfaction that is common to almost all of us (at least in capitalist societies), even if we all have different techniques for repressing it, projecting it, or sublimating it, rather than acting upon it. The example from film that Cavell uses to show how ordinary people are also capable of rediscovering philosophy in the way that Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Nietzsche did is that of Mr Deeds Goes to Town. In Frank Capra’s 1936 film, a seemingly naïve young man called Longfellow Deeds (played by James Stewart) from small-town America suddenly inherits an enormous fortune. In order to settle the finances, Deeds has to travel to New York, where he discovers a world full of superficiality, cutthroats, and capitalist zealots, all of whom seem resigned to abide by the same logic of cynicism and disenchantment that supports an unhappy and unhealthy society (Deeds notes on arrival that “They work so hard at living they forget how to live”). Deeds’ own naïveté, by ­contrast, stirs up a sense of threat in this cynical environment, the possibility of exposure, of fraudulence. When, for example, the board of the Opera House elects to formally endorse Deeds as Chair in order to smuggle past him the fact that they have been operating at a loss, he assumes the responsibility more seriously than they anticipated, asking to hear the treasurer’s report. Deeds’s astonishment at the scale of the loss ($180, 000)

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isn’t assuaged by the board’s attempt to persuade him that the financial loss is immaterial in the running of an artistic institution, or further that he should be expected to continue to finance such an institution given his newly acquired wealth, irrespective of its poor functioning. What Deeds exposes in this instance is the absurdity of making claims to artistic integrity (“Opera is opera!”) whilst those claims are undermined by the lack of moral integrity that seeks to profit financially from this claim. Deeds’s overwhelming disappointment in the duplicity of his fellow humans renders him silent—just at the point at which he is required to give a defence of himself, in court, on a sanity hearing. Longfellow Deeds is roused from his refusal to defend himself in court by the inadequacy of the evidence in the charges of madness made against him, not least because he is then able to demonstrate ways in which everyone else in the room is also mad according to the same criteria. Much like Descartes in the seventeenth century, Deeds observes that the people around him have become wedded to customs, ideas, and explanations for their being that no longer find concord with the way that things have changed, and thus have drifted towards abstraction (pictures that pretend to certainty) for the sake of simplicity. Cavell shows that the likes of Descartes and Deeds, however, experience an almost bodily rejection of this drift, and the name for it is a kind of existential ‘fidgetiness’12: Mr Deeds appeals to fidgetiness as a universal human attribute, if not exactly a normal one, in defense of his playing the tuba at odd hours, a practice taken by the prosecution and its witnesses as a major piece of evidence of madness. Deeds’s defense is that his tuba playing is his version of something every human being does under certain universally recurrent conditions. (Cavell, 2005, p. 126)  This is a notion that also appears in Schopenhauer, who in his Counsels and Maxims, observes that “people who have no work or nothing to think about, immediately begin to beat the devil’s tattoo with their knuckles or a stick or anything that comes handy. The truth is, that our nature is essentially restless in its character: we very soon get tired of having nothing to do; it is intolerable boredom. This impulse to activity should be regulated, and some sort of method introduced into it, which of itself will enhance the satisfaction we obtain. Activity!—doing something, if possible creating something, at any rate learning something—how fortunate it is that men cannot exist without that!” 12

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In the figure of Deeds, Cavell discerns not an instance of the Cartesian cogito coming into consciousness of itself, but rather the spirit of Cartesianism, or “what it is that Descartes changed in philosophy by discovering. It’s a rediscovery of philosophy” (Cavell, 2005, p.  190). Where Rossellini placed a picture of sovereign reason behind the dialectic of genius and history in his portrait of Descartes, for Cavell, it is the Cartesian rabbit that can be seen as an aspect of the Deeds duck that we find interesting. Another aspect to Mr Deeds Goes to Town has dawned. And the doors are opened for further aspects to be considered. In the rediscovery of Cartesianism, then, Cavell attempts to capture a philosophical motion that takes some influence from the Wittgensteinian idea that when we philosophise, the world is not changed but our relation to it is. But he also places this idea within a wider tradition, which references Nietzsche’s “revaluation of all values” and “eternal return”, Emerson’s “effort of conceptual rehabilitation”, as well as Heidegger’s concept of disclosure, the idea that we only communicate or disclose to others a view of the world that is already interpreted and meaningful. This motion is not one of trying to climb out of the chaos of the ordinary and everyday business of life to discover an abstract, metaphysical point from which to view it all, but rather one in which we return, daily, to the scene of our ordinary existence to rediscover its meaningfulness in new ways. The philosopher, therefore, is one who takes up the burden of expressing the inadequacy or dissatisfaction in a way that does justice to things as we find them, rather than by deferring to theoretical or psychological abstraction. Cavell’s defence of the traces of Descartes to be discovered in Deeds is made less on the grounds that the film itself proposes a solipsistic view of the world, and more on the grounds that philosophy begins with making a statement of responsibility for one’s own existence in the world: “… when Deeds begins to speak, defending his sanity, he is ­performing, as the climax to be expected in a melodramatic structure, a version of Descartes’s cogito, taking on the proof of his own existence, against its denial by the world” (CW, 199). Unlike Rossellini’s Descartes, Deeds is not meant to recreate a set of circumstances that likewise produced the rational genius of Descartes, but rather to show how circumstances demand of a person that they answer for them by affirming and announcing a self in much the same way as Descartes did. The viewer thus does not see Cartesian thought embodied in a representation of the

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philosopher himself (which amounts to metaphysics, i.e. that the veracity of the thought exists independent of whether it is the original Descartes or the actor playing Descartes who announces it).

 onclusion: Education’s Disappointment C in Its Criteria What we witness in Mr Deeds Goes to Town is less the confirmation or rejection of the assumptions we bring to bear upon it (Is it representative? Is it attempting to control my worldview?), and more the playing out of philosophical questions in the face of assumptions made by those on the screen: how do we discern nonsense when we encounter it? How do we respond to the irrationality and subterfuge of others, especially when it masquerades as accepted reason? Where the literal representation of philosophers on screen invites the viewer to stand in awe of their superior understanding, to follow Longfellow Deeds’ journey is to see him change in relation to others, some of whom assume this privileged psychology, others with whom we are invited to sympathise as being flawed in the same way that we know ourselves to be. Longfellow Deeds exposes others to the ordinariness of thought that comes with looking at the world in front of us, and not the world as various social, legal, and moral norms have come to frame it on our behalf. In the process, the viewer comes to see the ways in which an ordinary human being behaves as a philosopher. Wittgenstein’s conceptual aesthetics make the case for judgment based on what we see (not what we know), and that that judgment will be informed both by experience and by existing criteria. Our disappointment with criteria (the Cavellian inflection) comes about when it no longer matches with our experience, when it brings about an excess of existential fidgetiness that demands a revisiting of phenomena as they appear in our language, to see how much they still carry meaning. In what follows, I take this aesthetic approach to provide a footing in the experience of film as an encounter with ordinary representations of educational phenomena, which ask us to consider in turn whether these representations speak to our own experience, and whether we might want to consider them anew as a result. The next chapter looks specifically at the figure—or phenomenon—of the teacher to explore how this might come about.

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Bibliography Aprà, A. (2000). Rossellini’s Historical Encyclopedia. In D. Forgacs, S. Lutton, & G. Nowell-Smith (Eds.), Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real. London: British Film Institute. Austin, G. (1996). Contemporary French Cinema: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bazin, A. (2005). What Is Cinema? (Vol. II). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bazin, A. (2011). In Defence of Rossellini. In B. Cardullo (Ed.), André Bazin and Italian Neorealism. London: Continuum. Brunette, P. (1987). Roberto Rossellini. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cavell, S. (1978). What Becomes of Things on Film? Philosophy and Literature, 2(2), 249–257. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cavell, S. (2005). What Becomes of Thinking on Film? Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Andrew Klevan. In R.  Read & J.  Goodenough (Eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dixon, W., & Foster, G. (2013). A Short History of Film. London: Rutgers University Press. Laugier, S. (2015). The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary. New Literary History, 46(2), 217–240. Johns Hopkins University Press. Mulhall, S. (2012). Realism, Modernism and the Realistic Spirit: Diamond’s Inheritance of Wittgenstein. Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 1(1), 7–33. Rancière, J. (2006). Film Fables. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Rancière, J. (2014). The Intervals of Cinema. London: Verso. Rossellini, R. (2000). A Discussion of Neo-Realism: Rossellini Interviewed by Mario Verdone. In D. Forgacs, S. Lutton, & G. Nowell-Smith (Eds.), Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real. London: British Film Institute. Rothman, W., & Keane, M. (2000). Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Wagstaff, C. (2000). Rossellini and Neo-Realism. In D. Forgacs, S. Lutton, & G.  Nowell-Smith (Eds.), Roberto Rossellini: Magician of the Real. London: British Film Institute.

4 Seeing (Re-)education on Film

The end of the last chapter provides a helpful segue into Cavell’s thinking on cinema by introducing his take on Mr Deeds Goes to Town as an example of Wittgensteinian aesthetics based upon the concepts of seeing-as and aspect-seeing. In his discussion of Deeds, we find Cavell not only offering us another aspect of Capra’s protagonist, we also see an allegorical connection between Deeds and Descartes, or Deeds-as-Descartes (where Deeds is seen as more real—or possessed of the ‘realistic spirit’— than Rossellini’s depiction of the philosopher himself ). In this, Cavell not only captures Wittgenstein’s emphasis on looking at things we see before us rather than what the film might be concealing from us but also the intellectual and allegorical significance of seeing likenesses: the latter offer us the potential of phenomena, rather than the (false) hope of penetrating them. We also witness in Deeds a deliberate reconfiguration by Cavell of the sceptical thinker. This is not Rossellini’s Descartes, the man who consciously chooses doubt as a philosophical stance towards the world; Deeds erupts out of his self-imposed silence because doubt forces him to do so. Scepticism is not an option here, but an existential compulsion. In the courtroom, Deeds finally speaks because the charges and evidence being presented against him are nonsense castles built on causal sand; all he wants to show in response is just how non-sensical the behaviour of © The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_4

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everyone else is by the same standard. Deeds, for Cavell, is enacting the Wittgensteinian dictum that the aim of philosophy is “to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is patently nonsense” (PI, §464). When being told that his behaviour is manifesting characteristics of a pseudo-Freudian psychological disorder, Deeds finds that the criteria for his potential conviction are entirely at odds with his experience, his intention, and the acts of others. That this observation begins to effect a transition away from Wittgenstein’s aesthetics towards Cavell’s own inflection is then further enhanced by Cavell’s emphasis on personal experience as an imperative factor in the cinematic encounter. Cavell sees Deeds in this way because he, as a person, is well-inclined towards the character, as a person. In Deeds, Cavell discovers an orientation towards happiness that he shares, even if it is an orientation that must be disrupted by disappointment at various intervals in order to rediscover itself anew. Cavell’s reading of Deeds as the spirit of Cartesianism, as rediscovering philosophy, prefaces three important motions in his film-philosophy as explored in this chapter. The first concerns the expansion and exploration of scepticism on screen, as a condition that can be witnessed in cinematic representation. The second makes the case for an ontology of cinema, arguing that scepticism can only discover its representation on screen if we are willing to concede that there is such a thing as cinema. Rather than try to define what cinema is, however, Cavell suggests that cinema’s ontology is premised on its allowing things to ‘become’ on screen. The third motion has to do with the specific cinematic genre of what Cavell calls ‘remarriage comedy’, and the ways in which this genre enacts philosophical scepticism in Hollywood comedies about marriage, showing what is possible for a marriage to become within the confines of ordinary existence.

Cavellian Scepticism Scepticism, embodied in the ‘fidgetiness’ of Capra’s characters, is Cavell’s signature contribution to rethinking Wittgenstein’s later work. Whereas previously the received wisdom was that Wittgenstein sought to ­overcome the challenge of (especially Cartesian) scepticism in Investigations, Cavell

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sees it as being the all-pervasive mode of thought in the work, and in the style of its writing: “The human disappointment with human knowledge seems to take over the whole subject”, he says (CR, 44). Tackling that disappointment, then, is a matter of declaring what I, as a human, find unsatisfactory about the way that other humans seem to speak of and claim to know the world. Wittgenstein himself, reflecting on the confessional nature of philosophical writing (in which he saw Augustine as having been exemplary), wrote that honesty (with oneself ) is necessary in philosophy if the work itself is to be of worth: “If I perform to myself, then it’s this that the style expresses. And then the style cannot be my own. If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit” (in Monk, 1991, p. 367). Owning one’s style of expression is a mode of declaring oneself, as is reiterated in Culture and Value: ‘Le style c’est l’homme.’ ‘Le style c’est l’homme même.’ The first expression has cheap epigrammatic brevity. The second, correct version, opens up quite a different perspective. It says that a man’s style is a picture of him. (CV, 149)

To give a picture of oneself, or of things as one sees them, is a necessary part of self-knowledge, albeit one which shares the same potential for limitation as pictures of language and thought. What Cavell believes to be revealed through the process of writing the Philosophical Investigations is the essential character of doubt (though not suspicion) motivating the style of the author’s work, underpinning its dialogical force, interruption, interrogation, and relentless questioning. Cavell describes these as literary gestures of the Investigations characterised by three experiences on the part of a reader: pleasure, freedom, and exposure. All these are bound into one another: we feel pleasure at the audacity of Wittgenstein’s style (its aphorisms, its iconoclasm, its directness), which is at one and the same time a feeling “of being liberated from an unexpressed, apparently inexpressible mood” (Cavell, 2004, pp. 24–25), which is the mood of believing that things are inexpressible and that we are condemned to experience them only within ourselves. That this possibility of expression lies before the reader then leaves her with the feeling of exposure because the Investigations “treacherously invite false steps of

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the reader” (Cavell, 2004, p.  24). I am inclined to suggest that these are the very feelings that accompanied criticisms of Rossellini’s neorealist works when they were first screened, as viewers felt left out in the open (literally in the open spaces and bombed ruins of European cities) without the basic signposts of cinematic representation. In both, we witness the unfolding of a space for interpretation and thought on the part of a reader/viewer, in which the presentation and exploration of phenomena are unshackled from their obeisance to stylistic conventions, leaving the reader or viewer with the vertiginous sense of self-reliance if they are to find a way to “go on” within this space. In his presentation of the Philosophical Investigations as an ‘everyday aesthetics of itself ’, Cavell positions aesthetics not only within the category of ordinary expression but as an overlap between philosophy and art that relies on the ‘work’ of expression by those that encounter it to give it value and meaning. For it is only in working through our expression of these encounters that we discover the real purpose of both philosophy and art, which is to find some peace with the world of our own experience (cf. PI, §133). As such, philosophy and art share much in common: “Differences in the work philosophy does and the work that art does need not be slighted if it turns out that they cross paths, even to some extent share paths—for example, where they contest the ground on which the life of another is to be examined, call it the ground of therapy” (Cavell, 2004, p. 25). Philosophy is therapeutic when it is prepared to listen to others, and other domains of experience, to inform its own understanding, rather than position itself as the site of understanding per se (such is the spirit of Socratism contra the Sophists). Wittgenstein discovers this potential in his explorations of the concept of seeing, but Cavell takes them further in showing how the domains of music, literature, and film have as much to offer philosophy as vice versa. In ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, Cavell’s insistence upon the ordinariness of philosophising stresses the fact that philosophers do not concern themselves with things that others do not or cannot; they address the immediate and everyday problems of our being (together). Thus, the problems of ordinary language philosophy are not in any way different (superior or inferior) to those of other philosophers such as Hume, Locke, and Descartes, in the spirit in which they are

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approached: “They all begin from what seem to be facts of such obviousness that no one could fail to recognize them … employ examples of the homeliest extraction … and considerations whose import anyone can grasp” (MWM, 60, my emphasis). The significance of Cavellian scepticism is not that it is a conscious choice between philosophical approaches but that it is a feature of everyone’s most ordinary and mundane existence. Instead of articulating scepticism as the condition of doubting the existence of the external world, and therefore seeking certainty as a consequence of that doubt, Cavell suggests that certainty is hopelessly dependent on doubt for its achievements, and it is, therefore, the way in which we respond to doubt which is more significant than the conclusions we arrive at as a result. So we are all a part of the fidgety audience in the goings-on of the world. But sceptical doubt (as suspicion) does not have to be an attitude we hold towards the world (and therefore one which knowledge seeks to overcome); it constitutes an inevitable and periodical loss of confidence in the rules and norms presently provided for us in understanding that world. It is not choosing the life of the sceptic that matters, but rather it is a question of how we respond to scepticism that counts. Paul Standish describes the impossibility of trying to rationalise, rather than respond to, existential scepticism as follows: To see skepticism as refuted, Cavell claims, is to miss its driving force. It is to miss the existential motive to skepticism, our compulsion to doubt, and so, it is to lose sight of the truth in skepticism, the way it speaks to or expresses something deep in the human condition. (Standish, 2012, p. 76)

Cavell’s aim is not to reinstate Wittgenstein within the tradition he aimed to reject (the expression of doubt was indeed one that, for Cavell, places Wittgenstein alongside other great philosophers such as Descartes, Hume, and Kant), but rather to reformulate scepticism such that it is no longer understood along the lines of a belief (doubting that the world exists, doubting that other people exist—a disposition) but along the lines of knowledge (or rather non-knowledge: I do not know what is going on in the minds of other people). The pursuit of knowledge as a

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means to explain the world and others within it is one that is conducted in vain—not because we cannot say that knowledge is acquired along the way, but the pursuit itself is a distraction “from what it would be painful to find out” (CR, 109). In this Cavell refers to self-knowledge, the more painful process of coming to know oneself in relation to others, as opposed to seeking explanations of otherness to suit oneself. “Knowing oneself ”, Cavell says, “is the capacity … for placing oneself-in-the-world” (CR, 108). Self-knowledge depends not just upon the having of feelings but upon “my knowing or appreciating the place or reach … of those feelings to the situation in which those feelings occur” (CR, 107). As fundamental to the human condition, therefore, scepticism is tragic: I cannot know the mind of the other person however hard I try and however many schemes I may invent in order to do so (King Lear’s fateful question “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” is perhaps the most famous example of such a test). As humans, we coped with the tragedy of this condition a lot more easily when religion and the state held more sway over our understanding of the objective operations of relations with other people. When the picture of the world is not arranged according to preordained structures (of fate and belief), we are exposed to the tragedy of our condition, that is, the idea that, if there is meaning to be found in the world, it must come from us (through self-expression in style) and not from an exclusive reliance upon external, structural formulations. The anxiety over a conflict between self-expression and structural limitation evidently has a much longer history than cinema, and attempts to represent scepticism as aesthetics of self-education long precede the advent of film. Shakespearean tragedy—on which Cavell has written extensively— attests to this terrible frustration, riddled with characters whose flawed nature is revealed through their inability to come to terms with not knowing the mind of another (Othello and Desdemona, Lear and Cordelia, etc.). William Rothman and Marian Keane (2000) argue that Cavell’s readings of Shakespearean tragedy are in fact key to understanding his cinema text, The World Viewed, because of the connection he draws between Shakespeare and Descartes, which inform the sceptical underpinnings of cinema itself, as a medium which places itself under investigation. The taking up of Wittgenstein’s mantle, for Cavell, is thus a question of continuing to both address and come to terms with the limitations of

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our knowledge of others. Scepticism will be seen as key in both Cavell’s approach to cinema, and to the concept of film as education, precisely because of its “disappointment with criteria” that currently configure the world, a lack of completion and satisfaction that spurs the individual to always seek greater justice and happiness in relations with others. To confront the challenges of scepticism within our own culture may be to rethink the attitude we have towards epistemological authority within our culture also. Who are the Gonerils and Regans of our intellectual history, the people, ways of thinking, and images that seduce us with the things we want to hear, rather than the sincerity and clarity we deserve? Where do we experience conceptual confusion surrounding educational matters, and to whom should we turn for greater clarity?

Cinema’s Staging of Philosophical Scepticism Cavell’s other great contribution to philosophy as a ‘reading’ of the world, and highly significant for educational thought also, is to suggest that our philosophical resources reside not exclusively in those texts that declare themselves authorities within a discipline, but rather within any medium concerned with undertaking conceptual investigation as a response to scepticism. Philosophy must not only include those who are not professional philosophers but also those works which do not intentionally announce themselves as philosophical. “Such work necessarily contests disciplinary boundaries”, he says in Contesting Tears, and for this reason, his philosophy spans the study of Shakespeare, the American Transcendentalists, early Hollywood comedies, and twentieth-century classical composers as a mode of casting his own experience and expressions of interest back into a test of public concern and acknowledgement. Cinema, in particular, has made a new way of doing philosophy, and thinking philosophically, possible: To my way of thinking, the creation of film was as if meant for philosophy— meant to orient everything philosophy has said about reality and its representation, about art and imitation, about greatness and conventionality, about judgment and pleasure, about skepticism and transcendence, about language and expression/ (Cavell, 1996, p. xii)

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It is in The World Viewed that Cavell really tries to place cinema’s unique character as art form, starting with the idea that movies were worth as much serious attention as any other work of art, “with the same specificity of attention to the significance of the work at hand and to the formal devices of the work by means of which this significance is achieved” (WV, 163). The marriage of meaning and form here is important as the former cannot arise without the latter. Furthermore, meaning is not just a matter of technology because the aesthetics of film cannot be formally appreciated independently of “specific achievements in significant films”, stopping just shy of saying that light and movement do not make a movie’s soul. Instead, Cavell proposes to look at film as “a succession of automatic world projections”, through which we discover, or are disappointed by, the expression of concepts that the director and the viewer share in common. Through cinema, the relations between word and world are revisited, reworked, and relearned, first by the director and then the viewer-critic: “It is typical of my procedures in The World Viewed to invite words or concepts which are common, all but unavoidable, in speaking about film, and then try to discover what there is in these words and in my experience of these objects that they should go together” (1971, WV, 174). In the book, he performs a similar reworking (of philosophical language already in existence) as he had done with traditional scepticism: he affirms cinema’s ontological status, but not in terms of what cinema ‘is’. Instead, cinema’s ontology is a matter of what people and other phenomena can ‘be’ on screen, and what they have the potential to become. The indebtedness to Wittgenstein’s aspect-seeing is in plain view: The knowledge of the unsayable is the study of what Wittgenstein means by physiognomy. His continuous sketches of it occur in Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, in the long set of pages beginning with an investigation of the concept of ‘seeing as’. (1971, WV, 157)

The potential of phenomena to become something on screen (i.e. to be seen differently, despite their form not having changed) cannot be accounted for by any a priori conceptualisations of the medium, and therefore it is the task of both film and viewer to find something in a film on the occasion of

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its viewing. There is interaction and engagement in this process; for Cavell, it is both these things that amount to cinematic ‘reality’. Cavell’s ontology of cinema is spelt out much more succinctly (by his own admission people found The World Viewed dense and unapproachable) in the short essay ‘What Becomes of Things on Film?’. Initially taking his cue from Heidegger, he speaks of the latter’s concept of ‘the worldhood-of-the-world’ as “a phenomenon in which a particular mode of sight or awareness is brought into play” (1978, p. 249). Whilst Cavell returns to Wittgenstein later, he might already be talking about ‘seeing-­as’ here, although Heidegger permits him to talk specifically about the ‘tools’ with which we commonly go about ordering and coping with our world: only when there is a disruption in the matters of course that allow us to undertake these activities relatively unconsciously, do we suddenly come to see objects in our lives as strange and stubborn in ways to which we do not normally pay attention. This is perhaps a similar experience to that of which Wittgenstein makes mention, of repeating the same word to find it gradually losing its significance. This uncanny experience is one which Cavell sees very much in evidence in the films of both Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, who expose the everyday objects of our experience as more precarious and volatile than the fixed characters we reward them with when we simply associate seeing objects with knowing them (pace Wittgenstein’s first use of the word see). To see Chaplin in The Gold Rush so easily transform an old boot into a plate of food is both to delight in his innovation and remind ourselves of our casual acceptance of phenomena as given in nature. The delight is itself derived from our ability to see, with Chaplin, the bootlaces as spaghetti, to make that connection as if there were an innerness of meaning or an “intimacy of understanding”, we are also able to share with Chaplin. The possibility of happiness presented by this connection is matched by the consciousness that we all too readily accept the given roles of things, language, and others in our lives. Evidently, Cavell is pointing up an affirmative force in this phenomenon: he finds that Keaton’s and Chaplin’s charm lies in their responses to the worldhood of the world revealing itself as something more than just individuated objects of our perception. Human intervention can bring things into relations with one another that can drive happiness according to their context and environment. But Cavell resists the claim that all cinematic images possess the capacity to reveal the world in this way,

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because cinema—if it is to be understood to be thinking in the same way that Descartes does, or I do—must also be capable of the complacency and appeals to objectivity that the ordinary viewer, reader, or language speaker is. If philosophy is not just a technical discipline reserved for specialists, but “a willingness … to learn to think distractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about” (TS, 9), then the texts which allow us to engage in philosophy are those that reflect this spirit of thought also. So beyond establishing film’s place within other arts, Cavell is concerned to show that, as with other art forms, film is as capable of ‘doing’ philosophy as those people and texts that take philosophy as a professional discipline—if not moreso. Indeed, those who would refute this claim, argues Cavell, are trapped in an internalised understanding (or picture) of philosophy, one that speaks only to itself (and is therefore worth very little to anyone else, precisely the opposite of the spirit of philosophy). The films that Cavell finds fit for being thought worthy of philosophy are unsurprisingly those that are an expression of his taste, and he admits as much in ‘The Thought of Movies’. In this essay he says that the heart of the aesthetic matter over whether film can be taken seriously as philosophy lies in putting our own values to the test: “Nothing can show this value to you unless it is discovered in your own experience, in the persistent exercise of your own taste, and hence the willingness to challenge your taste as it stands, to form your own artistic conscience, hence nowhere but in the details of your encounter with specific works” (TS, 11). Cavell’s taste in films is consistent with his (Wittgenstein-influenced) autobiographical style in philosophising: films that seem to deny the artist’s position towards the concepts they unfold do not deserve as much merit as those that adopt this position of “complete conviction, of compassion, of delight or ironic amusement, of longing or scorn or rage or loss” (WV, 98). Some will see his preferences as sentimental in this regard (as will be explored in the next chapter), and his suspicions of directors that practise a “withdrawal of feeling”, such as Godard, iconoclastic.1 But  Cavell takes Godard to be enacting much the same kind of gaze on cinema as the theorist; by making characters reproduce the slogans of contemporary culture, he transforms them into the objects in much the same way that advertising does: “If you believe that people speak slogans to one another, or that women are turned by bourgeois society into marketable objects, or that human pleasures are now figments and products of advertising accounts and that these are directions of dehumanization—then what is the value of pouring further slogans into that world?” (WV, 99). 1

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Cavell’s response has been to say that the affectation of objectivity is itself a mode of sentiment, and possibly a more dangerous one than the overt display of affection. Cavell takes it that the redemption for humanity (on and off-screen) will rest not only with the critiques of its general culture but with an attentiveness to the “differences between words (and deeds) of love, lust, instruction, valor, meanness, hope or play” (WV, 101) that make up the drama of ordinary individuals. He affirms the individual instance, the way in which certain people transform our lives through the minutiae of their gestures and behaviours, to which only the movie camera can pay due and close enough attention (and which, to some extent, only the enigma of the Hollywood star is equipped to reveal). The fact that Cavell’s attention is particularly drawn to Hollywood comedies of the immediately post-silent era attests to both the sincerity and limitations of ascribing to this sentimentalist view. Cavell evinces little patience for some of the developments in cinema and cinema-going by the time of writing The World Viewed, almost as if he had closed down the opportunity for film to become the things he had imagined at the point of its greatest expansion. In what follows, I will show how Cavell’s various strands of thought, particularly scepticism’s place in cinema and the moral dimension of seeing that he has elaborated from Wittgenstein, find unity in his investigation of the Hollywood comedies of remarriage. I will then want to argue that the concept of remarriage, as a concept of moral philosophy, might usefully find a translation into the field of education, as re-education. Whilst this concept will take some inspiration from the Cavellian ideas of renewal of the ordinary that remarriage also proposes, I will also want to argue that re-education need not be so constrained by matters of genre as remarriage is presented to be.

The Remarriage Comedy Cavell makes a brief mention of marriage in his 1973 work The Claim of Reason, with reference to Wittgenstein’s private language argument, in saying that we do not enter another person’s mind in the way that we enter another place, or “from entering, say, into marriage” (CR, 368).

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There is something germinal about this comment as the discussion of remarriage comedies will later prove: the social contract of marriage brings with it a whole different grammar of relations between two people to that of mind-to-another, even if the scepticism entailed in the latter relation provides the prompt for remarriage along lines no longer set out by the social norm. Marriage makes for a useful locus for Cavell’s style of conceptual investigation because it occurs at the intersection of a privacy myth and a public reality: it reproduces, between two people, an individual’s attempt at overcoming the psychologistic doubts and concerns that seek allay in social structure, moral norm, and scientific explanation. Cavell’s own attitude towards the concept of marriage is that the grounds for its success lie not in outward display (of ceremony, of remaining married under contract) but in the daily renewal of commitment to and discovery of another person that inevitably encounters disappointment on occasion. He calls this renewal ‘remarriage’, described in ‘The Thought of Movies’ as follows: The point of the title ‘remarriage’ is to register the grouping of a set of comedies which differ from classical comedy in various respects, but most notably in this, that in classical comedy the narrative shows a young pair overcoming their obstacles to their love and at the end achieving marriage, whereas comedies or remarriage begin or climax with a pair less young, getting or threatening their divorce, so that the drive of the narrative is to get them back together, together again. The central idea I follow out along various paths, but roughly the idea is that the validity or bond of marriage is assured, even legitimized, not by church or state or sexual compatibility (these bonds, it is implied, are no deeper than those of marriage), but by something I call the willingness for remarriage, a way of continuing to affirm the happiness of one’s initial leap. (TS, 12–13)

The basic premise of the remarriage comedy, as Cavell sees it, is that it is a particular genre of Hollywood comedy that concerns the reuniting of a couple after the event of the disintegration of their marriage. This disintegration has often come about because certain social norms associated with marriage, particularly a complacent caddishness on the part of a

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husband in contrast with the wife’s more submissive status, do not suit the parties involved (particularly the women). The couples are expressing a sense of disappointment in the socially anointed criteria of their union, which has entered into a malaise, which can only be broken through a restructuring of their relations along mutual and personal lines, not those of the social ordination that originally blessed their union. The philosophical problem that motivates these films therefore takes the form: “What constitutes a marriage?” Marriage is no longer understood as an unbreakable legal contract but a concept up for reinvestigation. Cavell notes that the films are marked by an emphasis on the female protagonist more than the male, her decisions about her future and the claims made upon her independence. They also involve the couple having to decide whether to get back together or submit to the fact or threat of divorce. Important factors to note about the investigation are: that Cavell sees the films as being of a genre, and a genre that is peculiarly American in its “cultural inheritance”; that this peculiarly American mode of filmmaking (most closely associated with Frank Capra and George Cukor) is reflective of a philosophical spirit that places it in contradistinction to a Kantian mode, which “is not part of a common cultural inheritance of American intellectuals”; that the events which are played out as remarriage on screen are reflective of the spirit of philosophising with which Cavell wishes to align himself. Essential to the possibility of remarriage is the ongoing dialogue between the marital pair (in contradistinction, say, to Rossellini’s Mr. and Mrs. Joyce in Voyage to Italy who have all but stopped talking to one another), which Cavell identifies as exemplifying a healthy relationship of this kind, as per John Milton’s description of marriage as “the meet and happy conversation”. As Russell Goodman views it, “Marriage in these films is pictured not as physical lovemaking or as a series of profound moments of understanding but as a conversation in which each party appreciates the other’s talk, his or her style, more than anyone else does” (Goodman, 1990, p. 27). Cavell restores to the Hollywood remarriage comedies a moral enterprise which unites concerns from both analytic and continental traditions in philosophy, but with an American face (a physiognomy of the kind of optimism that he saw previously in Keaton), that is, the ‘pursuit of happiness’ to which we are all fated.

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Cavell situates his investigation of remarriage within a moral tradition by declaring his differences and affinities: [R]emarriage narratives … locate the idea in a comic form, one to define which I find to require, for example, a concept of repetition grounded in Kierkegaard’s and in Nietzsche’s ideas of repetition and of recurrence; a concept of the relation of appearances to things-in-themselves that challenges Kant’s curtaining between them; a concept of attraction or magnetism that does not depend upon beauty; and a theory of morality that requires a working out of Emersonian perfectionism in its differences with the reigning academic forms of moral theory, deontological or Kantian, and teleological or Utilitarian. (PDAT, 87)

This short passage summarises much of what Cavell admires in cinema more generally: representations of lives in which activities must discover their renewal in repetition (e.g. in the fact that one wakes up next to the same person each morning), rather than in escape from it (finding someone else to wake up next to); the idea that Kantian noumena are actually as much on display on screen as phenomena, and are discovered through the connections we draw between them (e.g. the ideal of love that is evident in people’s shared pursuit of it, and the ways in which different perceptions fail at and succeed in realising that ideal); an inclination towards that which we find pleasurable or makes us happy, particularly the souls of the characters before us, that cannot be captured by any definition of, for example, ‘good acting’ (Cavell celebrates the individual actor’s contribution to bringing a character alive); and moral behaviour that takes all these things into account rather than relying on prescription to determine its outcomes. Cavell has resisted attempts to view remarriage comedy as having an affinity not only with Shakespeare but with the broader tradition of the comedy of manners, particularly the plays of the Restoration period in England (Cavell, 1981, p. 19). In doing so, he reinforces an idea of genre as “membership”, for which certain features of certain movies are not appropriate. This resistance comes despite close resemblances, especially in terms of a preference for witty dialogue over plot in driving events (in contrast to the Hollywood melodramas he explores in Contesting Tears).

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Another feature of remarriage comedies that Cavell pays less attention to is the degree to which they are reliant upon people being able to participate in certain language games in order for the comedic romance to unfold. Those who are less competent in these games, either by virtue of their dullness and lack of ‘style’ (Ralph Bellamy in The Awful Truth and His Girl Friday, Gail Patrick in My Favourite Wife) or social standing (James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story), lose out. For all the comments about pursuing happiness, it is important to recognise that this pursuit is not possible if one does not, or cannot, participate in the language games that allow us to do so. This is not just a matter of money, but one of culture, and Cavell is reluctant to explore this condition with the attention it requires, if remarriage is not just to be seen as a luxury afforded to those who are not just adept with expression, but are permitted to express themselves in a way that is already accepted by others.2 Hence there is also no discussion of European equivalents of the genre such as Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, in which a looseness of morals among the French upper-middle classes allow for extra-marital relations of all varieties. In Renoir’s celebrated film, order of a remarriage kind is restored with the husband and wife at the centre returning to one another, but it is at the expense (and expulsion) of all those elements that have not been able to sublimate the rules of the social game. There are no nods either to those other films of the same genre that do not quite fit Cavell’s criteria, such as Vivacious Lady (1938) (because the marriage is only kept secret, rather than disintegrating?), My Favourite Wife (1940) (because there is no evidence that the marriage was in trouble?), or Kitty Foyle (1940) (because there is a divorce, an option to remarry, and a decision to marry someone else?). In terms of conceptual integrity, these films might not be as convincing as the ones Cavell has chosen; but a conceptual investigation, as Wittgenstein frequently demonstrates, must admit many factors that actively prevent against our meaning the same thing in the use of our concepts in language (as my initial pointing exercise was intended to  William Rothman makes a similar point with regards to the privilege of the women in Cavell’s genre of the melodrama of the unknown woman, in comparison to those, say, of other races. When speaking of the feelting glimpse of the character of Samson in Now, Voyager, for example, he observes that in in the viewers’ (understandable) fixation on Bette Davis’ wealthy heiress, “we risk closing our eyes to others who are not allowed her freedom to change” (Rothman, 2004, p. 98). 2

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demonstrate). In the case of My Favorite Wife, for example, why not explore the fact that the couple in question both have, and behave as, children, rather than discount it on the grounds that perhaps the former discounts the latter from being an essential criterion of the genre. The conspicuousness of omissions in this respect casts doubt on the usefulness of genre in anchoring the value of a concept. Of course, the Cavellian aesthetic relies on the seeing of connections, but there is a difference between Cavell suggesting that Gelsomina in La Strada bears a strong family resemblance to Ovid’s Philomel, and his accommodating a whole group of films within the tradition of another group of plays. Where the former strikes us with the clarity of the new aspect, the latter bears down with the shadow of the canonical. There is something claustrophobic about the approach that does not admit of alternatives. Which is to ask: why does remarriage need to be tied to genre in order to function as a concept (especially when many of Shakespeare’s plays still remain generically problematic)? And doesn’t that tie compromise its own renewal? The spirit seems to run contrary to Wittgenstein’s effort to resist the classificatory in favour of Paul Standish’s description as the need for “method or technique, of seeing connections, of knowing how to go on” (Standish, 2017, p. 191). The seeing of connections may value genre as a rule, from which it is then able to imagine variation, but does that then require the invention of another genre? With these questions in mind, I want to pursue a variation on remarriage’s conceptual criteria (as outlined above) by looking at films in which the concept, and not the genre, of ‘re-education’ might be at stake instead. This is not just a gratuitous move, but rather one that proposes to both embrace the potential of remarriage as a concept and expose its limitations as a genre. In many ways, remarriage is the concept that comes closest to defining Cavellian philosophising: it is the peculiar blend of existentialism, transcendentalism, and realism that asks us to re-wed ourselves to the world, through our words, in our ordinary and everyday experiences. As a genre, however, it assumes much not only about who participates in marriage as a tradition but also how the comedy of remarriage affirms the kind of tradition in philosophy which constitutes the broader project of Cavell’s interdisciplinarity. It is on these conceptual terms, then, that we might be brought to rethink (or re-wed ourselves?) to education. This investigation functions more as an experiment than an assertion.

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The Re-education Drama Cavell’s investigation of the remarriage comedy turns upon—among other things—its refashioning of a genre already in existence: the Shakespearean comedy. This works, in part, because it fits with the established method Cavell has of taking the common denominational parlance and refashioning it according to his own experience. To draw the line from Shakespeare to Capra fits with Cavell’s preferences, but this line does somewhat distort genre’s own problematic character. Genre might provide the thread between philosophical ‘texts’ (in their broadest sense), but doesn’t it also provide a police cord around ‘seeing-as’? There is a question of whether the method doesn’t become a noose in terms of our interpretation and our ability to see aspects. If I say, for example, that the films that qualify as remarriage comedies today might be the likes of It’s Complicated (2009), or even Bridesmaids (2011) for its refashioning of the genre into one about friendship, the question is no longer whether we accept these speculations, but whether there is any point. Remarriage has suddenly become more a mode of Aristotelian categorisation through newly validated generic criteria, than one which tests the limits of our criteria as viewers (and what we are willing to accept as ‘real’ in any given instance). Remarriage again becomes something that we seek in a film, as if evidence of its being there confirmed the genre, rather than something that reveals itself to be at play. Individual films are in danger of becoming simply illustrative of a genre, rather than describing concepts in new and interesting ways. Can there be a loosening, or even unyoking, of the concept of remarriage from the genre of (Shakespearean) comedy such that it attains a more plastic function in our ‘seeing connections’ than the more canonical tendencies of the genre seem to imply? Cavell is fairly steadfast on those films that qualify as having an affinity with Shakespearean comedy that he seeks to express, and the avoidance of allegory with other modes of expression that would somehow dilute the integrity of the generic association (as opposed to a conceptual one). The Cavellian method is not altogether immutable, however: the Read and Goodenough anthology, Film as Philosophy (2005), provides a number of excellent examples of

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how the collapse of a Cartesian paranoid introspection, and the remarriage to the world that occurs as a consequence, can play out. These examples are not assured by generic grounding in tradition (although there is something hubristic about the male leads in many of the films discussed that could be traced back to Shakespearean tragedy). Indeed, they mostly fit within the peculiarly cinematic blanket genre of ‘Drama’, one whose generality has no precedent in the theatre or other art forms. And because drama can be comic, historic, epic, tragicomic, etc., its aesthetic character (its claim upon our interest, and appeal to our better judgment) is always still in the process of (re)defining itself, rather than discovering some legitimacy in previous incarnations of generic association. I want to therefore pursue the idea of a re-education drama as an aesthetic that is not hidebound by genre—even as it differentiates itself from those films that often are. The traditional Hollywood film about education might usefully be described—generically—as an education drama. The conventional education drama is almost always centred upon a school which is not just a backdrop for the relations that take place between young people (as in, for example, Grease or Mean Girls), but is necessary to the plot also (i.e. due to its geographic location, its demographics). An education drama can be easily identified by a narrative formula: a teacher arrives at a school where children are either over-privileged (Dead Poets Society, Mona Lisa Smile, School of Rock), underprivileged (Freedom Writers, Dangerous Minds, Sister Act 2), repressed, or violent (Blackboard Jungle), all of which are conceived of as socially contrived obstacles to their true and equal education. The teacher experiences difficulties of his or her own in trying to communicate to students that they are worthy and capable of more than their current circumstances suggest/permit. The teacher then finds an innovative way to overcome the obstacle such that the students are freed from their Platonic captivity. In staging its themes within the formal and group (if not mass) learning environment, the education drama is primarily geared towards change at the social (rather than individual) level, and almost always within the hands of a charismatic—and ultimately emancipatory—educator. Narratively speaking, these figures are secular Christs for heretic schools.

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Where Rossellini’s pedagogical films might have had a Comenius-­ inspired universal knowledge in view, the education dramas have as their horizon a universal politics, the achievement of an egalitarian, cosmopolitan, and democratic liberalism. In short, the drama is about something bigger than any of the protagonists because it is the drama of an American ideal (consistent with the philosophical ambitions of Dewey, Rawls, Nussbaum, and others). More importantly, the model for the achievement of this ideal is the teacher: obstacles may have to be overcome, but their overcoming is somewhat guaranteed because that individual already embodies what society is to become. Of Mona Lisa Smile, one critic wrote: “It sends [Julia] Roberts to Wellesley less as a character than as an ambassador from the enlightened future. She’s there to explain it all, to challenge the narrow expectations of the young women of the 50s, to let them know there’s more out there than life in service to their future husbands” (Tamney, 2004: online). We invariably know that the arrival of the emancipatory educator upon our screens signals the triumph of a liberal worldview in which a diversity of self-awareness can be accommodated within a particular frame of reference. Whatever happens, the viewer is safe in the knowledge that the teacher will guide the students out of the cave. By contrast, what I want to (tentatively) call dramas of re-education are less ones in which the only question at the beginning is “How will the teacher achieve our ideal education?” and more ones in which ideals of the teacher and of the learning situation are themselves called into crisis. These crises might lead us towards describing the films as tragedies, given the self-awakening in which “the philosophical impulse in adults is characteristically brought on by a crisis in one’s life” (Cavell, 2008, p. 59)— except that they are not always defined by tragic ends. Instead, Stephen Mulhall’s description of a crisis in relation to Cavell’s work on J.  L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances is to simply describe it as a “turning point” rather than an “overturning”. Where the emancipatory educators of education dramas lack some self-awareness around their pedagogy because it accompanies them more as a gift than a skill, the teacher in the re-education drama has already assumed a self-consciously resolute stance towards freedom as an educational end, which inevitably means that the students are instrumentalised to this cause. Where the

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narrative of an education drama sees the triumph of liberalism as an implicit plot strategy rather than an explicit pedagogical manifesto, the teachers of re-education dramas initially inhabit more doctrinaire approaches to their roles. The teacher is therefore someone who already carries the burden of (a picture of ) education upon him or herself, who wields a Weltanschauung so strong that it must confront scepticism head­on if self-knowledge as integral to the teaching personality is to be instantiated. What is made clear is that no model of either political ideal or ‘teacherliness’ will serve as exemplar because teachers must come to terms with the fantasy of their own personal ideology (or private language) in order to rediscover an expression, or style, of teaching for themselves.3 The two films I want to discuss in-depth here are Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson (2006) and Matt Ross’s Captain Fantastic (2016). These films are deliberately chosen for their being American films, given the specific mode of thought that Cavell claims for American cinema (in the Capra vein) more generally. The claim in The World Viewed is that American cinema is characterised by a particular position that the filmmaker adopts towards the subject of the film, one that does not make claims to objectivity, but rather expresses something of the filmmaker’s view of the world. This sits comfortably with Cavell’s view that the ‘pitch of philosophy’ itself ought to be autobiographical, and that those films that pretend to social criticism without situating their own voice within it can only affect, rather than assume critical distance. I would argue that the writers/ directors of both Captain Fantastic and Half Nelson do commit themselves to an affective investment in their protagonists, and express both the conviction and the compassion that Cavell calls for in works that provide one with pleasure.4

 An early candidate for re-education criteria is Josef von Sternberg’s Blue Angel (1930), an example in which the coming-to-terms does not quite arrive at rediscovery: Professor Rath’s necessary education in his own voluptuousness proves to consume, rather than redeem, the professionalism upon which he had built his reputation. 4  There is also the suggestion in both, I would argue, that the fact of the teacher as protagonist being male is important in these films, and that they in part constitute responses to the question: “(What) Can a man teach today?” 3

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Half Nelson’s Disappointment with Dialectics I will start with Half Nelson because I think it is the more successful of the two films both in terms of its sustaining a conceptual investigation of what it might mean to re-educate the educator, and as a work that is more aesthetically and coherently satisfying independent of such an investigation. The film also shares a number of devices in common with the neorealist mode of filmmaking, including improvisation, amateur actors as schoolchildren, and a loose narrative thread (the scenes are substantial, the seams between them less obvious). The basic plot of the story concerns two protagonists, a high school teacher, Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling), and one of his students, Drey (Shareeka Epps). Mr. Dunne commands the respect and affection of his students in his History class because of his offbeat and friendly attitude and his passion for the subject. This passion runs contrary to the curriculum design because Dan is determined to teach history as a process of ‘dialectics’.5 At the same time, Dan is also a drug addict whose dependency has destroyed past relationships and is beginning to encroach upon his life at school also. One of his students, Drey, is an early adolescent caught between her admiration for Mr. Dunne as a role model and an increasing draw towards the life of drug crime that landed her brother in jail. Dan and Drey’s lives are pulled closer together when Dan’s drug addiction brings them both into the orbit of a local dealer, Frank. The set-up might, at first glance, seem altogether contrived. The film anticipates an emancipatory educator narrative like any other. Dan opens his class (and the film) with a discussion of dialectical ‘opposites’, and as the kids respond with helpful suggestions such as ‘Night and Day’, ‘Big and Little’, ‘Teacher and Student’, the viewer is immediately conscious that there is another set of opposites already on display in the image of the white, well-educated, middle-class man, teaching his predominantly black students from a deprived neighbourhood about social change. The irony is electric, and yet at the same time there is pathos in the evident  The inverted commas are both to draw attention to Dan’s own individual take on dialectical thought and to the fact that it is the subject of much mockery throughout the film from colleagues, family, and foes. 5

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affection the kids have for their earnest educator—even as (or perhaps because) he affects their mannerisms and vernacular. It might be assumed, at this stage, that Dan and Drey are simply fated to enact the lesson that Dan tries to impart to his history class in the opening sequence, the dialectical theory of history being a sequence of “a clash of opposites”. But there is already evidence that this opposition is not so simple: Dan’s affectations can be seen in equal measure to be both endearing and/or an appropriation of black youth culture. In this sense there is something childlike in the way in which he desires to be accepted by the kids, to be thought of as ‘cool’ on his students’ terms. It is almost as if his role as a teacher permits him an escape from who he is as a person (antithetical to the Carl Rogers-type ‘authentic educator’ of the education drama). Rather than being exclusively defined by the things that in some cases he ‘is’ (white, male, etc.), Dan is here also defined by what he is not, or rather by what he desires to be (someone who is accepted, acknowledged, respected). This is not a simple dialectics of self and other, but one in which the other within the self is also at issue. Individual integrity is as partial as community, says Cavell, and is to be searched for “always within circumstances of false unities, misplaced desires” (Cavell, 2012, p. 29). When we jump straight down the throat of false unities, we are inclined to see individuals like Dan as representative of the very conditions they pretend to challenge, but a closer attention to the way things actually play out on screen often reveals “how mysterious these things are, and in general how different different things are from one another” (WV: 19). The similarity with De la Rochefoucauld’s maxim that “we are sometimes as different from ourselves as we are from each other” is both striking and urgent here: criticism cannot do justice to this film if things on screen are not able to become something else, that is, if they are reducible to a lens, a theory, or a gaze (male, white, or otherwise). After all, criticism and crisis are etymologically linked as both separation and judgment, and it is the task of the critic (not the theorist) to do justice to the observation of crisis, the ways in which a self not only separates from others (through objectification, say), but from the self. So, the opening scene, in fact, seems entirely designed to set up the kind of expectation that reality cannot support, that is, the idea that history—and social change—can be reduced to the theoretical formula

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that Dan has prescribed for it. Cavell describes these formulae for living as “derived images of what would constitute knowing and being known” (CT, 20), partial representations that do as much justice to the whole as passport control does to human recognition and free movement. Stylistically, the scene suggests that the kind of objective social processes that Dan is describing will be undermined by the selfhood of the characters participating in the story: the shaky, handheld quality of the camera work, with its close-ups on individual student faces, and restless movement from frame to frame, all portray an atmosphere of the kind of ‘fidgetiness’ one would expect from a class full of teenagers, people looking for the resources they need to ‘become’ someone, to pursue happiness for themselves. The whole scene is imbued with a sense of just how pivotal a moment in the lives of these young people this specific class, in this specific time, is—not as a collective, but individually. Some look at the teacher in earnest, others in confusion, others in delight, others in curiosity. The delicacy and fragility of a time for which the teacher carries such a burden is captured in an essay by Cavell called ‘Time and Place for Philosophy’, where the liminal space between childhood and adolescence is described as one in which the young person recognizes that he or she is not quite an adult either, recognizes not merely that he or she is perhaps not full grown but is not up to being full grown, to take on the powers and consequences of that unreturnable gift. Here the task is no longer, one could say, to explore the ins and outs of nature but to assume responsibility for the right and wrongs of the interactions with it called society, responsible not merely to it but for it. (Of course I do not deny that the child has a massive sense of injustice and of the desire for retribution.) The suggestion here is that the step into adulthood is not established by continuing to grow naturally, but requires one’s intervention in one’s own life, making it one’s own. (Of course it may be said that this requirement begins in infancy. I am speaking here of differences of economy.) Adulthood is a process of decision, call it the conversion of possibilities into actualities. This is the moment philosophers might view, or project, as consent to the society of one’s predecessors. (Cavell, 2008, p. 53)

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If children are to consent to the society of their predecessors, they must look to those that would inspire them to do so. In Half Nelson, the director Ryan Fleck reveals himself to be intensely alert to the vulnerability of teacher, of students, and of society, in this situation. The kids look to Dan with expressions of interest, but his claim upon that interest is precarious. Their attention is turned towards the teacher, and it is in this role that Dan first presents himself. When he asks “What is History?” as his opening line, he positions himself like the philosopher of Nietzschean ridicule, the Socratic pedagogue who sets up a problem to which he already has the answer. The question is reminiscent both of Cavell’s ‘umiak’, and of St Augustine’s observation that “If no one asks me [what time is], I know what it is.” To set up such problems is to set up philosophy and knowledge as things that exist independent of our interaction with it, our humanity. Paradoxically, says Cavell, philosophers demonstrate their humanity in posing such problems because “nothing is more human than wishing to deny one’s humanity, or to assert it at the expense of others” (CR: 109). Dan’s assertion of universal history at the beginning of Half Nelson is not to show how the truth of universal history (Hegel, Marx, Fukuyama) will play out in its events but sets up how he will come to deny the humanity of others by clinging to universal truths. Half Nelson distinguishes itself from other education dramas not just in the necessary transformation/becoming of the teacher figure as opposed to the students, but in seeing that journey as one in which the protagonist’s whole Weltanschauung must be brought close to destruction before he can be re-wed to his profession. This transformation attests to Cavell’s belief in “film’s power of metamorphosis or transfiguration” (Cavell, 1996, p. 122). There is, after all, nothing not to like in Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating, in Richard Dreyfus’ Mr. Holland, in Julia Roberts’ Katherine Watson, or in Hilary Swanks’ Erin Grewell. At worst, these educators experience moments in which their naïveté gets the better of them, but their character is never truly in question. They make adjustments in judgment, perhaps even in attitude, but their disposition towards the world is not called into crisis. As the embodiment of a social vision, their character must not come into question, must not ‘become’ something else: it exists to educate the viewer normatively as to what education should be, not to question where we should be looking for answers, let alone ask whether it has any meaning at all. The teachers of education dramas carry

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with them the imprint of Rossellini’s philosophers. A ‘good’ education, as a metaphysical ideal, already precedes their narratives, and it is up to the narrative to find its way to the full realisation of that ideal. By contrast, Half Nelson removes further and further from the surety of ground upon which we would like to call Dan a ‘good’ teacher. He begins by showing his obvious merits as a teacher: his students like him not for the inspirational content of his history classes, but for who he is. He makes them laugh and he makes them listen. But the fatigue effect of his drug habit becomes over time the physiological symptom of weariness of not accepting his personability as the greater pedagogical quality that he brings to the learning situation than his earnest dogmatism. The fact that his decency and despair are at odds with one another never prevents us from the awareness that they are part of one and the same person, and that he can therefore be every bit as Hegelian as Heraclitan in his humanity. The disposition towards the latter in the wish for self-betterment appears in his saying: “When you inhale and you exhale, every single time you do that you’re a little bit different than the one before.” Dan’s idealism means that he can be dogmatic about social change in the classroom, and yet maundering on its true meaning out in the world. In a conversation he has with two women he has picked up whilst high in a bar, he tries to situate what he does as something meaningful (for others to understand): Vanessa: Dan:

So you’re a teacher? I’m a teacher. And what am I supposed to teach them, you know what I mean? What am I supposed to teach them? Simone: Right. Dan: That’s the point, you know what I mean? Simone: Yeah. Dan: If you can help one student… Vanessa: Yeah. Dan: No, if you can change… Simone: One person, right? Dan: If you can change one person… Simone: Then you can change them all. Dan: No, that’s not the point. The point is, if you change one…

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If remarriage comedies are characterised by the ways in which two people appreciate each other’s style of speech more than any other, in that they might be saying almost anything and that would still be appreciated, re-education dramas might be seen as characterised by speech whose received idiom must fail if the individual’s own voice is to emerge. In this short passage of dialogue, Dan’s unfinished sentences reveal him to be inarticulate, almost lost, in the face of the questions as to his pedagogical purpose (in this he recalls aspects of Antonio in Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, thwarted by an inability to summon that to which others cannot bear witness on his behalf ). He does not know his way about when trying to locate the real meaning of what he does, and the camera only affirms his isolation in this respect, framing him in one shot trying to explain, whilst the two women are always framed separately, together, looking at one another in cynical glances. Dan’s picture of the world is leaving him disconnected from others. The self-interrogation that takes place as part of the dialogue with the two women suggests that this is an individual who has not yet come to terms with himself, or with what his role is as a person in the lives of others. The fact that he is also unable to mean what he says is evident in the lack of interest that his companions take in what he is saying. Instead, these are the questions he keeps internally asking himself and has no answer to. He assumes that there is a point and that it must be a change of some kind, but he fails to see that the change he seeks in others is one he is failing to seek in himself. His criteria are not working for him: he does not know who is trying to change or how, or indeed what will be different (for him) if that change happens. As the film progresses (and his condition declines), this inability to articulate also spills into his classroom confidence, where his sentences start to drift without ever finding firm ground and his monologue betrays the incoherence of the metaphysical coherence he so desperately seeks: In Asia the idea that things are made of opposites, Ying and Yang, dates back 3,000 years. That was them saying change is the only constant, but that just died in the West. It just couldn’t be both, couldn’t be black and white. It couldn’t be right and wrong. It had to be one or the other. Who

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am I to say that Aristotle is wrong, right, but that doesn’t make any sense … These things need each other. The idea that all God’s creations are ‘perfect’… So just to suggest that a tree, it’s crooked and it’s straight, it’s strong and it’s weak, is to suggest that God created something imperfect. They do however acknowledge it in people. We are sinners, but we can strive to be good, just not in nature itself, I guess…

Here Dan’s humanity is beginning to peep through the cracks of his dialectical method, cracks for which religion, philosophy, and nature all seem to be conspiring to create a terrible confusion around what might make a person good (to which the only response can be that none of these have completely the right answer). In both these passages, Dan is continually in conversation with himself and his pursuit of conviction (over happiness), continuing to claim what Cavell calls the “epistemological exemption” that contrives “the singling out for unknownness”, which is “the foundation of a particular direction of madness in adulthood” (CR, 463). Dan would like to teach in such a way that his private self need play no part in the process, to avoid acknowledgement altogether, but he blinds himself to others by doing so. In another scene, the father of a former student approaches Dan in a bar to tell him that his daughter has gone on to college and has chosen to study history because of him. The fact that Dan clearly doesn’t remember the student in question shows how confused and introspective his ambitions are: he lives by a doctrine that he sees as important for the kids before him, but the doctrine leaves him aspect-blind when it comes to seeing individuals and his own personal intervention in their lives. To assume teaching as a style without being self-implied (or soul) is to ask others to accept you only as an automaton: “a man’s style is a picture of him” (CV, 149), as Wittgenstein says. In this invitation, there also lies its impossibility (however much I want to be seen as automaton, I am not one as far as I know), and so I will still continue to “betray exactly by the way in which I conceal” (CR, 459), especially to those “who know how to read such concealments”—and who more so than those who haven’t yet learnt how to conceal, who haven’t yet assumed the language of camouflage, that is, children? The disjointedness of his speech has to do with a

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sense of exposure in the face, the faces that see him for what he is, and thus the irreconcilability of his criteria with himself as lived person. The juxtaposition of his agreeable but assertive persona in his professional life with the childlike inquisition of his adult personality sits at the heart of the conflict between the two. It is evidently the latter side to Dan with which the viewer is meant to sympathise, but the tenacity of the film is held together by our never knowing which side will win out, self-­assertion or self-destruction.

Re-educating the Educator Dan pushes the viewer to the limit of wondering whether he can—or should—be redeemed as a ‘good’ person at all. It is testament to Gosling’s acting that we do not lose sight of this possibility, because Dan always betrays a doubt in his own conviction, glimpses of being lost and not knowing how to go on even at his most self-confident (Cavell argues that film is unique in its capacity to retrieve the human from images of simple identification in this way, because the movie camera makes visible “a possibility or potential in the human self not normally open to view”). Gosling is able to reveal both the kind of aspect-blindness that is the preserve of adults who have had sufficient exposure to the world to reduce it to a single viewpoint, and the childlike attitude of one who still has not accepted the responsibility of “one’s intervention in one’s own life, ­making it one’s own” (Cavell, 2008, p. 53). Dan is from the outset both sides of the duck-rabbit: an assured duck on the one hand, and a frightened rabbit on the other. He is both human and teacher, however much he contrives to hold these two positions apart. It is these aspects to his own person that place him in conflict not only with others but with himself. Having played roles with Drey of parent, guardian, mentor, and even seducer at a school dance, at one point he turns around to her and says: “I’m your teacher, not your friend.” In the figure of Dan, then, we are presented with a man who, when teaching, is liked because he performs his pedagogy; in life, he is fugitive because there can be no performing to oneself. He is a man riven within himself, preaching the

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kind of ideology in the classroom, which is impossible for him to put into any kind of useful practice outside of it because it will not legitimate his existence in a way that provides him with the exemption from confronting it. Like Lear, he is tragically destined to collapse beneath the burden of a concrete view of the world that is meant to armour him against disillusionment and yet continually disappoints to the point of destruction. In short, Dan is no Longfellow Deeds. He displays the same kinds of fidgetiness characteristic of the sceptic, but chooses to dispel it with drugs, rather than by playing the tuba. When he is not sedated, Dan deploys the intellectual instruments of educational theory to keep his mind off his own condition. He plays critical pedagogue in the classroom because it is a theoretical position that he can intellectually uphold. The bad faith of the latter and the escapism of the drugs are seen to be mutually corrosive and cannot be sustained. Because these are external solutions to a condition of the self, it is conversation with, and consistency in, the self that slowly becomes corrupted. The lack of foundation that his pedagogical theory has in real human interaction repeatedly undermines Dan’s moral integrity. When allowing visitors into his home, for example, Dan experiences a kind of defensiveness that is absent in his freewheeling teaching demeanour. Both Drey and Isabel (a colleague he has invited round for a dinner date), for example, look through his book collection. The first asks “Why you got so many books about black people?” whilst the other questions “Are you a Communist?” Dan ignores the former and attacks the latter (“If I had a copy of Mein Kampf would that make me a Nazi?”), and in doing so shuts down the opportunity to express ­something of the anxiety which these questions pose for him (in the same way that the judge and psychoanalyst are affronted at Longfellow Deeds’ challenges to their own peculiar mannerisms). Dan takes these questions as invasions of his privacy, but they are in fact the questions that confront him with what he means by teaching in the way that he does, and the ones that he must answer if he is to teach. The questions test Dan’s criteria for knowing whether what he does is right, and whether he is allowing the words of others (as received via the

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books he reads) to determine the meaning of what he does, rather than his own self-expression (of which we see just enough to know that is very well-received by his students; they are well disposed towards his soul). The paranoia of a picture of thought, of education and its purpose, is allowed to surface again in these instances, and Dan opts to defend his position rather than “seek what it would be painful to find out” (CR, 109). It is as if he hoped that the social orientation of his pedagogical purpose was inextricably and unequivocally aligned with a particular moral integrity (cf. Professor Rath in Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel), but the weakness of his responses suggests otherwise. These questions call for a renewed perspective on the self, rather than a rejection of its demand; whilst that can be upheld in public, it does not bear private scrutiny (because he cannot bear the thought of those questions and what they mean for his character). As evidence of Cavell’s position that it is through the expression of our intentions that we discover responsibility, Dan’s disavowal of self in his educational expression and intent leads to increasing irresponsibility, from pet neglect to sexual aggression. The peak of Dan’s interrogation, however, arrives in a confrontation with the drug dealer (and competitor for Drey’s paternal influence), Frank. Dan tries to persuade Frank to stay out of Drey’s life, saying that he is not a good influence on her, whilst Dan, the white drug addict, is looking out for her interests. Frank’s response is to ask whether “What this comes down to is ‘What’s white is right’, right?” When Dan tries to dismiss this question, Frank further challenges his integrity: “it’s good for Drey to have somebody like you looking out for her, Mr. Model A1 fucking citizen.” The look of horror on Dan’s/Gosling’s face might suitably be one that captures what Cavell means by ‘exposure’. Dan is horrified at this exposure of his own prejudices, particularly the double standard he permits himself in all aspects of his life, and the fact that his civic integrity is being challenged when he sees himself as teaching civic virtue. At the point at which these scales start to fall from his eyes, Dan turns to Frank and shouts: “I don’t know! I don’t know!” The failure of knowledge in these words reduces Dan to a King Lear in a storm of his own summoning. The director’s intention seems not so much to expose Dan as being a fraud in this scene, but to remind an audience that we are all vulnerable to the seduction of principle over

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practice in this regard. Like Lear, Dan is not entirely alone here either: the shot of his admission that he “doesn’t know” is over Frank’s shoulder, an intimation of the other person’s role in that realisation and in the possibility of self-realisation that might come about as a result. To have the rug of normative principle pulled from under us can reduce us to the state of children in the face of what we should do next. Cavell writes that “the philosophical impulse in adults is that it is characteristically brought on by a crisis in one’s life” (2008, p. 59), and here we see that crisis written into the expression of philosophical bafflement on Gosling’s face. Dan’s confrontation with Frank brings his fantasy of dialectics crashing down to earth (Frank mockingly asks Dan how the ‘dianetics’ are going—­ perhaps a more profound commentary on Dan’s metaphysics than its flippancy suggests), as it is played out under very different circumstances than the Marxian/Freirean positions he has put forward to his own students. Again, the aspect-blindness that Dan has afforded himself is foregrounded, seen in his alarmed and almost trapped expression. Dan’s “I don’t know, I don’t know!” is an expression of doubt, but its referent exceeds any particular answer or object. Much like the point at which Longfellow Deeds breaks his silence in court, this is the moment of doubt that Cavell demands of his moral perfectionists, a crisis of knowing in the face of the very reality of one’s relations with others (rather than our reconstruction of them via theory). And then Dan follows up with this: “I’m supposed to do something, right? But what am I supposed to do?” This is the first moment at which Dan sincerely asks something of someone else, in which he genuinely seeks an answer for which he hasn’t already furnished himself. He asks it no longer as the teacher of history, who knows exactly what history is but almost as a child. His wild-eyed, distracted gaze is meant to be that of the thinker close to madness, the point at which he must decide whether to deny his doubt (and thereby defer it again), or to assume it as the foundation for self-knowledge. Here, for both Wittgenstein and Cavell, is where philosophy begins (and at which films, in Rupert Read’s words, “can deliberately collapse under [their] own weight”). It does not start with identifying a problem (such as ‘History’ or ‘Education’) for which we need to arrive at a satisfactory solution through the application of rigorous rational method, but in medias res, in the middle of an argument between a dealer and an addict

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on a Brooklyn street, and the acceptance that actually we do not know our way about, and that we need others to aid us in this exercise. Dan began this scene in an assertive fashion, telling Frank to stay away from Drey. Through the dawning of the realisation that his demands were a projection of his own anxieties, Dan begins the process of returning his ordinariness to his disavowed sense of self. When Frank offers him a drink, Dan’s initial reaction is to treat this gesture as one of suspicion, to think that there must be something in its intent that is not on the surface, so much so that Frank has to offer a more simplistic version: “Are you thirsty? Do you want a drink?” Dan allows himself to be led childlike into the house. Dan’s great exclamation of not knowing does not, however, mark the point of his redemption: he will have to travel further into despair at this knowledge of just how little he really knows (about himself ) in order to return from it. But in this exclamation “I don’t know”, Dan goes from adult to ‘grownup’ in Cavellian terms; it is an expression of frustration with lacking the means to go on with the tools that he currently has at his disposal. Half Nelson would be an exceptionally tedious film if it had genuinely attempted to reproduce the hackneyed dialectics presented by its protagonist at the outset in its narrative. Conversely, it could easily be seen as being libertarian in its politics if it deliberately attempted to undermine the oppositional narrative to simply say that everyone ought to be free to do things their own way. The film does neither and is nuanced in its navigation of a different political and ethical concept: the interrelatedness that binds us to community, independent of ideology but not independent of one another. The film doesn’t rely on the traditional cliché that ‘change comes from within’, which suggests that we can make that change at will and by ‘looking inwards’, but turns at every moment on the hopeless indebtedness we have to others for the change in perspective on ourselves, our different aspects. The final scenes of the film show Dan neither surrendering himself to the ecstasy of self-denial in drug addiction nor fully redeemed from this fugitive position by being restored happily to the classroom. He is simply showered, and sat on the sofa at home with Drey (it is one of a number of occasions where they are shot face on, parallel to one another, as opposed to his either looking down at her from the desk, or her looking down upon him when he’s high and in a weak-

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ened state). There is the intimation that with his body cleaned, his soul might be cleansed also, as if the double that he had contrived for himself in the form of the teacher has settled back into the same body.6 The difficulty of reconciling his relationship to Drey seems all along to have stemmed from a fundamental mistrust of self. Drey has successfully shown Dan that the realisation of his person does not lie in the mastery of his profession, but in being able to learn from those he hopes to teach. Cavell makes this point in Pursuits of Happiness by saying that “the way to overcome theory correctly, philosophically, is to let the object or the work of your interest teach you how to consider it” (PH, 10). As viewers, we are left here with an image of possibility, which does not guarantee the direction that their lives will take from this point and whether they will be free of other trappings by virtue of their cinematic genre. They are simply more alive to themselves and the world, and prepared to take on the day again, having overcome the confusion of their relationships with one another, discovering instead the value of friendship as appropriate animus. The pair have succeeded in reaffirming their relationship on grounds that do not require a denial of self for the sake of social norm. The teacher-student relation is seen to be possible as a friendship, perhaps even necessarily configured as such. Teaching, for the time being, is still both meaningful and possible.

Captain Fantastic’s Fantasy of Education What I hope to have indicated, then, is that Half Nelson presents us with a portrait of education, one in which the concept of teaching, or what it means to be a teacher, is investigated as something that matters to us, but that it might need rethinking. As viewers, we are asked to think about whether it is possible to sustain the good intentions of a particular pedagogy if it is not at the same time supported by a certain kind of self-­  Cavell writes of Now, Voyager that it explores this same theme of unknownness (to oneself ) through Bette Davis’ character Charlotte Vale, such that the film proposes “the study of human change, as liberation, as the scene or condition of a doubleness in human passion (to say the least), an acceptance of the otherness of others as an acceptance of their difference from, and their sameness with, themselves” (CT, 122). 6

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knowledge and awareness of others. The answer seems to be negative, that it constitutes bad faith, and that the teacher must understand himself (in the case of Dan) as implied in the narrative he seeks to teach, if that narrative is to be ethically non-deterministic (the title alludes to a wrestling hold that can be got out of, but requires a struggle). It is only the film as a whole that can carry out this investigation, and it is important that we have no sense of Dan’s fate until the very end. Captain Fantastic (2016) is not as committed a film as Half Nelson, in that its style bears more the marks of convention than Half Nelson’s more open and deliberately hesitant cinematography, and is a lot less nuanced in both theme and form. Contra Cavell, the film’s structure is something of a perversion of a Shakespearean comedy. One of Cavell’s criteria for a remarriage comedy is that there is a pastoral interlude at some point in the film, during which the couple escapes the noise of the city to discover their relationship anew. This criterion can be said to have been fulfilled in Half Nelson with a scene in which Dan and Drey are at a park on some slides. They arrive at the bottom and hold an important conversation about Drey’s future (who she might become), as equals, independent of the classroom dynamics that have him at the board and her in her chair, and independent of his addiction which often places her in a position of superior gaze, looking down at him. Captain Fantastic, by contrast, begins in the space that has supposedly been created as one only for equals, in which the educator has taken his children away from society to avoid its corrosive immorality: it begins with paradise before the fall, the pastoral prior to the return to civilisation. Here freedom in education is understood as only possible if it is guaranteed by freedom from society. And it is as if the pastoral interlude is to be upheld as a perpetual bliss. But just as remarriage comedy sets up the idea that freedom is to be found in divorce, only for it to be rediscovered in becoming wed again, Captain Fantastic undertakes an exploration of what freedom might mean within society, not outside of it (which can, in Cavellian terms, only ever be an affectation of outsideness because it is defined by both comparison with and denial of the inside). Ben Cash (Viggo Mortensen) and his wife have removed their six children from corporatist, capitalist American society to go and live in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. The children have been raised to be both

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self-reliant, learning to hunt and training in combat techniques, and to be intellectually hungry (their reading includes George Eliot, Dostoevsky, and Mao Tse-Tung). They are also encouraged to be musical and adopt political opinions of a left-libertarian flavour (Noam Chomsky is the family’s Father Christmas) that are manifest in their ability to repeat and assume Ben’s own ideological mantras: “You said Americans are undereducated and overmedicated”, quotes his young daughter Zaja. This is the background to the crisis about to befall the family, with the news that the children’s mother (whom from the start we have never seen because she has already been away for “five months, two weeks, six days, and eleven hours”) has finally committed suicide having been admitted to psychiatric care. The story then follows the family’s attempts to gather themselves and head south in a bus in order to attend the mother’s funeral, which is being organised by the maternal grandparents, who blame Ben for their daughter’s demise. The tacit suggestion that the mother might have been driven to suicide by the idealism of her own co-creation looms large over our impression of the sort of education the children have been receiving. On the surface of things, the kind of schooling these parents have dreamt up for their children has a utopian feel along the lines of Plato’s Republic (a letter from Ben’s wife to her mother lets her know that “Our children shall be Philosopher Kings”), with nods to Rousseau’s Romantic child, Locke’s tabula rasa, and Marxist counter-culture (not forgetting the overtones of the Genesis myth). But with the ghost of the mother hovering over events, the other dilemma of a closed community drifts into view also: the spectre of incest (consistent with Biblical origin). Indeed, incest, as both familial and intellectual threat, is what arguably brings about the reckoning of Ben’s authority as an educator with the real needs of his family. It is the most extreme outcome of a paranoid pedagogy, one which can only accept its own knowledge as that worth reproducing. The opening scene, after all, is one in which the entry of the eldest boy, Bodevan, into manhood is celebrated with his killing of a deer, an event that almost directly coincides with the news of the death of his mother. There is something Oedipal about this occasion, as if the slaughter of the (male) deer signalled the older son’s overthrow of the father, and therefore the mother has anticipated the arrival of her son’s sexuality by

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refuting its fate (we find out later, for example, that she had been secretly trying to secure Bo’s entry into Ivy League universities, an attempt to escape the perversity of the family’s private language, and to bring him into social contact with other people of his own age). That the figure of the mother only appears to Ben in his dreams, as a disembodied voice, is also highly redolent of Cavell’s observations on the voice of the male philosopher: “I was … reporting something I felt I had discovered about male thinking, namely the tinge of self-imposed melancholy or pathos arising from a self-imposed suppression of the male philosopher’s feminine voice” (CT, 33). Both Ben and Dan Dunne are seen to be guilty of this suppression (and possibly the assumption of a Male Gaze), but it is this dialectic of the self that accounts for the driving force of their re-­education (in what it might mean to be a teacher, and how to mean one’s own teaching). The fantasy of freedom is what sets this story’s events in motion, and finds common ground with Cavell’s remarriage comedies in the process. Just as Ellie in It Happened One Night believes that freedom lies in fleeing from her father, taking her from a state of captivity to a state of liberty, Ben believes that freedom is a state of withdrawal from capitalist society. Cavell’s argument is that these myths of freedom are as fantastical as the notion of reason as philosophical enlightenment, that all are flights towards abstraction which can’t help but take emotional and psychological dissatisfaction (or fidgetiness) as their travelling companions. That Ellie has to lose her luggage before she can come to converse with Clark Gable’s Peter Warne on common ground, is as true as Ben having to lose his ideological baggage before he can talk to his children properly (as did his precursor in The Sound of Music’s Captain von Trapp). And it is in these conversations that Ben also comes to discover his freedom and his voice. One of the most intriguing moments in this respect relates back to the whole issue of where the children’s sexual education will come from? How will these children learn about desire and its different manifestations, conscious and unconscious? Ben captures the Cartesian moment best in his exchange with his daughters about Lolita, that then leads to questions about sex and eventually rape. The conversation begins with a useful example of Ben’s ambition and authoritarianism when it comes to

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his children’s learning and use of language. When he asks his daughter how she’s enjoying Lolita (a book that he is surprised to find her reading because he did not prescribe it), she replies: Vespyr: Bodevan: Zaja: Ben:

It’s interesting. Illegal word! Dad! Vesp said “interesting!” Dad! She said “interesting!” “Interesting” is a non-word. You know you’re never allowed to use it. Be specific.

Vespyr’s subsequent explanation of why she is intrigued by the book is one that somewhat mirrors the predicament of the film itself (or at least the viewer’s position in relation to it): she finds much to empathise with a man who is essentially guilty of crimes against children. Ross’s film, whilst less subjective than the Nabokov novel, wants also to ask whether there is still human decency in a protagonist that can redeem him from crimes of imposition (in this case imposing a political and educational doctrine on his children). Lolita—especially because it had not previously been approved by Ben—is a challenge to the order he has tried to establish, albeit an order in which sexuality may not yet have featured very strongly. It is not surprising, then, that the conversation quickly turns to the matter of sex, and leads to the youngest child asking: “What does ‘rape’ mean?” It is the brief hesitation in the responses of this otherwise resolute man, registered in his fleeting glances to the rearview mirror, that are the very evidence of scepticism in action, its “universal fidgetiness”. Only film can register the fine texture of these brief moments in all their interrelatedness. Image and word act together to show the inadequacy of both to complete expression; the mirror acts as the conduit of this inadequacy, playing up an indirectness in communication which has arisen in a context of morality coming into conflict with knowledge. As Cavell says of Cordelia’s predicament in King Lear, “[h]er problem is to make words, or the absence of words, say or do what neither words nor silence in her impossible situation can do” (2005, p. 55). Ben’s glances into the mirror evoke the consciousness of another’s reception of our words in ways that we can neither foresee nor guarantee. The use of the rearview mirror, so

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effective in filmmaking, is particularly poignant here, as Ben is looking back at his son’s future, who he will become as a result of his teaching. Ben prefers to give his children dictionary-type definitions of things (Rape is “When one person, usually a man, forces another person, usually a woman, to have sexual intercourse”), but here each definition prompts a new question: “What’s sexual intercourse?” “Why would a man stick his penis in a woman’s vagina?” The picture that emerges here is the same that Wittgenstein and Cavell describe when talking about philosophical problems for which we seek answers that are themselves only answerable to logic (“[H]ow could we have discovered something about the world by hunting in the dictionary?”, asks Cavell). There are really no right answers in this situation, but the questions face us with the challenge “of what we should say when” (MWM, 20, emphasis in original), as well as the difficulty posed by the child’s natural curiosity, which, as put by Cavell in ‘Time and Place for Philosophy’, “may start to veer or develop toward the scientific rather than, or in addition to, or as a refinement of, a philosophical wonder at events” (2008, p. 58). But in opting for science over sense (as in what the question means for him), Ben doesn’t respond to the Wittgensteinian call to say how one sees it: “I should have said: This is how it strikes me” (PI, §219). Because Ben doesn’t just want to give an answer to his son’s question, he tries to give the right answer, to do right by him both now and for the future. By appealing to the rule of science, he obeys the rule blindly: the idea that objectivity will justify his unease at being human, the unease that makes people “appeal to a rule when we deserve more intimate attention from them” (MWM, 23). In the eyes of a viewer, an opportunity for learning about what it means to be a teacher comes from seeing the opportunity to teach being missed: Ben believes that his integrity and his son’s development hinge upon what he says, whilst for the viewer their relationship depends upon how he says it (and not that he says it). The fact that he becomes “morally inaccessible” in the act of not saying what he means, here, is what leads to the subsequent fragmentation of his children’s attitudes towards him. When he is finally reduced to the absurd position of having to explain that the pleasure of sex does not interfere with other bodily functions, and that “Pee comes not from the vagina, but from the urethra, which is within the outer labia”, we are conscious that the performative attempts at satisfying the

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child’s curiosity haven’t accounted for their passionate response, as Nai’s reply then shows: “I’m sad”. In eliminating the affective from his utterance, the teacher has become effectively inhuman. At various stages following on from this self-recusal, Ben is hit by a ‘J’accuse’ from all six of his children, and each under different conditions of injustice, for which his beliefs have not solidly prepared him. Bo sums up their frustration by telling his father that all the learning he has had to undertake has, in fact, amounted to him not knowing anything about anything, whilst Rellian accuses him of effectively murdering their mother. It is the reality of the Cash children’s individual humanity (physically reinforced by Vespyr’s falling from the roof whilst trying to rescue her brother from ‘captivity’ in their grandparents’ house) that slowly begins to dissolve Ben’s idealism before his eyes, and forces a revaluation of how he assumes his own humanity before them. Ben, like Dan, takes his case to be exceptional, in that he resists the idea that he needs to be known in order for his students (children) to know what they need to know. Indeed, both perform the notion that private experience is unknowable to others. In Dan, this manifests as the shame he experiences when others challenge him about his values and his preferences; in Ben, we see consistent attempts to hide his humanity, both to conceal his grief and its accompanying sense of guilt, in deference to an endeavour which he takes to be more-than-human. For Cavell, following Wittgenstein’s discussions of private language and particularly the experience of pain, both are denials of our own existence, as well as claims to “metaphysical uniqueness”, because to teach another is first of all to declare one’s own existence, “as if taking it upon myself ” (CR, 462). Both Ben and Dan indulge the illusion that they are perceived as “monstrous” educators (by the headteacher and her representation of the established school ­curriculum in Dan’s case; by Leslie’s father as wealthy capitalist archetype in Ben’s case). But, as Cavell puts it, really the monster “is monstrous because he lets the task of becoming human wait upon how others treat him” (ibid.). For Dan and Ben to become the teachers they can be (because throughout we do not lose sight of their humanity), they must declare their existence as humans before they indulge their ideas as truth. Again what we witness over the course of Captain Fantastic is a portrait of education in which teaching comes under conceptual investigation.

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Can a person be both parent and pedagogue? Isn’t Ben’s philosophical confusion to do with his not being able to see his children as individual trees in growth for the forest of a political vision he knows to contain the best future for them? The conclusion of the film makes some concessions to the liberal utopianism of the education drama, but in this instance, it is the teacher that is transformed. In the final images of Ben getting his children ready to attend traditional schools, we might understand this as a picture of domestication, of taming the radical teacher and restoring him from the exceptional to the everyday. There is some justification in this, but it is to the everyday and ordinary that Cavell returns to in the question of remarriage also, because a marriage cannot take itself to be exceptional if it is to survive the tasks and challenges of the diurnal, which itself has its own “possibility of festivity”. Perhaps the lesson that Ben has been forced to learn of himself, is that no amount of exemption (whether of place or of person) releases one from the obligations of the everyday, and that to address those obligations, we have to learn to accept the diurnal character of our lives with others as both “mode of intimacy” and “metaphysics of repetition”. The task of being a teacher, then, emerges as one less of realising a mission, but of making each day matter, through meaning what one teaches.

Conclusion: Teaching to Transgress Oneself Traditional academic scholarship on the subject of teaching is often unable to account for the personal lives of teachers in its presentation because of the limits of the journal, the academic book, etc. These limitations are themselves boundaries of a genre that often prevent experience from emerging into evidence. What I hope to have achieved in this chapter is to have shown how my own experience of two films might make the case for film as conducting a conceptual investigation into what it means to be a teacher, and how one can become a teacher even when burdened with too self-conscious an understanding of teacherliness. Often this becoming is dependent upon transgressions, particularly in terms of a ‘private life’: in more conventional education dramas, there is little or no interaction between teacher and student in the teacher’s domestic envi-

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ronments, where they feel themselves to retain some kind of private experience. In dramas of re-education, the teacher’s domestic environment must be exposed as being continuous with his professional role, if the latter is not to enter into crisis. If Ben imagines that he has created more a classroom than a home in the wild, it is the presence of his children as students that disturb that distinction. So film can perform an interesting disruption of the separation of teacher from a broader social environment. It sees the teacher as someone who also moves between environments and institutions, and must negotiate the language games that provide the rules of behaviour in each. In representing a disappointment in and with educational ideologies, film can provide the viewer with a re-education in the concepts of their everyday experience to rediscover language and objects and other people through the seeing of different aspects to them. In this instance, I have suggested that Half Nelson and Captain Fantastic offer us a re-education in the concept of the teacher, by asking again who the teacher is, how we recognise a teacher, what is the likeness of a teacher to a friend and to a parent (Drey will see Dan as many things over the course of the film, allowing her to settle on attitude that suits them both). The two films are therefore, on this view, concerned particularly with educational concepts, allowing us to suggest that they offer a re-education in education itself. This is where I think film fits best with the education I try to provide for my students, in that it presents concepts that are relevant to their field of interest, in a way that few other modes of pedagogical presentation are able to do. In the next two chapters of the book, I want to pursue the idea of re-­ education further, but as further detached from its association with the genre. This is because I think it is a concept that will help us to see ­connections across genres, rather than identify films as belonging to a particular genre. In the first instance, I want to look at how the films of the New Iranian Cinema came to take a peculiar interest in the figure of the child, and what that might mean for the viewer’s re-education in childhood. I will then look in more depth at the films of one director, in particular, Samira Makhmalbaf, to explore how the meaningfulness we attach to education in a more general sense, and the question of whether we really care about education when we talk about it, are fundamentally at issue in her work.

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Bibliography Cavell, S. (1971, new edition 1979). The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, S. (1978). What Becomes of Things on Film? Philosophy and Literature, 2(2), 249–257. Cavell, S. (1981). Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (1996). Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Cavell, S. (2004). Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cavell, S. (2005). What Becomes of Thinking on Film? Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Andrew Klevan. In R.  Read & J.  Goodenough (Eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Cavell, S. (2008). Time and Place for Philosophy. Metaphilosophy, 39, 51–61. Cavell, S. (2012). Philosophy as the Education of Grownups. In N.  Saito & P. Standish (Eds.), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. New York: Fordham University Press. Goodman, R. (1990). American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Monk, R. (1991). The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage. Rothman, W. (2004). The ‘I’ of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rothman, W., & Keane, M. (2000). Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Standish, P. (2012). Skepticism, Acknowledgment, Learning. In N.  Saito & P. Standish (Eds.), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. New York: Fordham University Press. Standish, P. (2017). Seeing Connections: From Cats and Classes to Characteristics and Cultures. In M. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations. Singapore: Springer. Tamney, E. (2004, January 14). History Versus Her Story. Chicago Reader. Retrieved from https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/history-versus-herstory/Content?oid=914311

5 Seeing the Child on Film

The next two chapters of this book presuppose that something has been achieved by the first three. Put simply, this is to say that we might come by a greater appreciation and understanding of education, by looking at how it emerges conceptually from the representation of meaningful relations between people and phenomena on screen, rather than by trying to establish their meaning a priori, whether ontologically or theoretically. The section on Wittgenstein’s Part II of the Philosophical Investigations explored the possibility of a different disposition towards the visual, one in which the whole idea of seeing was understood as a process that was engaged in linking different aspects of experience together, or “seeing connections” between them. The linguistic intervention in this category of perception takes it beyond an empirical understanding of perceived phenomena: we don’t just see things, but we are able to see things as other things also. If Chaplin is able to see bootlaces as spaghetti, then we as viewers should be able to see education as not simply fated to indoctrination, or attendant upon emancipatory educators, but as a compulsion to consider things otherwise. The allegorical function of this seeing-as is taken up in the work of Stanley Cavell as a notion that informs the ways in which we might view a film as a thing that thinks. The seeing of aspects encouraged by this particular philosophical attitude towards the visual is © The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_5

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one which has the potential to deepen and enrichen our understanding of what education means to us today, as revealed through the simplicity of its basic phenomena rather than in the aspiration of elevated ideals. Whilst it is never explicit in Cavell’s work on film, everywhere he suggests that films—at their best—replicate human consciousness in certain ways. On the one hand, they observe, they frame, and they organise; on the other, they reveal sympathies, take positions, and favour the fortunes of some over others. The marriage of the technical and the affective is significant for Cavell in its ability to project a world that the viewer then both cares about but also senses his or her distance from. This duality itself is a mark of scepticism, and, as was seen in both Descartes and Mulvey, can allow for the mistrust of distance to deny the value of caring. The doubt that others exist, as in Descartes, exemplifies a repression of the affective attitudes we assume towards them. This is not the same doubt, however, as that of not knowing what others think. Where Descartes sees the doubt over the existence of other minds as a matter of science (what one can know about other people), Cavell (following Wittgenstein) identifies it as more a matter of psychology, a suspicion that needs to be overcome rather than a phenomenon to be accepted. Descartes’s suspicion, however, has gradually become sublimated into the Western consciousness as a more generalised introspectionist condition. To critique Descartes on these grounds is not to dispense with the philosophical impulse that motivated him; in fact, the Meditations, for Cavell, are better read as proof of the scepticism that prompts philosophical inquiry, rather than an argument for radical doubt. After all, he insists that the likes of Descartes, Kant, and Freud are not thinking about extraordinary matters, but all evidence a capacity to “think undistractedly about things that ordinary human beings cannot help thinking about, or anyway cannot help having occur to them” (TS, 9). As I have shown, it was the very ordinariness of Descartes’ ambitions that led to a discovery since interpreted not just as extraordinary but also foundational. It is the taking of our eye off the experiential foundations for that method that has resulted in an engrained and introspective psychology in Western thought. Cavell’s care is primarily oriented towards human relations and the capacity that humans have for creating an aesthetics from their ­interactions with others and with objects in the world—an aesthetics that is fundamentally oriented towards happiness. This is something of a ­development

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on, and departure from, Wittgenstein, who is more reticent on the subject of peculiarly human qualities he sees as underpinning or redeeming the existential condition. Wittgenstein seems to allow greater space for human behaviour to follow on from the linguistic perspicuity he seeks, prioritising instead the rigorous investigation of concepts over the search for contentment. Both, however, see in language the opportunity to rediscover concepts according to their appropriate and contextual (rather than metaphysical) status. Cavell describes the motion towards ordinary language “not as a question of cutting big ideas down to size, but of giving them the exact space in which they can move without corrupting” (MWM, 18). The question of what constitutes this exact space is important to the style of the Philosophical Investigations, and arguably to Cavell’s own writing also. It comprises both an aesthetics and ethics of space, in which concepts are explored so as to do them justice, without elevating them out of proportion to their use in the everyday. I have suggested, then, that films might open up the potential for a viewer’s aesthetic re-education in concepts, or conceptual aesthetics. Provided we view films as showing us worlds in a way that can still surprise us, rather than simply affirm the things we already know, we might come to see the basic phenomena of our experience in different and unusual lights, to consider their different aspects. If this disposition can be assumed towards film, it might be seen as offering a re-education in the things that matter, by asking what those things mean to us, whether they still have meaning in the language we use to talk about them, and what might become of them in the future. The emphasis on re-education, and its association with Cavell’s concept of remarriage, should serve as some reminder that this book addresses those who have already assumed some understanding of concepts, that they are already part of a reader’s language and therefore their language games also (just as we can’t return, for example, to a time where we experience cinema with the same awe that struck the audience of the Lumières brothers’ ‘Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat’). Seeing new aspects to concepts is to appreciate the phenomena with which we are already familiar in different contexts and lights. In order to really see education on film, one has to be able to see the connections between certain aspects of film and those of education, to express a likeness between them. Such likenesses are necessarily informed by our own experience, because I must have some experience of teachers to say whether Ryan Gosling’s Dan

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Dunne ‘fits’ with my own understanding of what a teacher looks like. These connections are not to be forced, and therefore will not serve those at an age where they simply have not had time to gather the variety of experience sufficiently to draw the connections between things, to discover aspects to them. To some extent people must have been first “aspect blind” in order for aspects to dawn. We can, however, have our attention drawn to different aspects to familiar concepts, and film is singularly placed to do this, particularly in the exercise of style. Over the course of this chapter, I will look at how realism, as a mode of cinematic expression, can provide the pedagogical space in which educators and educationalists can rediscover their educational concepts. This is different to the analysis and/or evaluation of film on the grounds of formal or technical qualities, which leads into a critical cul-de-sac of only being able to say whether a film is good or not, but nothing more. Cavell’s way out of this is to say that films ask questions of us, just as Augustine’s Confessions asked questions of Wittgenstein at the opening of the Investigations. With the question, philosophy begins again: philosophy itself—what it means to philosophise, or what we mean by doing it—needs to be rethought. Even the question is of a very different order to that of Socratic pedagogy, whereby questioning is a mode of leading towards the right answer. Instead, the question once again places us in a situation in which we do not “know our way about”; we are as children in the face of a new situation. The fact that we look upon these problems as children is itself a reminder that we are aware we are not actually children here, and that it is possible to see the problem only from the point of view of our adult selves, but that to see the problem as if we were children is to take less for granted in the face of it. But what if it is the figure of the child itself that asks questions of us? Can the child ask the viewer to rethink education more on its terms, rather than those to which society would like to see it conform?

Wittgenstein’s Child The child on screen both represents the person still in the process of assuming language (and is therefore pre-conceptual in its expression of things) and a figure who therefore challenges whether we (as viewer-­adults) have

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taken up language in the right way. The figure of the child on screen, particularly as it appears in relation to formal educational environments, reveals a lot about how we conceive of the subject of education, and what designs an adult world places upon this figure in anticipation of who it might eventually become. Are all films about children participating in an adult gaze, just as those made by men and feature women impose a Male Gaze? Is there scope for seeing the child in film that interrogates the gaze also, or on occasion rejects it altogether? Do we simply construct childhood through cinema, making of our imaginary children the ‘docile bodies’ of Foucauldian subordination? In talking of the child, then, I will again be addressing (how it is seen by) the ‘grownups’ of Cavellian stipulation, rather than considering the ways that, for example, children relate to representations of themselves on screen. Wittgenstein’s own thoughts on the language acquisition of children serve as an interesting prelude to a discussion of what grownups have to learn from the representation of children on screen, because they begin to tease apart the confident associations between language and object, word and world, which are perhaps nowhere more dangerous than in perceptions of ‘the child’ (as someone who comes into being with language and in language). The word ‘child’ appears 40 times in the Philosophical Investigations, and almost always as a reminder that our language does not have the symbolic or pictorial function that we so often entertain, because it is taken up from within specific forms of life and language games. Here are some examples: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think only not yet speak. (§32) In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. (§66) A child has hurt himself and he cries; and then adults talk to him and teach him exclamations and, later, sentences. They teach the child new pain-behaviour. (§244) (Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child.) (§282)

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A child can talk to picture-men or picture-animals, can treat them as it treats dolls. (xi, 194) A child has much to learn before it can pretend. (A dog cannot be a hypocrite, but neither can he be sincere.) (xi, 229)

The example of the child in the Investigations consistently pulls us back to the point at which our pictures and theories of language can no longer be supported by its reality. In doing so, he also retrieves the child from romanticism or idealism. In what follows, I will explore how an Augustinian picture of ‘the child’ continues to be reproduced in Hollywood cinema, which is to say, as an idealised object. The curious thing about the way that children are represented in many Hollywood films, as was explored earlier in the instance of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, is that they can behave very unlike the children of our ordinary existence, and yet still be understood as the very epitome of childhood. Shirley Temple, Mark Lester, and Macaulay Culkin all came to embody at different stages of the twentieth century a picture of childhood that suited the narratives of family, aspiration and mobility that their films depicted. The problems often witnessed in the later lives of child stars might arise from this kind of straightjacketing: the role is not itself open to interpretation, because the child hasn’t sufficient experience to interpret it. There is no space here for the child to, in Cavell’s words, “lend his being to the role and see what fits” (the aesthetic exercise of judgment on the part of the actor), because there is not enough experience to inform that being. Instead, the child star is selected for his or her looks to become the picture of childhood more generally, where the actor is reduced to the concept itself. We do not see Macaulay Culkin as a child in Home Alone or Richie Rich; Macaulay Culkin is what a child is. So the child is directed, in that its gaze follows every line of the director’s command (cf. Rancière, 2006). By contrast, the children of many Iranian films of the last 40 years or so present the viewer with instances of a person in the process of learning about the world: children in these films are almost always confronted with situations in which they are lost, and thus quite literally do not know their way about. They must find solutions to problems they have

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never had to solve before, and their lack of acting experience as well as the loose and improvised style of filmmaking refuses them the ‘slippery ice’ of pre-ordained representations of childhood, and keeps returning them to the friction of real-world encounter. These experiences are therefore often very hard to watch, because the viewer is left uncertain as to whether the film has wandered into documentary, whether the pain and panic that the child appears to be experiencing is authentic or acted. In so doing, we begin to see the child not as an idealised image in which we are to mould those of our own occupation, but as persons whose curiosity and as-yet unanswered questions about the world require attentiveness, guidance, and space. The vicariousness of seeing children behave in this way is not one that is reducible to the gaze of the adult viewer (as if it were another version of the Male Gaze), because I know that the experience of the child is not assimilable to my own. I can only see as if I were child, not be the child that sees.1 So there are two senses in which the figure of the child as it appears in many Iranian ‘children films’ is important in what follows. Firstly, the child is a concept in which the viewer of film must continually re-educate themselves. Secondly, the viewer is therefore learning to see as a child does in the face of a world of phenomena that become meaningful in our everyday existence, to see them anew. From this position, we are, as Cavell writes “all children again, looking in on our lives, as it were from the outside” (CR, 125). What this dual sense indicates is that there is no looking at the child in these films from an objective, theoretical point of view, because we are also looking at ourselves, rediscovering ourselves as children, and are therefore subjectively implied in the process. Once more, experience plays a part in whatever we say about the child, and therefore the generalising tendency of the concept is always and everywhere held in check by the limitations of perspective.  Baker and Hacker (2009) make a similar point about the child’s language as it relates to their experience, in that it should not be assumed that there can be any correlation with the way the adult understands the relationship of word to world. They point out that it cannot be argued that “the description of a child’s use of such primitive forms of language when the child learns to talk gives us a surveyable representation of our use, even though it may well be highly illuminating to reflect on the primitive case” (2009, p. 329). 1

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The Naïve and the Sentimental In order to make the distinction between the particular style adopted in Iranian filmmaking for the effective representation of childhood in this way, and the kind of Hollywood cinema to which Cavell is more disposed in his own writing, I want to take a brief detour via an essay on poetry by Friedrich Schiller. Schiller’s comments on naïveté and sentimentality are here taken as useful in appreciating why different aesthetic styles in artistic creation are significant in conceptualising its form and content. I have already shown why I think cinematic realism is the principal mode in filmmaking that allows both for things to “become” on screen, and provide the adequate space for viewer interpretation of phenomena also. Cavell’s faith in film’s realism largely dwells at the level of character, because we have to care for characters in order to observe their transformations in pursuit of happiness. I want to argue that in Iranian New Wave Cinema, an emphasis on the conceptual rather than the characterful is both more enlightening with regards to educational phenomena and why we (come to) care about them, without losing sight of the fact that care is always a human expression. Schiller’s essay will provide some further qualification of the realist mode, therefore—either as naïve, or as sentimental. In Schiller’s essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’, he separates all great poets into one of two categories: naïve or sentimental. Whilst indubitably quite a reductive exercise, Schiller’s argument is more interesting for the descriptions of the categories he gives, than it is for the way he divides poets into them. The naïve poet, he observes, is the poet who is more in tune with Nature, such that he can almost directly capture the world of his perception with very little assistance from artistic technique or adornment (the kind of pre-intellectual insight that Wordsworth also refers to in ‘Tintern Abbey’ when he describes “a feeling and a love,/ That had no need of a remoter charm,/ By thought supplied, nor any interest/ Unborrowed from the eye”).2 The naïve poet has such a lightness of touch that his work gives all the appearance of Nature itself, rather than an artificial creation. This might seem an extravagant claim on behalf of the  T.S. Eliot makes similar observations about the genealogical descent of poetry since Milton, in “the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet”. 2

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written word (or the spoken, in the case of the first naïve poet, Homer), but Schiller wants to draw attention to the naïve poet’s singular facility for drawing from life, and in this way assuming a child’s eye that is highly unaffected by the bias and prejudice of reason. He writes that the naïve way of thinking: combines the childlike simplicity with the childish; through the latter it exposes a vulnerable point to the understanding and calls forth that smile, whereby we make known our (theoretical) superiority. So soon, however, as we have reason to believe, that the childish simplicity be simultaneously a childlike one, that consequently the source thereof be not want of understanding, no incapacity, but rather a higher (practical) strength, a heart full of innocence and truth, which out of inner greatness disdains the help of art, so is the former triumph of the understanding past, and the mockery of simpleness passes over into admiration of simplicity. We feel ourselves compelled to esteem the object, at which we previously have smiled, and, whilst we at the same time cast a look into ourselves, to lament that we are not similar to the same. So arises the quite peculiar phenomenon of a feeling, in which joyous mockery, respect, and melancholy flow together. (Schiller, 2005, pp. 182–183)

Naïve poetry is thus that which refuses a lot of the embellishment of an art form, to give an impression of the world in its clearest, most unadorned, simplest fashion. Schiller appeals to the universal categories of innocence and truth that imbue this ‘childlike’ gift of the artist’s perspective, but the direction to which these universals point is not simply another universal category: it is a respect that replaces a smile, when we see that the simplest depiction of things makes us admire just how simple things are, or can be. It points towards the kind of perspicuous representation that Wittgenstein imagined, a consideration of the world that prompts our expression of it that can be as true to that perspective as possible. The naïve poet, then, risks causing offence in this veracity, because its exercise can entail the mixture of comedy and tragedy that is often the case in life also. Of Shakespeare, for example, Schiller writes that on the first reading of his plays “his coldness revolted me, his insensibility, which allowed him to jest in the highest pathos”. Later, however, he came to appreciate Shakespeare’s refusal to condescend to generic expectation, as a mark of fidelity to Nature.

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The childlikeness of the naïve poet is precisely something that is not that of a child, but like it. It can only be childlike, because it is still the perspective of someone who is no longer a child (a child has as yet no need of giving this kind of expression to their view of the world), but also because it is the likeness to a child’s view that creates the surprise, sympathy, and even the horror in the reader. Naïveté, in this sense, need not be restricted to poetry. For the naïve film director, the movie camera, as extension of the director’s view, is still fated to reproduce something of the adult view in its representation of the child, just as the male director must bring something of his Gaze to bear on the representation of the woman. But just as the camera can create the possibility of the actress breaking through the role to bring her own experience into view (as Bardot does in The Truth), and thus disturbing the power of the Male Gaze, so the child actor—in its amateur capacity—can participate in moments whereby the adult gaze over the child is no longer assured in the anticipation of the child’s actions, or that it will be restored to its necessary place in the social order. Schiller celebrates the naïve poet as someone who is so close to nature themselves they can almost directly reproduce it (in this he goes further than, say, André Bazin, in saying something of the artist’s psychological makeup). The sentimental poet, on the other hand, is one who, in being less close to nature (perhaps as a result of too heightened a self-­awareness), attempts to retrieve or recreate it rather than just portray it. He argues that the poets are everywhere, according to their concept, the guardian of nature. Where they can no longer entirely be the latter and already experience in themselves the destructive influence of capricious and artificial forms, or indeed have had to struggle with the same, then will they appear as the witnesses and the avengers of nature. They will either be nature, or they will seek the lost nature. (Schiller, 2005, p. 196)

We might describe these two artistic poles as attitudes towards nature, and there is certainly some indication in Schiller’s essay that they are not to be helped. Indeed, whilst praising Goethe’s virtues as a naïve poet, Schiller seems to have thought of himself as the sentimental equivalent to

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his friend and compatriot. But even if Schiller is alluding to a more natural disposition on the part of the artist, the distinction itself remains helpful. It points up again the importance of doing justice to things as they really are, as we find them (along with “the world’s refusal to conform to any conditions one might lay down for it”, as Mulhall puts it), rather than layering our vision over with a preference for how we’d like things to be seen (or the “craving for generality”). What Cavell describes in the genre of remarriage is something that is true of the sentimental attitude in poetry, namely that it is perpetually trying to resolve a conflict between nature and an ideal. In the case of the remarriage comedies, this means the natural affection that two people have for one another irrespective of the societal imposition placed upon them by an institution, and the ideal that is their union (e.g. not as institution, but the possibility of its being forever). Cavell’s observation that the couples in remarriage comedies frequently gain perspective on their differences and similarities by removing themselves to a ‘green world’ (invariably Connecticut), “a place in which the knots of comic confusion are loosened” (Cavell, 2005, p. 342), expresses sympathies not only with Shakespearean plays such as The Winter’s Tale, but also with Schiller’s writings on the subset of sentimental poetry that is the idyll, as a place of “humanity’s infancy prior to the beginning of culture” (Schiller, 2005, p. 227, italics in original). In other examples such as Mr Deeds Goes to Town, Longfellow Deeds is seen (by Capra and Cavell) as the embodiment of that human infancy, someone whose natural childlikeness is both an affront to the unnatural environment of the cosmopolitan citizen, but must also confront its own capacity to realise thought as an ideal. The director seeks in the character the virtues of a more primitive nature (the child), but he is not quite satisfied to just depict them: they must undergo transformation according to the ideal (that of the grownup).3 Even Deeds cannot remain child forever. The sentimentalism, then, comes from a  I take it that it is this self-reflexiveness that leads Gordon Bearn, in a book chapter on ‘Sensuous Schooling’ in Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, to make the point that Cavell’s famous statement about philosophy’s relation to education is one in which becoming grownup is the desirable upshot of learning to be as children, and not being childlike itself. Bearn writes, “Our becoming children again is a figure…for our not knowing our way about”, a useful metaphor more than a closeness to the nature of the child. 3

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self-reflexive editing of nature in order to find happiness in it, including the removal of its bad bits. We cannot be repulsed by nature in trying to reclaim it: we can only be charmed by James Stewart and Cary Grant and Claudette Colbert, because they reveal nothing repulsive of their nature. If they behave like children, it is only because we seem to forget that children can often be disgusting in their behaviour (we are blind to this aspect of them). So we see a longing for a kind of childishness in their representation, not the child itself. The same is the case in Cavell’s philosophising: the child almost always appears as the childlike in grownup behaviour, seeing the adult as child, but not confronting the child head­on. This is because he is interested in the continuity between film, philosophy, and childhood—each of them ideals, mutually engaged in dialogue. He describes his film studies as “a region of work I do that I think of as philosophy in which the relation of philosophy to childhood, or of adulthood to childhood and to youth is at its most continuous” (2008). As Gordon Bearn notes, however, this is therefore a condition within adulthood that is constantly to be overcome; it is not about letting the child be child (Bearn, 2012). There is a kind of safety in the sentimental mode, which looks to the world as it has already been taken up, or assumed in language, and sees how things might be reconfigured from within that world. Cavell finds this safety in the figure of the ‘grownup’, and the adult movie star whose being is sufficient to break through the social conventionalism of narrative storytelling, with a knowingness that reveals the actor’s own psychology, something that is not, and cannot be, wholly objectified. But what of “the monster of philosophy”, as Jean-François Lyotard calls the child? What of the child itself, in its lack of adjustment, unassumed social mores and self-expression, degradation of behaviour, dirtiness? What of those who see, without knowing quite what it is that they see just yet, and without people to explain and define what they see for them? What of Truffaut’s Wild Child, Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero, and Carol Reed’s Fallen Idol? We might here say that these are not ‘real’ children—they are still directed children, an extension of an adult, if not male, gaze. And we might also say that we are on safer ground if we do not make the assumption that these are children, but rather focus on the allegorical childish-

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ness of adults so as not to affect any kind of objective notion of what childhood consists in. This question sits at the crossroads of what it means both to do justice to the child on screen, and/or whether any representation of the child is a form of injustice. The question is itself one that preoccupies educationalists also: not just how we do justice to the child in teaching, but is every act of talking about the child (as concept) in educational research one of generalising (mis)representation? Can the attempt to do justice, in representing the child in either verbal or visual language, therefore sometimes constitute an act of injustice? My feeling is that Cavell somewhat swerves this matter in his emphasis on grownups, because the latter are still individuals with the agency to ‘become’ on screen—albeit through disappointment. But in remaining within the concern of the screen’s education of grownups, I’m not sure that Cavell really addresses the education of the viewer (although this may be precisely the point—Cavell is concerned with the character of philosophy, and not education). In this, we may require something of an encounter with the natural child of realist cinema, who surprises with its refusal to behave like an adult (as with most Hollywood children), and not just the sentimental child of remarriage comedy, who only appears as a figuration within the grownup couples. This is where philosophy and education must declare different interests: the philosopher wants to know to what or whom s/he might turn to become a better philosopher (and in this sense Cavell considers childhood and adolescence in terms of what the philosopher might learn from them); the educationalist, however, must be aware of the fact that this part of their self-education is only one stage in the motion of their thought, because that self-education must be cast back into the education of young minds. Not just ‘How do I learn from children?’, but ‘How can I learn from children such that I do justice to children’s learning in turn?’. In the education of grownups who take as their field of interest the potential of education (and its accompanying concepts), the shock of the child itself may be as important as the example of childishness in others. The distinction between naïve and sentimental poetry works as prelude to what I want to say about the New Iranian Cinema’s representation of children less because of its critical accuracy (which would amount to an explanation of how poets see the world, instead of a description of

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their attitude towards it), and more because it draws attention to differences of perspective (and to some extent, preference). If we described Cavell’s preference for films as one for ‘sentimental’ realism, this would be to say that his eye is more drawn to that style of filmmaking which believes in effecting transformation through an affective commitment to its subject matter, which celebrates nature through the charm of the ordinary and the everyday. He provides evidence of this disposition in defence of cinematic theatricalism, the artificiality of which is not, Cavell says, in conflict with realism: “rather, the acceptance of theatricalism is then a condition of our accepting a work as the depiction of human reality” (WV, 90). Reality is a dish best served dramatically, because we everywhere accept the dramatisation or our lives already. Cavell even notes that the arrival of Technicolor took people by surprise as being unnatural: “Movies in color seemed unrealistic because they were undramatic” (ibid.). The illusion of technological change was a distraction from the fact that really nothing had changed (in the way that human beings relate to one another). The pursuit of happiness, and its inherent charm, exists despite these developments. Which is all very well, but sometimes the ordinary and everyday is anything but charming, not least when people are not in a position to transform the world about them. Children of the cinema I am about to describe do not have the luxury of even being able to imagine a boot as a plate of spaghetti, as Chaplin does, as they haven’t yet assumed the language that would allow them to do so, that is, a conceptual understanding of the world as expressed through language, which requires first the experience of a range of phenomena upon which to draw. Indeed, these children are frequently at threat of being deprived of language altogether. The possibilities of ‘becoming’ on screen are contingent upon language, upon both learning its rules and the potential seeing-as for which rules provide the foundation. The child of Iranian cinema has its allegorical qualities, then, mostly in its associations with political oppression and censorship; however, in not being equipped with the experience of being which would allow it to satirise its own condition in the way that Hollywood remarriage comedies did, it is also a very real challenge to the viewer, asking us: am I what you thought a child looked like? Would you have preferred that I look different?

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 ollywood and the Myth of a Universal H Childhood ‘The Child’ remains the Holy Grail of educational thought: if we knew what it was, we’d know exactly what to do with it, how to teach it, what moral attitude we ought to raise it in. Such is the legacy of Cartesian science. But history also teaches us that, whether children really exist or not, educationalists are continually having to invent them to suit their purposes. And yet children continue to defy our best attempts at theorising them, at placing them within the order of things—biological, psychological, political, moral—that would make the lives of those that seek to raise them and educate them that much easier. What I have tried to outline so far, however, is an attitude towards educational concepts that does not seek definitive answers as to who or what things are, but embraces the challenge of rethinking the concept as it currently presents itself, and reveals itself as something meaningful in the process. How then do we provide a space in which children can be both seen, and our attitudes towards them (as ‘real’ people) rethought? I want to begin by paraphrasing Cavell’s question about the ontological character of film, in asking: what becomes of childhood on film? The remarriage comedies are, in Cavell’s terms, a group of films “dedicated to the pursuit of what you might call equality between men and women… the pursuit of their correct independence of, and dependence on, one another” (TS, 16). The films pivot on the role of the woman because it is she who will have to both learn of inequality and forgive the man for it. Marriage, as a concept, is therefore constantly being negotiated before our eyes, with the impression that, even when the cameras stop rolling, these couples will continue to have the differences that make that negotiation an endeavour for the rest of their lives. It would be difficult—even dangerous—to talk of childhood in analogous terms, when both philosophy and marriage are rediscovered in the films of Cavell’s criticism by those who have already assumed them as concepts, under terms and criteria that prove to be disappointing in some sense. Unlike marriage, which is a prospect that dawns, childhood as a concept is one that a person only really assumes retrospectively. Lyotard captures this retrospec-

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tion in his description of philosophy’s relationship to childhood: “You cannot open up a question without leaving yourself open to it. You cannot scrutinise a ‘subject’ (training, for example) without being scrutinised by it. You cannot do any of these things without renewing ties with the season of childhood, the season of the mind’s possibilities” (Lyotard, 1992, p. 116). These possibilities have their own sentimentality: they are not a reflection of the life of a child but reflect upon ‘the season of childhood’. Cavell also describes adulthood as “a process of decision, call it the conversion of possibilities into actualities” (Cavell, 2008, p.  53). He wants for adulthood not “to become one of progressively ceding the capacity to judge for oneself ” (Cavell, 2008, p. 54). In this formulation, though, what is at stake is the nature and character of philosophy, not childhood. In some ways, the question of the representation of children on screen replicates the problems that painters through Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance also experienced. The impossible proportions and uncannily self-aware expressions on the child’s faces are evidence of artists struggling to come to terms with the thing before them, that is, as something other than small adult.4 There is something similar to be witnessed in Hollywood representations of children, and their contrived mimicry of adult behaviour, that is only accepted as plausible by adult audiences because of its recognisability according to our own rules. We must ­immediately differentiate, then, between those films intended to provide representations of children as entertainment for children, and those that undertake a conceptual investigation of childhood for any audience—but particularly those that may benefit from seeing the concept anew. The first thing to note about Hollywood films about children is that they are often made in the context of ‘family entertainment’; that is, films which can be tolerated by parents. The Hollywood films I have in mind are perhaps films less about childhood than they are about family (the question of a child’s experience independent of the family as institution rarely arises). This is to say that, whilst a child may feature as the protago This, at least, is the argument most famously put forward by Philippe Aries in Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (1962), although it is sometimes contended by art historians on the grounds that it presumes too much of a correspondence between art and life. 4

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nist, it is understood as significant that the child be either without family, or its relationship to the broader family network is threatened. Family is the institutional site at which both liberal and conservative values can safely locate the foundation for American identity. The cult of this kind of family film began with Shirley Temple around the same time as the remarriage comedies, and developed to encompass films such as: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Pollyanna (1960), Mary Poppins (1964), Oliver! (1968), Annie (1982), Home Alone (1990), and The Parent Trap (1961; 1998). The Hollywood child in many of these instances, then, is frequently one whose family status is threatened, only for the narrative to safely restore the child to a situation of stability, the hearth of a happy society. The idea that the child of Hollywood cinema continues to be a vessel for the social reproduction of liberal family values has more recently been put forward by Lee Edelman and Karen Lury. Edelman’s thesis, as set out in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, broadly addresses the idea that the figure of ‘the Child’ as it appears in (American) political discourse is so closely associated with the continual reaffirmation of socially accepted heteronormative values of family and tradition that it is “impossible to refuse”. Much like the highly objectified and psychologically impoverished figure of the female under the Male Gaze, the innocence and defenselessness of the Child as it figures in both public discourse (e.g. political propaganda) and in cinema, is such that the Child “shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought” (2004, p. 2). Within such representations, the idea that children are innocent and in need of protection is itself a deliberate mode of effecting a social investment in the child: the future of the state. In ­exploring literature and film, Edelman diagnoses a “reproductive futurism” in art’s representations of children, whereby the symbolic order in which art participates continually recycles utopian dreams of a harmonious, heteronormative society. Big commercial family films make for an easy target in this respect, with their fantasies of restoring children from orphandom or poor parenting to harmonious domestic circumstances (Curly Top, Annie, Oliver!, Mary Poppins, Curly Sue, Three Men and a Little Lady, Matilda, Home Alone, etc.). In each instance, the reproductive future of the family at the centre of (the symbolism) of American society is once again, by the end, guaranteed.

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We could extend this notion further and say that the emancipatory educator films discussed in the previous chapter also participate in this narrative, in their own reproduction of values that themselves are exemplary of the heteronormative liberalism for which Hollywood stands. Edelman’s study then moves on to look at two films by Alfred Hitchcock, North by Northwest and The Birds, as instances in which this symbolic futuring is refused. The fact that the eponymous birds of Hitchcock’s film represent something upon which it is impossible to project emotion, and seemingly produce only an anarchic mode of disruption, leave them as an arbitrary—rather than antagonistic—element in the film’s symbolic order. Their reality (and our acceptance of it) rest with a total rejection of intent, of meaning. Indeed, the birds can’t simply be seen to convey meaninglessness (of life), because that would situate a lack of meaning within the realm of possible interpretation, whereas Edelman wants to insist on the kind of excess which only leads to resistance in the face of such interpretation. Hitchcock, for Edelman, discovers in cinema a kind of jouissance that allows him to confront the viewer with a world which “models as much as it mirrors the subject’s imagined sense of wholeness or integrity, leaving that subject helpless before the coercions of the image, helpless to let go of the image that gives it the image of itself ” (2004, p. 81). The Hitchcock film thus takes delight in parodying the kinds of fantasy that we project into our symbols of reproductive futurism, through its awareness of when we would like to invoke our child/future-protecting emotions, such as compassion, and then flatly denying them through the unsympathetic technological gaze of the camera. We might say that Hitchcock’s response to a Schillerian sentimental realism is therefore sadism, and Edelman does indeed invoke the Marquis to suggest that Hitchcock might have taken pleasure in the idea of creating a cinema which so absorbed its spectators’ visual stimuli, that they would not have noticed that there was hardly a (plot-based) movie there at all. Where Edelman finds affinity with this view is in its denial of any emotional projection into a value-­ driven future, one which still rests on vestiges of normativity, a nostalgia for universalism. With these tendencies unequivocally associated with heterosexual relations, Edelman instead puts forward the case for the sinthomosexual (“a word without a future”), who rejects all these fantasies

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and “speaks to the singularity of the subject’s existence, to the particular way each subject manages to knot together the orders of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real” (2004, p. 35). Edelman dismisses the idea that Hitchcock tries to depict a world of pure nature in The Birds—even if this was the express intention of the director—because of the technological intervention of the camera. But if Hitchcock is no naïve director in Schiller’s sense of the word, he could not be accused of being sentimental either. Indeed, one suspects that Edelman’s sympathies with Hitchcock place him in direct opposition to Cavell’s fondness for Hollywood comedy, not least because the genre of remarriage might easily be claimed as a symbolic affirmation of the conditions for reproductive futurism (even if the couples of remarriage comedy are themselves often noteworthy for their childlessness).5 But if Edelman resists both the naïve and the sentimental in his own reflections on cinema and literature, it is in part because his drive for jouissance (in the figure of the synthomosexual) is equally tempered by ressentiment (at the heteronormative mode of (re)production). If there were another category to be added in contradistinction to those provided by Schiller in the naïve and the sentimental, it would be the cynical. It is indeed an interesting turn in language where the social norms of heterosexual reproductivity come to be seen as the soppy fantasies to which our libidinal encounters with the Real are enslaved, but is it necessarily a turn for the better that the synthomosexual’s sneering at any form of attachment, its rejections and resistances to anything that smacks of affectivity, are to be celebrated? A lot of examples Edelman draws upon are those in which the reader or viewer is frequently deprived of the fantasy of futurity in the fate of the protagonist. In George Eliot’s Silas Marner, Dickens’ Christmas Carol, and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, we come to see how art is also populated with figures who refuse to propagate. What is not discussed is how we come to care for characters who enact this refusal. What is it about Scrooge, or the birds, that keeps us coming back for more? It is too con It is, however, testament to Cavell’s conviction in the generic integrity of remarriage that he himself recasts North by Northwest into this strain of romance, asserting the significance of Cary Grant in the lead role as evidence of a self-conscious theatricalising of real life (e.g. the constant attention drawn to the character’s attractiveness and ability to act). 5

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venient to say that it is the fact that Scrooge is ultimately restored to the symbolic order at the end, or to say that technical mastery is what makes Dickens and Hitchcock so compelling. The affront to our emotions in our initial encounters with both remains evidence of them, and therefore the attempts at refusal might be taken as either only disingenuous (as per the Cavellian suggestion) or psychopathic. To renounce futurity altogether would be to behave as if indifferent to care, an attitude that says I have no attitude towards souls (the attitude that Edelman observes in Hitchcock). This may allow for an argument in favour of releasing ourselves from the captive image of the Child, but it says nothing of how our relations with children—ones that are, unfortunately for Edelman, inevitably founded in care—are to be reconceptualised so as to do justice to their reality, not just in the rejection of their symbolism. If this excursus via Edelman has been worth the effort, it is to show that there is some value in highlighting the libidinal attachments of politics to symbolic modes of reproduction, and of trying to release the subject from determinism through exposure to the Real’s refusal of our emotional investment. Within this picture, the Child is exposed as part of the symbolic order of reproductive futurity—but what of the ‘real’ child? At times it would seem as if No Future were almost a celebration of childlessness as the rejection of fantasy, but this makes no acknowledgement of the reality of reproduction, of the fact that there are children, and that people do care for them. Edelman institutes a rejection of this care through the figure of the synthomosexual, but must effect its theoreticisation in the process. As Rancière said of Deleuze’s contrivance of a split between the Time Image and the Movement Image, the crisis is there “because the thinker needs it to be” (Rancière, 2006, p.  116). Thought once again pulls us towards the legitimacy of theory, but away from the encounter between image and its relation to our own experience. If educational research is to do justice both to the real character of children in its writing and to the fact that teaching itself involves children, then writing about the child cannot afford to make this departure. Whilst for Edelman the concern is primarily for a disruption of this cycle for the sake of releasing subjective agency from the terror of this symbolic Child, Karen Lury has drawn upon his work to suggest that this release from the totalising figure of the Child cannot forget the reality of

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children altogether. “Real children”, for Lury, cannot ever “be fully encompassed by these stories and discourses” (2005, p. 308). The question that Lury then asks herself, which is as important for educational research and practice as it is for visual representation, is that of how we might still allow for the participation of the child in our (educational and visual) language, without its ontology becoming predetermined by the reproductive values of futurity. How can we do justice to this concept without deciding what must become of it?

The ‘Real’ Child The digressions via Schiller and Edelman have been somewhat propaedeutic in setting the stage for an exploration of the concept of childhood within a mode of filmmaking that can be seen as both faithful to its subject in its naïve mode of representation, as well as evincing care in doing so—without having to fall back on a cynical theorisation of that subject. Children, as I suggested in the discussion of Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, can be represented on screen, but—as the Harry Potter films demonstrate— they can also be made to serve as mere conduits for content and narrative, and thus reduced to somewhat artificial or mechanical versions of the real thing. It is not just representation that narrativises the experience of others, however; as both Edelman and Laura Mulvey demonstrate, theoretical explanations of narrative’s subjection of individual identity, can frequently amount to a narrativisation of film’s subconscious operations also. To see the child for what it is, therefore, we have to attend more closely to how it behaves on screen—rather than try and unpack the motivations lurking behind the camera. The representation of the ‘real’ child is already complicated, as I have suggested previously, by the fact of a child’s limited experience in bringing their ‘being’ to a role. The challenge for a director, then, is to look at modes of representation that either allow for an unrehearsed child (the child who has not been told how to be a child, how to behave like the one that they aren’t) to naturalistically ‘become’ their character within a realistic cinematic space, or whether the reality of the child’s experience is to be conveyed through attending to the child’s capacity to disrupt the cin-

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ematic gaze, by not allowing its own line of sight to be reducible to that of the director/narrative. The former is more the tendency of Italian neorealist cinema, whereas I take the latter to be a decision on the part of Iranian directors to allow the child to consistently challenge the authorial gaze, as a reminder to the viewer that this is someone whose thought we do not know. The question addressed to the educator/educationalist in this challenge is: how do you teach—or conceptualise teaching on behalf of—someone whose thought you don’t know? How do you allow for them to learn and become (themselves), without just telling them what to think? How do we write about children as subjects of education, such that these things are possible? And before all this: what spaces are provided for us, as grownup educators and educationalists, to rediscover the reality of children such that we might do them greater justice in our work on their behalf? I want to suggest that it is the pedagogical space provided by a ‘naïve realism’ in film,6 particularly that which has evolved in Iranian cinema over the last forty years, that allows for this rediscovery in relation to children (a re-education in childhood), precisely because a sentimental realism of the kind that Cavell prefers can only justify its theatricalism in relation to humans who have sufficient experience of being to prevent their assimilation to objects of the directorial gaze. Bert Cardullo, among others, has commented on the central figure of the child in Iranian filmmaking after the country’s 1979 revolution, even suggesting that the child protagonist is a key feature of Iran’s New Wave: The cinema of the Islamic theocracy of Iran is chiefly known today for two qualities: its children films (by which I mean movies about the young but not necessarily for them) and its self-reflexivity (by which I mean the posing of deep questions about fiction, reality, and filmmaking). (Cardullo, 2004, p. 62)

The latter of these two observations is entirely in keeping with the conditions for a cinema that thinks, according to the Cavellian romantic mode; it is the former which represents a domain in which film philosophers according to this mode may have feared to tread, perhaps because  Not to be confused with naïve—or direct—realism as spoken of in philosophy of mind.

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of aforementioned problems of representing the person who has yet to assume thought as something that can be doubted. In short, the child on film is problematic because of its inability to be sceptical, because it hasn’t sufficient criteria in which to be disappointed. This can make the viewing experience all the more troubling, when children participate in the very grownup activity of questioning what aesthetic representation means for an educational ethics: is it right for us to rediscover how little we know the mind of a child through seeing it in its most ‘real’, unsymbolic form: afraid, vulnerable, subjected to cruelty? In moving the scene of action from screwball comedies to children films, we travel far in another direction, and not just to another country. We are a long way from Cavell’s comedies here, with their affluent city lives and country retreats. Clearly the coordinates—cultural, political, and philosophical—for understanding Iran’s children’s films will have to be different (Gibbs, 2018). But there are commonalities enough for comparisons to be made, and for re-education to be seen as having a likeness to remarriage also. One of these commonalities lies in the plot, or lack of it. In both remarriage comedies and the children films, very little ‘happens’. Instead, the viewer is drawn in by the small scale of events. In remarriage comedies, the force of these events is propelled by dialogue: characters must come to terms with one another again, through the language they use, and that only they can (know how to) use. In the children films, however, the young protagonists are still largely without language, whether because they cannot yet speak (as in Samira Makhmalbaf ’s The Apple) or because they do not speak the right language (as in Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger, which itself is strongly redolent of Truffaut’s L’Enfant Sauvage), or because they are spoken over (as in Where Is the Friend’s Home?, Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror, and Hanna Makhmalbaf ’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame). These children do not talk much, but observe and search.7

 We might be reminded, then, of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s concept of infancy (the ‘in-fans’ as someone who is without voice), in contrast to the discovery of voice by those that have already assumed language that Cavell addresses (and I am here suggesting that the challenge presented to educators by these children is how we do justice to those who are as yet to assume the language that will allow them to later rediscover philosophy for themselves). 7

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What movements do these children undertake? In Bahram Beizai’s Bashu, The Little Stranger (1986), the eponymous character escapes from the explosions that have killed his parents, to go and live with a family that speaks the rare regional dialect Gilaki. In Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), a young boy accidentally takes his friend’s notebook home with him, and resolves to return it to the neighbouring village despite his mother’s admonitions. In Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997), a girl tries to find her own way home after her mother fails to pick her up from school. In Samira Makhmalbaf ’s The Apple (1998), two sisters are released from 11 years in home captivity to take their first steps into the world outside. In Majid Majidi’s Colour of Paradise (1999), a blind boy is the last to be collected by his father from school, and subsequently becomes the source of the father’s shame as he attempts to remarry. In Mohammed Ali-Talebi’s Willow and Wind (2000), a boy breaks a pane of glass at the school and must go and find a replacement for it, battling the elements to return with this fragile object in his hands. In Hana Makhmalbaf ’s Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame (2007), a very young girl in remote Afghanistan tries to go to school for the first time, but encounters boys playing at being the Taliban along the way. The grammar of these small cinematic portraits differs significantly from that to which the Western eye is accustomed, both in terms of genre and in terms of style. Firstly, the boundaries between documentary and fiction are significantly more blurred (a significant departure from Italian neorealism also). For example: two of Abbas Kiarostami’s films, And Life Goes On… (1992) and Through the Olive Trees (1994), return to the location of an earlier narrative film, Where Is the Friend’s Home? (1987), to explore what happened to the inhabitants of the village after an ­earthquake. Both of the sequels contain elements of a narrative, but to different degrees play upon intertextual reference and the interventions of ‘real life’ to create a world in which generic distinctions will not aid the viewer in interpreting its imagery. Through the Olive Trees is something of a meditation on the process of filming And Life Goes On…, and it casts an actor as a schoolteacher who had already appeared as a teacher in Where is the Friend’s Home?—but is also a teacher in his everyday life (“I play that role every day. I am a teacher!”). The director appears at the beginning to tell us that he is an actor playing the director, and that he is

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about to cast the lead female role from a group of schoolgirls: but during the casting process, has he started acting? And are the schoolgirls acting the part of people auditioning for the role, or are they really patiently lined up and awaiting the director’s assessment? If this playfulness does not descend into the overly self-reflexive contortions of a postmodern novel, it is because Kiarostami wants to create an image in which the surety contrived by generic expectation subsides, but is replaced by a confidence in the image alone. Instead of stamping our feet and demanding to know which bit is real and which is not, we are simply asked: what do you make of all this, what you see on screen? It is an invitation to judgment that is meant to resist the temptations of (generic) categorisation, of calling things according to a rule. This is a judgment that must instead summon into question the very character of filmmaking itself. As the newly cast teacher-as-teacher says in Through the Olive Trees, “I do not much like films, cinema, art in general. But because of the earthquake, I asked if I could be found a small role”. Sometimes, life doesn’t imitate art, but necessitates it. Another significant feature of the children films is the emphasis on unremarkable experience in children’s lives that is elevated to the proportions of epic adventure. Unlike their cinematic peers in films like Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone or Home Alone, these children are not thrust into exceptional circumstances, but are instead left to contend with the challenges posed by the everyday. To take one example (that provides a neat contrast with Home Alone), Ebrahim Forouzesh’s Kelid (The Key, 1987) is wholly concerned with what happens to a boy whose mother locks him in the house with his brother for the day. The opening two minutes feature the credits appearing above the sleeping figure of a child, as his mother works in the kitchen behind him. She leaves the house and locks the door just as he is waking. Here is our film: the boy must go about his day, navigating a household in the absence of its anchor. From the off, the images are of a precarious existence: filling the kettle, climbing the bed to feed a caged bird, taking care of a baby brother—all these activities are replete with a sense that something could go wrong. This danger is only matched by the child’s resourcefulness— sometimes ingenious, sometimes foolhardy, but always necessary. The camera follows the boy’s movements with a curiosity and interest that

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sustains a distance despite the intimacy of the surroundings, and is unobtrusive even at moments when things seem to go wrong. The boy accidentally spills a bottle of milk over the baby, but there is no indication of whether this was pure accident or part of the plot: life must go on, and the camera must record it. To be beholden to plot would be to subject the child to a directorial gaze, transforming it into a figure of authorial sentiment, rather than one who is equipped with its own unique and unknowable qualities for coping with the challenges of everyday existence. Hamid Reza Sadr writes that children liberate plots by introducing non-essential actions—generally loafing around on the street or in a rural area. Usually the world is seen from a child’s point of view. Sometimes the children’s discourse realizes itself in their resistance to or confrontation with the adult characters of the story. These films pay much attention to the family, but do not proclaim it to be the basic cell of society or the ultimate source of love, support or morality. (Sadr, 2006, p. 233)

What Reza Sadr picks up on is how these films reveal the child’s experience as something independent of the adult world, rather than something that anticipates its reproduction. Instead of showing the family to be a unit that experiences crisis but must ultimately be restored to its nuclear state, “the family [in children films] is depicted as a mass of tensions and conflicts” (ibid.). And the author suggests that this is precisely because the family in Iranian society is always potentially implied by inserting children into a social order of oppressive values. They don’t so much ask the question of what future we want for our children (or what present?), but instead, a lot of these films seem to ask: have you seen your children? Have you seen what they need? Children move among these films often largely ignored or dismissed. They are often shot parallel with their own line of sight, such that all the viewer sees of the adult world is pairs of legs, and ones that rarely drop to give the children their attention. In Amir Naderi’s The Runner, Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon, and Hanna Makhmalbaf ’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, no one takes any notice of the plight of young children unless they have money with them, or unless they are selling something themselves. The levels of improvised action in these scenes are also such

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that the viewer is completely deprived of knowing whether the adults are performing this ignorance, or whether they are unaware of the presence of the camera (the levels of anguish reached in the faces of the young actors often hints at the latter). Either way, we are not meant to feel that we are somehow being offered a commentary on the aspect-blindness of adulthood through the eyes of the child. Instead, all we see is the anxious, fearful face of the child itself, tormented by a lack of answers, whose emotional confusion is not readily available to aesthetic interpretation (at least in the sense that a moral concern invades any attempt at objective judgment). Something that is not picked up in Reza Sadr’s overview is the fact that children in Iranian film are as frequently—if not more often—situated in relation to their schools as they are to family.8 These two institutions seem to be in competition for shaping the child in some sense, but the child also moves between them as a figure not yet reducible to either, with greater freedom than women more confined to the domestic environment, or men in service to the public domain. Jean-Luc Nancy alludes to this movement as a child’s capacity to become someone on screen, whereby mobility is the “essence of presence, and presence as a coming, coming and passage” (Nancy, 1999, p. 81). Cinema’s unique capacity to show things in motion also allows us to see what they might become; the child’s passage through the film is one in which it meets with opportunity and limitation, both of which present themselves to the viewer as imperatives to consider how the child’s life might have been otherwise. One could see the child as something of a deconstructive force within the film itself, therefore, providing both telos and critique of societal structure in its every movement. But it is in its movements, its behaviour and its sight, that the child of Iranian film emerges as someone who is both intrepid and unsure, resolute, and yet inquisitive. The children may be guided either by their own wish-fulfilment, or by adult imperative, but in each instance, they will come up against both their own lack of knowledge about the world, and the unwillingness of adults to assist them.  Abbas Kiarostami’s early documentaries, particularly the 1989 film Homework, arguably identified the conceptual potential of exploring the relationship between child and school. The film comprised individual interviews with a group of boys discussing (with the director) how they go about doing their homework: who they receive help from, how they are punished if they don’t do it. The film thus indirectly accesses the domestic environments of the boys, allowing for a critical relation between child, home and school to be established as an exploration of social norms. 8

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The peculiar imagery of these films further contributes to the idea that children are somewhat in a pre-conceptual phase of language, yet to appreciate how all the various phenomena of their experience will come to cohere in expressions of their own interest later on in life. In particular, the children films frequently depict children against expansive landscapes that evoke the possibility of their experience taking them in all sorts of different directions, depending on both the orientation provided them by others and on their own self-determination. An image that Kiarostami recreates in Through the Olive Trees is one of the more striking and repeated images of Where Is the Friend’s Home?. In the latter, as a young boy runs between villages to try and find his classmate to return a textbook to him, he takes a route up a hill that has the camera filming from a distance a zigzagging motion in the ascent. The image captures something characteristic of the films of Kiarostami and his followers: a long take in deep focus that is drawn from real life, but has a distinctly poetic quality to it. The image is intended to capture the full scale of the challenges faced. This kind of image is repeated both in films by Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us, A Taste of Cherry) and in films such as Hanna Makhmalbaf ’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame, and Mohammed Ali-Talebi’s Willow and Wind. Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn have even identified this image as being key to the representation of children in Iranian cinema, calling it “the open image”. The open image, claim the authors, has its roots in Italian Neorealist cinema: The neorealist locations inspired by the indeterminate environments created by the postwar situation attract a new type of protagonist who— because images no longer obey sensory-motor rules—tends to see rather than act. For this reason, as Deleuze suggests, the role of the child, who mostly looks on in wonder or confusion while unable to intervene, becomes significant. (Chaudhuri & Finn, 2003, p. 45)

The open image, in being neither assimilable to the gaze of the director or that of the protagonist, defies any claim to omniscience on the part of the viewer: “we would prefer to stress not an imagined source of subjective or subjectless viewpoint, but rather the otherness of the images as

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objects, as intrusions of the real” (2003, p. 40). The real as associated with the camera is something of a limited and limiting consciousness in its own right, and its gaze is one that lingers perhaps longer than it should, on objects to which we wouldn’t otherwise attach significance, perhaps long after characters have departed from the shot. The ‘resistance’ to which Chaudhuri and Finn refer, then, is that of having one’s attention drawn back to the act of looking, the uncanny feeling that perhaps one was looking for meaning in the wrong place all along.

A Wandering Gaze If Edelman’s thesis of ‘reproductive futurism’ succeeds in making readers feel disconcerted, it is because audiences tend to prefer narratives involving children to see them restored to safety, reassuring the viewer that all children are safest when at home. When it comes to children, the thing that adults least like to reflect upon is the idea that children (in general, not specific instances) are not safe, particularly as a consequence of adult neglect, because we all feel indicted. And something that is even more reassuring about Hollywood children is that the camera seems to be in control of their gaze, and the script in control of their tongue. In fact, whatever may happen to Hollywood children over the course of a film, the viewer generally has the confidence from the outset that they are in safe hands. This approach of course contests Bazin’s celebration of an observational, objective reality made possible by film: instead, the world is one in which pleasure is to be derived from the benevolent and godlike gaze of the director. As long as the child looks in the direction that it is supposed to look, and has said the lines it is supposed to say, we know that its fate is assured—absolutely. But it is curious to note that in this directed gaze also lies the success of the horror movie featuring children, because invariably they return the gaze of adults, absolutely (staring, not blinking, unaffectionate). The recognition of the strangeness of the directed child gaze in horror films shows just how uncanny we ought to find it, and yet just how accustomed, or aspect-blind, we have become to its tamed character. Equally, we might find in the gaze of Ryan Gosling’s Dan Dunne, at the point at which he is most defeated and most vulner-

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able, a look that is as much like that of the child as any of the searching expressions found in Iran’s children films. But what happens when the child neither submits to the directorial gaze (standing in for the parent), nor returns it? Not only are they new to being directed, but the narratives in which they are implied entail a ‘not knowing’ of what comes next: Ahmed of Where Is the Friend’s Home? must find a classmate’s house he has never been to, Bakhtay in Buddha Collapsed out of Shame must find a school she has never attended; the boy in Willow and Wind must track down a pane of glass when he doesn’t know where to begin finding one. This wandering gaze, then, mirrors that of the viewer of these films who finds little generic structural criteria and formal stability in the cinematic images within which to ground her own reception of them. The curiosity, fear, wonder, and desperation in the eyes of these amateur actors has all the appearance of being entirely unrehearsed (untimely), and seems designed less to inspire empathy or pity, than to invite the viewer to inhabit this state of seeking also—not from this child’s point of view, but as if they were themselves a child. The emotions that lie within the wandering gaze of the child (curiosity, wonder, bemusement, etc.), then, are ones that might be described as the affective dimension of our concept of education, if we associate them with the will to learn—that is, to discover and understand more about the world (albeit a world in which the opportunities to carry out those discoveries are limited). Jafar Panahi’s The Mirror (1997) presents the viewer with one of the more startling instances in which a wandering gaze actually becomes a confrontation with the directorial gaze, causing our objective knowledge of the child, as distanced viewers, to become entirely unsettled. Before I get on to that moment, I want to say something about how it is anticipated. The opening shot of the film is a circular long take that has the effect of ring-fencing the world into which we are entering, and ensuring that we only see that world from within, as opposed to some kind of external perspective. We are seemingly placed at the centre of a traffic junction; the frame opens onto a school, which is just on the point of opening its gates to allow a stream of schoolgirls to spill into the street; the camera follows them as they cross the road and disperse; as the camera keeps rotating, it lights upon various other people of interest: an old

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man trying to cross the road unsuccessfully; two other men carrying cushions on their backs; and two women crossing the road with a pram, to collect their daughters from the school. The camera finally comes to rest at the position in which it began, only now there remain just two girls at the school gates. The film’s philosophical lens is established in this shot. We are conscious of a 360-degree vision, and therefore one which is taking in more of the world than those it observes, but it remains a line of sight that can only see certain things at once, and from street-level— much like ordinary people. And it is not from the outside that we look in at things, but rather from the inside out. Most significantly, the comings and goings of people’s daily lives are seen as things that would not normally warrant any specific attention, except that in this instance something has interrupted their flow: one girl has not been collected from school as she should have been. The relation between child and school, unremarkable at the beginning as the mass of girls left to go home, has been brought into relief. The moment in which Mina learns that her mother is not coming to get her is both one of disappointment and of hope. It replicates that moment in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness where he imagines a friend Pierre failing to turn up at four o’clock, whose total absence then presents the author with the ‘flickering of nothingness’ that puts into motion his self-awareness as an individual, when everyone else in the cafe suddenly appears as indifferent to this nothingness. Mina’s disappointment, itself registered over a medium take that this time lingers on her facial expressions as she looks up and down the streets, contains within it the seeds of the film’s hope: that somehow this interruption of the course of things might break one girl out of the circle drawn by the opening shot (circular motions and themes being a common feature of Panahi’s films). Her disappointment will propel her to find her own way home, to find her feet, as it were. But if there is a danger that such a set-up already sounds a little contrived (and possibly quite derivative of Kiarostami’s Where is the Friend’s Home?) it is a later manoeuvre that undoes any suggestion of conventionality, either as Bildungsroman or pastiche. In this later scene, Mina has been travelling on a bus, only to discover that she has overshot her stop and arrived at the end of the line, where everyone else has alighted. Abandoned for the second time, this resolute young person now begins to cry. The bus driver tells her that she

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will have to take a different bus. Amongst the swell of adult men trying to get on board, the next driver shouts at her that “This isn’t the woman’s entrance” (always at the back), and she has to get off again, and back on another bus. In a brief pause between the two buses, she stands in the road, and sees an elderly woman sat on a park bench (recalling the mirror of the title), and from here she is bundled onto the next bus. As the driver and another man talk over her out of shot, the camera stays on Mina as she looks increasingly uncomfortable, until we hear yet another voice say “Don’t look at the camera, Mina”. This deus ex camera moment then brings about precisely what it was intended to prevent—in an act of defiance (that carries resonances of Godard’s Nana in Vivre Sa Vie), Mina looks up from her narrative world, and stares straight into the world of its creator. “I’m not acting anymore!”, she shouts. The child as something created (sentimental, even?) has suddenly reclaimed its right to self-­ creation (Fig. 5.1). The moment then effects a kind of looking-glass transition in the film, whereby Mina spends the rest of the film trying to get home from a film shoot, rather than from school (a curious parallel therefore drawn between the two, in which the institution of a child, its framing as a concept, is seen as taking place as much within one as the other). The film’s ownership over the child doesn’t quite give up its claim at this point: with the microphone still attached to Mina, the filmmakers are able to continue

Fig. 5.1  Mina in The Mirror

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their story at a greater distance. But in the final moments, Mina gives the mike back to the shopkeeper who had put her forward for the part, leaving the viewer with the background noise and conversation of the shop as the camera observes Mina from afar, returning home and shutting the door behind her. In this final sequence, something of the child’s agency triumphs: she becomes someone who has not only succeeded in effecting the kind of distance from which an adult might come to respect their difference (rather than assimilation to the adult gaze/narrative), but is also able to close the door on the adult gaze altogether. By removing the device that would still claim her voice from her, and effectively making her silent for the viewer, she asserts something of her voice in the process. The fact that the background noise in the shop provides us with the final score of the Iran vs. South Korea football match, a game that was announced by a passing vehicle’s radio in the opening shot, suggests that the unity and continuity of the world that characterised the opening, has now been divided: Mina’s world is not wholly reducible to the picture of the city provided at the outset. Her future may well be otherwise than the present that defined her initially; perhaps just as ordinary, but a different kind of ordinary, one more of her own making. Panahi’s film gradually exercises a retreat from our full and complete knowledge of the child, towards a point at which the child will exert its own unknowability in the face of our attempts to reduce it to a total p ­ icture. The film starts out by admitting to a certain fascination with the figure of a child, but reaches a point at which that fascination is called out for its potential romanticisation of the figure over the very real character of the individual. Throughout, it is Mina’s troubled looking for her next step, the anxiety over where or who to turn to next, that marks her reality out as different to that of her Hollywood counterparts. It is a gaze that, whilst troubled, is in search of its own future, rather than one that plays out the role designed for it. Within this searching gaze lies the (re-)educational character of the children films. The search is a reminder that this is an as-yet unformed, or unfinished person, someone who is still in search of the knowledge, the information, or simply the people that will bring them closer to a sense of destination, and conceptual understanding of the world. Unlike their Hollywood counterparts, these are individuals whose fate and future has not yet been decided for them, whose cognition is not burdened

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by the cogito, and who are learning—under often quite brutal circumstances, through harsh lessons—that humanity is no kind and forgiving narrator to their tale either. These filmmakers don’t condescend to romanticise childhood for the sake of narrative, or to make life easier for their audience; rather, children carry the burden of existence through stories that don’t always see their hardships redeemed, and the viewer has to endure that privation also. As a result, the child’s understanding of its world is concealed from view, at least in the sense that it does not coincide with that of the adult viewer. It is the gaze of someone who has not yet assumed the language—semantic and/or emotional—that allows us to interpret its experience according to our own rule. We are left, then, feeling either helpless, or confronted with the idea that we can but do justice to the child as concept, rather than child’s own experience (as a universal category). At the end of Kiarostami’s Where Is the Friend’s Home?, the notebook is returned to the classmate just as school is about to begin. And the class continues as normal. Nothing remarkable has happened, and the boys continue with their routine, their ordinary existence. Everything is left as it was, but in another sense everything has changed. The picture is one in which the viewer sees the child otherwise, even as the teacher does not. Wittgenstein describes this perspective as one in which we see “a whole which changes (is destroyed) while its component parts remain unchanged. These are the materials from which we construct that picture of reality” (PI, §59). The viewer is simply left feeling that a different aspect to the child has been seen to the familiar face of Hollywood directedness. That aspect might be described as vulnerability, but this time not vulnerability in the face of a threat from other people (crooks, criminals, sexual predators), but a vulnerability in the face of indifference, on the part of anyone and everyone. To re-educate ourselves in the figure of the child is to question whether there are aspects to the education of subjects to which we have become apathetic, to which we no longer attach meaning, or to which we have become aspect-blind. We cannot fully see the child in the children films, because he or she is someone who, through its own journey of sight, is still becoming that person. The child is the most complex of concepts because it is always in motion. Jean-Luc Nancy makes the observation that Iranian films are particularly adept at drawing our attention to this motion: repeated tropes

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such as open doors, but also broken windows, barred and bolted doors, homes with neither windows nor doors, all describe the architectural possibilities of leaving, escaping, captivity—the ‘leading out’, if you like, that sits at the heart of the word education. In many ways, it is hard to place the adequacy of words to images when talking about cinema of this kind: they are both insufficient and in excess. But Nancy encourages us relish the challenge of this inadequacy in the face of an image that resists explication: “I want to remain this foreign spectator who I am, and whom the film, without explicating this image to me, lets me be” (Nancy, 1999, p. 81). Iranian cinema’s re-education in childhood is one which, in letting children be on screen, invites us as viewers and educators to rethink the degree to which we do, and should, direct who they become in life.

 onclusion: The Child’s Challenge C to the Educationalist Writing in ‘Time and Place for Philosophy’, Cavell says that he “might put the moral of the call for the ordinary in the Investigations as a caution to philosophers to remember the days of their youth and of its childhood” (Cavell, 2008, pp. 59–60). In so doing, he perhaps intends also to invoke Wittgenstein’s phrasing in §89, where he describes those forgotten concepts as “is something that we need to remind ourselves of ” even as we accept that “for some reason it is difficult to remind oneself ”. Cavell’s moral call, however, is still oriented towards the adult that would be a philosopher. It asks us to imagine our childhood in order to better philosophise. Maybe in the bits of the Investigations where Wittgenstein is explicitly invoking childhood, or asking to imagine ourselves as children, this is to be taken as the case. But there are other moments where we are closer (though not assimilated to) the natural—or naïve—condition of the child, where we experience the feeling of asking (ourselves) something for the first time. This does not involve remembering what it is like to be a child in order to decide what we are going to do in the face of such a question. Instead, there is a call to accept a certain kind of unknowingness in the face of someone who is going about accumulating the rules of existence, the rules of the language game, for the first time.

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There are instances in which we can see this unknowingness occur. It is the experience, for example, that registers on Vigo Mortensen’s face in Captain Fantastic, when his character, Ben, is asked about rape by his young son. The challenge for the adult is seemingly to plump for one of two options: give the philosophical or the scientific response. But from Cavell’s point of view, the adult forgets here that these are one and the same thing in the mind of the child; any answer might satisfy the child in this respect, but there is no right answer from its point of view, and possibly no answer will do. The adult agonises from the point of view of someone who already knows the answer but also knows it is one that they don’t want the child to know about. So the viewer, in the encounter with the child in Iranian cinema, must decide how to cope with this image. There are representations of children that are close to our idea of childhood, but then there are those that bring us closer to the condition of childhood—of not knowing our way about. The perilous situations with which the children of these films are confronted point to the perilousness of teaching children also. This is not a matter of treating kids with care: the films show that they are determined individuals with a tremendous spirit that often exceeds that of the ­narrow-­minded adults around them. Indeed, the commercially oriented adult world (the films are filled with shop owners, selling bicycles, goldfish, apples, balloons, trainers) is one that constantly overlooks the potential of the child—to be free, to be happy, to learn. These films ask us whether we truly know our children, and suggest that we will have to become children again in order to answer that question. Childhood becomes the persistent claim of re-education upon the viewer.

Bibliography Baker, G.  P., & Hacker, P.  M. S. (2009). Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Bearn, G. (2012). Sensual Schooling: On the Aesthetic Education of Grownups. In N. Saito & P. Standish (Eds.), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. New York: Fordham University Press.

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Cardullo, B. (2004). Mirror Images, or Children of Paradise. In In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Cavell, S. (2005). The Good of Film. In W.  Rothman (Ed.), Cavell on Film. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Cavell, S. (2008). Time and Place for Philosophy. Metaphilosophy, 39, 51–61. Chaudhuri, S., & Finn, H. (2003). The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema. Screen, 44(1), 38–57. Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gibbs, A. (2018). Familiar or Strange? Rediscovering the ‘Real’ Child of Educational Policy Through Film. Policy Futures in Education, 16(8), 953–963. Lury, K.  E. (2005). The Child in Film and Television: Introduction. Screen, 46(3), 307–314. Lyotard, J.-F. (1992). Address on the Subject of the Course of Philosophy. In The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982–1985. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Nancy, J.-L. (1999). On Evidence: Life and Nothing More by Abbas Kiarostami. Discourse, 21(1), 77–88. Rancière, J. (2006). Film Fables. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Sadr, H. R. (2006). Iranian Cinema: A Political History. London: I. B. Tauris. Schiller, F. (2005). ‘Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ in Essays. London: Continuum.

6 Samira Makhmalbaf: The Filmmaker as Educationalist

In the previous chapter, I looked at how realist representations of children in Iranian cinema can amount to conceptual investigations into the child as subject of education, putting that concept to work in challenging the attitudes we assume towards it, and the meanings we attach to it. The child came to be seen as part of a cinematic visual grammar that a number of works had in common, a figure which reveals itself through its own search for purpose within a textually closed (rule-governed, normative) society. In drawing attention to the ways we often overlook the ‘real’ experience of children, we are asked to reconsider whether our attitude towards the child as an educational concept is more an attitude towards an idea than, say, a soul. Iranian cinema’s particular mode of poetic, or naïve, realism offered images of the child whose reality lies in its proximity to nature. The possibility of this real nature being something that we often overlook, in favour of more palatable narratives of childhood (whether on film or in educational thought), draws the viewer’s attention back to a need to continually rethink our attitudes towards both children and education, if we are to do justice to both in a present context. In this chapter, I will explore how the films of Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf develop this attentive sensibility in a direction that doesn’t just situate the child as a figure of challenging ambiguity, but places it, and © The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_6

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others, within environments in which the given character of anything cannot be taken for granted. The key characteristics of Makhmalbaf ’s cinematic vision include: a keen eye for the tension between the symbolic and the ordinary within any one object; a deliberate attempt to sabotage her own ability to exercise full directorial control over the subjects of her interest (showing the influence of forebears such as Kiarostami and Panahi); and a strong sense that justice in cinematic representation is best achieved via the refusal of excesses of style or sentiment. These features can produce in the viewer a feeling that the director is almost uncaring in her depictions of societal issues, but this may be because she refuses to treat them with the kind of reverence that might be mistaken for idealism. I want to argue here that Samira Makhmalbaf ’s films can provoke in the viewer some very challenging conversations precisely because of her willingness to obstruct her own will: if she makes films about people whose psychological development evades her own experience of being a child (The Apple), of people whose language she does not speak (Blackboards), and about countries whose conflicts she has not had to undergo (At Five in the Afternoon), we begin to suspect that she is interested in how the phenomena of her curiosity will reveal themselves when she cannot subjugate them to her own intent. The fact that the viewer might sense this semantic ambiguity in the image means that it is incumbent on them to come up with an interpretation for the phenomena represented, rather than await visual explication. These phenomena, however, do have things in common, and I want to suggest over the course of this chapter that Makhmalbaf is peculiarly fixated on the ‘educational’: questions of who educates, who is educated, where education takes place and when, whether a formal education is even necessary or desirable. Throughout her films, I think that Makhmalbaf is less concerned with answering these questions, than she is with asking them in such a way that possibilities for an answer are laid open, but are never definitive. There is evidence of hope, but it is up to a viewer to decide in what direction that hope points. The three films I will look at, then, I take to be key texts in asking the important educational question that brings together the investigations undertaken in previous chapters, the question of what education means for us? Much like Abbas Kiarostami, Makhmalbaf ’s film imagery sustains an expressed interest in the matters of education, enough to make me

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inclined to describe her as an educationalist. One of the things that Samira Makhmalbaf shares in common with other educational thinkers is the questioning of what it means to give a form to the experience of others. Because cinema, as an art form, does this also, the overlap between film and education becomes even more intriguing in her work—almost the essence of it. And the use of symbols in her films become a testament to that overlap, almost as duck-rabbits placed in among our films for the appreciation of their different aspects. They are not to be taken one way or another, necessarily, but draw our attention to the potential of phenomena as the basis for an aesthetic re-education in concepts. Makhmalbaf ’s films return us to the site of the original question of educational meaning: not so much what we mean by education, but whether we attach meaning to it at all. “What does education mean for us?” is a significantly more uncomfortable question than “What do I mean when I speak of education?”. It implies value, and not just semantics. Makhmalbaf, to my mind, is constantly engaged in the questioning of her own position as to whether education is able to justify itself in circumstances that are both extreme and also ordinary (they are the ordinary existences of people who live at the very margins of society). She considers education in relation to people who haven’t experienced it as a foundational institution in their lives, as something that is just a matter of course: instead, it is something that must find its voice in among the chaos, the unformed, the rubble. I want to therefore make the claim for the filmmaker to be as much an educationalist as any other professional, but not on the basis that we are in full possession of her educational intent or imaginary. I will make some remarks on the unique educational and political climate in which Makhmalbaf was raised, but only to make the necessary nod to the idea that, whilst our experience certainly does inform our work, it does so in ways that make interpretations of the work irreducible to experience, rather than symmetrical.

Schooling in the Screen Samira Makhmalbaf was born into a filmmaking family, and was raised to see the world through a cinematic lens. At age seven, she starred in her father Mohsen’s film The Cyclist (1987), and at age 14, she left the public

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education system altogether to apply herself to filmmaking, under her father’s instruction. In his account of Mohsen’s career, Hamid Dabashi writes that Samira abandoned formal education to devote herself entirely to cinema, studying primarily with her father at home. Her defiance of an educational system inundated by theocratic indoctrination is symptomatic of a larger predicament more than two decades into the Islamic revolution….Samira’s is a post-ideological generation that, in its defiance of the institutional foregrounding of abstract idealism, reaches for a kind of virtual realism…The active defiance of one particularly powerful institution is the symbolic defiance of ideology itself as the meta-narrative of salvation. (Dabashi, 2001, p. 263)

Dabashi sees the Makhmalbafs’ rejection of public schooling as a rejection of theocracy by default, constituting a significant departure from Kiarostami’s exploratory mode of critique from within, in films such as ‘Homework’. But this rejection should be seen more as a statement made by the father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf; it was a deliberately political move that should not be conflated with the politics of his children. Mohsen Makhmalbaf, dissatisfied with the lack of provision of nonideological film education by Iran’s educational institutions, had set up the Makhmalbaf Film House, a school whose first pupils were mostly members of the family. This was less an act of nepotism than one of convenience, given the difficulties of gaining formal recognition for such an experiment. Mohsen Makhmalbaf has described the purpose of the school’s daily routine thus: I spent 8 years nonstop to teach my family cinema through theory and practice. And during this time our house had turned to a school and laboratory for filmmaking for them as well as a few others. (www.makhmalbaf.com)

What is interesting about the coalescence of school and laboratory as brought about by filmmaking is not so much its rejection of schooling, but that it seeks to do schooling otherwise. Mohsen Makhmalbaf may have consciously wished to withdraw his children from the indoctrina-

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tion of the state school system, but he couldn’t have anticipated the kind of child that a school of filmmaking would produce, because it had not been done before. In this sense we might recognise in him something of Captain Fantastic’s Ben Cash, except that the Film House embraced a more diverse, and less deterministic curriculum. According to Dabashi, it included: “Regular readings in Persian prose and poetry; courses in painting, photography, acting, directing, cinematography, and mise-en-scène; frame-by-frame analysis of masterpieces of world cinema; and field trips throughout Iran and precise recording of local music, customs, and other folklore” (Dabashi, 2001, p. 266). In reflecting too much on what this education meant for the films that emerged out of it, risks taking us into territory of the ‘anecdote’, in which Cavell identifies the ‘banal touch’ of attracting audience interest in a film by telling stories about its creation that are extraneous to the thing itself. The anecdote panders to our ‘gossipy’ thirst for explanation and causation, the idea that something that happens in life offers a key to understanding what goes on on screen. Cavell redeems this kind of information by saying that it does indeed draw our attention to things happening in movies (e.g. the first appearance of Tony Curtis in a film where he has no lines), which otherwise might go unnoticed, but I want to justify this background information on Samira Makhmalbaf on different grounds: I want to suggest that it is precisely because she experienced an other education (e.g. so unlike my own), that I can’t hope to discover causal connections between that education and the films it produces. The anecdotes simply draw my attention further toward the images for my interpretation, and away from the obsession with origin, because I cannot satisfy myself that interpretation can be made on the grounds of life. Resisting the pull of causal interpretation means firstly recognising that the character of Samira Makhmalbaf ’s films cannot be attributed entirely to her father’s vision (as Hamid Dabashi sometimes seems inclined to suggest). For Mohsen Makhmalbaf, every aspect of education was for the greater good of cinema, and was conducted with the aim of cultivating individualised creative talent. Samira seems to have absorbed some of her father’s cinematic philosophy, but also to have interpreted it in her own way. Whilst Mohsen has often pursued an overtly political aesthetic in his work (we might describe this as a more ‘sentimental’

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vision), Samira has always erred more towards the suspension of her own politics, to allow the politics of others to speak for themselves. She has said that she tries in particular “to remember not to judge, not to think that you know everything, and not to decide before seeing someone” (interview with Said, 2009, p. 165). Here we might also call to mind the Cavellian observation that pretensions to distancing from the object of one’s interest amounts to an affectation, but I’m not sure this is quite the case with Makhmalbaf here. She is not trying to deny her interest in that which she observes by making claims to objectivity (a knowingness that equates to sentimentality in Cavell’s view); she is instead saying that she tries to resists judgment in that which interests her, at least until it has had the chance to speak. As I will go on to show, she achieves this by placing obstacles in the way of her own epistemological grasp upon her subjects, refusing the (fantasy of ) absolute control of the directorial gaze. Unlike Rossellini, who sets himself up as being in complete possession of Descartes’ life and thought processes in Cartesius, Makhmalbaf consistently denies herself this possibility: she creates the conditions in which her own doubt is to the fore, situations in which she cannot possibly know what her subjects are thinking. In this, a certain ruthlessness can appear almost cruel in its lack of sentiment, in that the camera is cold in its distance and abstention from affective positioning. It will hold its attention in places where we would often look away, or in others where society asks that we don’t stare. But it is also the most generous act of aesthetic presentation, and precisely a characteristic of the naïve artist in the Schillerian sense. As Schiller asks us to recognise, the naïve poet does not condescend to give us things as we might want to see them (“he feels the heart that seeks them”), but has to present them as they are: “the arid truthfulness with which he treats his subject matter often appears as insensitivity” (2005, p. 196). The problem comes when the viewer seeks “the object in the subject”, in short the metaphysical truth that t­ ranscends the portrayal of any one character, that leads us to be upset when that character wither behaves in ways or experience events inconsistent with our expectation of what that truth ought to be. We are looking for something beyond nature as it is, reflecting/refracting it instead through our intellect. Pity and remorse can’t be allowed to interfere with this representation (we might think of nature documentaries and their editing in the

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same way). This insensitivity removes some of the sugar-coating to which cinematic representation often tends, but is not a provocation so much as a necessity of the naïve realist attitude to filmmaking. What she seems to have gained from her unique education, then, is the idea that making films is not so much about representing her own view of the world (in the depiction of social injustice, or moral causes, or particular people), but about allowing the world to represent itself, often in conflicting and confusing ways. For Makhmalbaf, amateur actors, different languages, and ideological ambiguities are the essential components of a cinema that refuses to judge humanity before giving it a chance to speak (albeit in a manner that self-­ consciously acknowledges the selection of content and location as forms of judgment). None of these components should be seen as exclusive to Samira Makhmalbaf (and/or other members of the Makhmalbaf family): as the previous chapter showed, contemporary Iranian cinema is often characterised by elliptical dialogue, sparse poetic landscapes, and the use of amateur actors—not least because of issues to do with censorship that frequently prevent, for example, direct criticism of political parties, the depiction of the private sphere, and the representation of women in certain ways or environments (Farahmand; Haghighi; Lahiji, in Tapper, 2006). To try and romanticise Iranian cinema outside of these limitations is to ignore a very conscious effort on the part of its directors to respond to, and work within and around these parameters. But they have approached this in their individual ways: the geographical and philosophical remoteness of Kiarostami’s films, for example, make them difficult for both audiences and censors to reach; Jafar Panahi dealt with the frustration of censorship by making a film about it; Mohsen Makhmalbaf has defiantly used his name and notoriety to tackle censorship head-on— including opting to sell the family house (in consultation with the other members) rather than edit the film A Moment of Innocence (1996). Equally, Samira has developed her own style, which is designed to challenge norms from within certain limitations. Hamid Dabashi has identified the realist style that surfaces from these competing elements as a mode of “parabolic realism” which is “at once connected and yet paradoxically released from history”. Dabashi sees this realist mode as one which both combines and distinguishes itself from

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the “sub-atomic energies” of Kiarostami and the “figurative suggestiveness” of Mohsen Makhmalbaf, to develop a parabolic style that mingles mimesis and allegory. In both The Apple and even more so in Blackboards, we see Samira favour a style in which stories occur in episodes, ones which could almost stand independently of one another within the narrative. These vignettes do indeed resonate with the parabolic tradition of Persian storytelling from the Thousand and One Nights through to the Sufi tales of Idries Shah. At the same time, Samira’s images are highly evocative of a poetic tradition that particularly bears the influence of the twentieth century poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), a figure whose influence is attested to in much of the New Iranian Cinema (the title of Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us is taken from one of her poems). Farrokhzad’s poetry is marked by a tension between both symbol and place that plays out in Makhmalbaf ’s films also, in a way that both evidences an affinity but also discovers the potentialities of this tension in creating the non-judgmental space of cinema that Samira Makhmalbaf aspires to. I now want to turn to each of her first three major releases, in turn, to explore how this space might be one that we could describe as pedagogical, in the sense that it allows the educationalist to learn of their concepts anew.

The Apple (1998) The Apple was Samira Makhmalbaf ’s first feature film, made when she was 18 years old. At its most basic level, the film recounts the tale of two girls, Zahra and Massoumeh Naderi, held captive in their home by their father, a man who devoutly believes that letting the girls out of the house would expose them to sin. As a result, by remaining at home for the first 12 years of their life, with only their blind and belligerent mother for company, the girls are significantly delayed in their physical, cognitive and linguistic development. Makhmalbaf ’s first film thus touches on a theme that was a favourite of Enlightenment philosophers and physicians, from Rousseau to Philippe Pinel: that of the feral child. The Romantic fascination with, and fetishisation of, real-life examples in Victor of Aveyron and Kaspar

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Hauser, lay in the enigma of their wildness, and the potential for using them as experiments in late-stage acculturation and civilisation. These stories were given new life and meaning by the directors François Truffaut and Werner Herzog, in their respective films The Wild Child (1970) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974). Makhmalbaf, however, produces something in The Apple that her forebears could not: the ‘real’ thing. The girls playing Zahra and Massoumeh are not really playing at all, because they are the original Zahra and Massoumeh. The Apple is a fictional reconstruction of a news story that broke in Tehran about a call made to Social Services complaining about the treatment of two young girls; days after their release, the young film director asked all of the people involved to re-live the events on film. In reconstructing the events, Makhmalbaf is herself rediscovering their implications from the perspective of her own interest, crafting her own narrative from theirs. Whilst this might seem opportunistic, to the point of being immoral, there is something in the mismatch between the girls’ formlessness (at least according to societal convention) and the form that that filmmaking requires, that creates a tension which is not reducible to moralising. The director and her subjects are instead in immediate conversation. The question of where an audience situates itself between fact and fiction is complicated from the beginning. The opening shot is one which evokes precisely the kind of poetic image that Forough Farrokhzad repeatedly invokes in her poems, in particular ‘Conquest of the Garden’ and ‘I Feel Sorry for the Garden’, in which themes of (female) captivity and restraint are set against a society set deep in self-denial. In ‘I Feel Sorry for the Garden’, Farrokhzad writes that “no one wants/to believe that the garden is dying”, whilst ‘Inaugurating the Garden’ anticipates the unfolding of the narrative from this point: Everyone knows. Everyone knows you and I have seen the garden through that cold, grim window and have plucked the apple from that far, flirtatious branch. (Farrokhzad, 2010, p. 67)

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The garden is constantly recalled in Farrokhzad’s poems as the state of nature from which everyone has long since departed, and to which some (such as herself ) are striving to return. That the apple in ‘Conquest of the Garden’ sits on a ‘hard-to-reach’ branch might well be understood as its placing of something that the poet has to strain for in life—whether knowledge, freedom, equality, or recognition. The playfulness of the branch is almost precisely mimicked early on in Makhmalbaf ’s film when a child dangles an apple in front of the two sisters, but it is also anticipated in the opening shot of child’s arm straining to pour a cup of water into a plant pot. That Farrokhzad’s voice imbues this screen image with allegory beyond its representation is important to understanding the feel of the film itself (Farrokhzad herself was famous for making a short documentary feature, ‘The House is Black’, in which her poetry was read over the top of images of a leper colony). The fact of no one wanting to believe that the garden is dying, tied into the accusatory ‘Everyone knows’, both point to a political message of the film in which everyone is implicated in its events. Once we have watched the film, we are part of the ‘everyone’ that knows such things are possible, and have a responsibility to look out for them. That the simple gesture of the first shot folds Farrokhzad into its expression, suggests that Makhmalbaf wants the picture to be taken as both poetry and protest. The recurring symbol of the apple then makes its first appearance in the film in an equally significant follow-up scene, further implying the resonance with Farrokhzad’s opening lines to ‘Conquest of the Garden’. In this next shot, the screen is filled with the picture of a written document, which sets out the complaint made by neighbours of the Naderi family to the Social Services about the mistreatment of the girls, under which they are all signing their names (the signature becoming a declaration of one’s self in the world that is later revisited in Blackboards). The image at first provides a striking contrast with the opening poetic image of the disembodied arm and the plant pot, because of its seemingly anodyne bureaucracy. But the image again performs multiple functions. We see the trope of disembodied hands reappear, this time in the form of adult signatories to the document, which serves to tie a fragile connection from the poetic image to the political one, making the claim that these things are one and the same. Where the previous figure was notable for

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its isolation, however, this image is one in which solidarity is evoked as the possibility of overcoming that isolation. A revolutionary chord is struck here that might easily be attributed to the influence of Makhmalbaf Senior. But where this simple shot triumphs, however, and achieves the signature of its own director at the same time is in its final flourish: a placing of an apple on top of the signed document. If Farrokhzad had previously been alluded to, here her presence becomes more explicit. At the same time, however, the apple is not limited to this allusion (and I am not aware that the allusion has been directly acknowledged). Instead it disturbs the otherwise ordinary process of registering an official complaint, to place itself as a figure of unknown quantity: why here? Why now? It appears on the page like a question mark. Farrokhzad’s poetry can only provide at most a partial answer: its verses are, for example, concerned with themes of captivity and womanhood much like The Apple (Farrokhzad’s first collection of poems, Captive, contained a poem of the same title with the words: “I am thinking that in a moment of neglect I might fly from this silent prison”). And yet the apple will reappear under so many different circumstances over the course of the film that to limit it to just these discourses does not do justice to the ways in which it brings allegory into its every appearance, whilst in the process refusing the possibility of its metaphor being consistent across the piece. Nowhere is it incongruous with the narrative, but everywhere it is replete with alternative connotation, consistently asking of the viewer: what do you see this apple as? It is therefore not a wilfully arbitrary floating signifier, but an everyday object that demands our constant attention and revaluation in each context that it is rediscovered. Is this a symbol of knowledge? Of sexual awakening? Of capital? Of communication? Of friendship? Of love? Of forgiveness (when Massoumeh hands an apple to her father through the bars of the house now keeping him captive)? Further to these possibilities, the Wittgensteinian might also be tempted to see the apple as allusion to the most famous of the philosopher’s primitive language games, the scene of the shop in which “five red apples” serve as a starting point for the discussion of language-in-use. And like Wittgenstein, Makhmalbaf pursues this object through the film like someone testing its use in every different circumstance, discovering new aspects to it and asking the viewer to contemplate the same. The affinity

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is captured in Steven Affeldt’s observation that Wittgenstein was concerned with “the vitality of our life with words—our familiarity with them, our attachment to their look and sound, their prolific and fluid associations, the ease with which we employ them, their coming to meet us in speaking, and more” (Affeldt, 2010, p. 280). Makhmalbaf allows the physical apple to function in her visual grammar much as the word does spoken: it holds its shape whilst being protean in meaning. So whilst in every instance the director may have some new meaning in mind for the apple, yet it remains just an apple, and at no point does the girls’ attitude towards the apple appear as anything other than that which it might do if the camera were not on them. The apple has no transcendent quality for them. They are not aware of having to attribute a significance to the fruit. To speculate about their subjective, interior, relations of meaningfulness towards apples would be absurd. The apple slips between scenes as the sense of something by which the girls will come to understand themselves, independently of claims that the institutions of family or state can make upon them. It is not the only symbol employed to this effect (secondary is the symbolism of bars, keys, mirrors, watches, etc.), although it is certainly the most prominent. We are left always wondering not “What does this object mean?”, but “How does this object establish different relations between different people in different situations?” And “What are those relations?” The Apple’s first few minutes, then, contain multitudes as to their mode of expression and the space for meaningfulness that they make possible. What is extraordinary is that Makhmalbaf saw in one news story the opportunity to realise this highly allegorical space within just a few days of its happening, to weave a parabolic and poetic heritage into ‘real life’ events, such that the viewer does come to see the enormous potential of art in its closeness to the everyday. The ten minutes that follow the signing of the document all appear to be genuine documentary footage of the girls’ release, their being taken into care, and then being allowed back home on the condition that they be let out to play with other children and go to school. It is, once again, impossible to know whether this isn’t another instance of the viewer being lured into documentary disposition, only to have that interrupted by a switch to a style more consistent with the feature film. The abruptness of the switch might have the appearance

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of stylistic confusion, but is more likely intended to shift a viewer from a complacency towards genre convention that supplies an understanding of what is seen, towards the figures unfolding on the screen themselves. In the story of Massoumeh and Zahra, we are presented with Makhmalbaf ’s own version of a children film, but with an additional complexity to it: the girls are ‘real’ in the sense that they are authentic amateurs much like their counterparts in the films of Kiarostami and Panahi, but they are also unreal in their non-resemblance to other children of their age. We can assume even less about who they are, and how they perceive the world. We must await their actions for that perception to reveal itself. As they begin to discover the world anew, so we observe childhood discovering itself from another angle.1 The girls are not ‘wild’ in the sense that Victor of Aveyron was, but they are largely inarticulate and possibly suffering from physical issues as a result of poor care and nutrition. At a relatively mature age in terms of years, they are still effectively without language, their words unshaped through lack of practice with either parents or peers. The question of language (and what Cavell calls arrogation, the speaking on behalf of others) is present from the beginning as a dilemma over personal freedom (as it was in Truffaut’s Wild Child also). The important thing about The Apple in educational terms, then, is not the kind of form it proposes education should take, but rather that it poses the question of whether it is fair not to give a form to a young person’s experience, to deprive of them of the opportunity to express their interest. It asks, therefore, what form education might take. For all the suspicions that some might harbour towards formal education as a process of socialisation, can a person really experience freedom if they do not participate in the language games that provide the potential for expressive freedom? There is no romanticising the feral child here: the girls are trapped, not only in their homes but in their tongues. They cannot tell of their experience, and to suggest that this is a desirably primitive state is to err in our assessment of justice (it is not  We might recall here LW’s attraction to Augustine in this instance, and Cavell’s observation that the PI is motivated by a curiosity for “such a one speaking about his childhood, so in words of memory, and more particularly, about his first memory of words, say of first acquiring them”. Makhmalbaf almost replicates LW’s fascination for Augustine in her observation of Massoumeh and Zahra. 1

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their fortune to experience things outside the social order; they are disenfranchised from expression itself ). But Makhmalbaf does not condescend to give us the girls’ eye-view on this story from this point (as Carol Reed attempted to do in The Fallen Idol), nor does she set up her own idea of how the girls should be effectively socialised (e.g. by contriving a balance between family and society as seen in the conclusion to Captain Fantastic, in the mode of reproductive futurism). Instead, with a simple motion, the social worker pushes the girls out into the street, and closes the door with herself and their father, state and family influence, within. Makhmalbaf, for her first feature, has chosen two protagonists whose curiosity exceeds their capacity to render the world explicable, and whose movements are not to be tamed by directorial demand; indeed, their movements and sight antagonise film theorist and psychologist alike, because they are not completely in harmony with the shot, the sequence, the framing. They roam on the rough ground of language, and our theoretical analysis struggles to make sense of their motion, because it is irreducible to both authorial intent and therefore our own. Outside their house, a young boy dangles an apple on a string: is he teasing the girls with knowledge, or desire (as their father has feared and suspected)? The Biblical significance of the fruit has been picked up on by Cardullo (2000), who notes that the girls’ first encounter with the apple signifies the moment their consciousness and knowledge of the world begins, with all the enlightenment and deception that that entails. The boy then tells Massoumeh and Zahra that if they want an apple of their own they’ll have to come to the shop with him. In leading the girls out into the wider world (a public space of which they have no experience), the boy gives them no information about what to expect and how to make sense of it: apples are the only destination around which this journey revolves, and the girls will have to connect the other dots and learn the rules that children their age will have already achieved by then (how to negotiate traffic, communicate with shopkeepers, etc.), as they go along. When they make it to the shop, however, the boy is shown to be just as inexperienced as the twins, in being reminded by the shopkeeper that they can’t get apples without paying for them (his indifference to the girls’ difference refuses to sentimentalise their condition). Massoumeh and Zahra return to ask

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their captive father for the money, and in doing so demonstrate that independence does not mean freedom from interdependence, and that they have entered a system of capital which cannot help but define their development from here on. Outside of their captivity, other structures are immediately making their claim upon the girls’ understanding and appreciation of the world and its extant values. The next scene in which the apple effects a new relationship involves a mirroring of the two sisters with two other girls of the same age. From the beginning of The Apple, questions are being asked by the authorities about why the sisters are not attending school (revealing sympathies with the director’s own abstention from formal schooling, and therefore how their experience might be different as a consequence). Even though The Apple doesn’t feature a school, the question of schooling looms over every new encounter that the girls experience in the world, and the issue of how they might be better equipped to ‘go on’, in Wittgenstein’s words, had their education been given some form to it. This question comes to the fore in the shape of the two schoolgirls playing at hopscotch. In their neat uniforms, and in the rigid structure of the game (which Massoumeh and Zahra fail to understand), the schoolgirls are the very representation of socialisation as a function of schooling. But Makhmalbaf crafts a more complex relationship between the four that is more counterpoint than just this juxtaposition: their friendship emerges as one in which it is difficult to discern a natural ease of affection from the curiosity of comparison. The girls sense a sameness, but also a difference. The interplay of these attitudes is evident when Massoumeh, in being given instructions on how to hopscotch properly, hits her new playmate on the head with the apple she has recently purchased. Knowing nothing of her attacker’s background, the girl takes the gesture as an insult but then soon decides to forgive her with a kiss. Massoumeh seems to interpret this ­reciprocation as a reward for her actions, and so hits her with the apple again. During this time, the camera maintains a respectful, anthropological distance from the girls’ interactions, zooming in only on their feet as they play the game. When the four girls all then lie back on the ground and eat their apples together, however, a more stylised shot is established: the twins are no longer side by side, but are alternately laid down with their new

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friends; and they are observed from above, a shot that seems to envision their more harmonious arrangement as equals. Despite the potholes in their communications, some community is beginning to be established between them (or, in the case of the two schoolgirls, re-established, as they are having to learn some rules of community over again). In this to-­ ing and fro-ing, we see the evolution of the language game of friendship: there are many rules to be learned, some which will ease interpersonal understanding, and others that will introduce the twins into a system of conformity and regulation that may well deprive them of their innocence and wonder at the world. The director seems to observe this scene with a questioning eye: what will be lost amongst all these gains? In the final scene, the young boy is shown once again to be holding the apple on the end of a piece of string, this time dangling it above the head of the girls’ blind mother, who has ventured out of the house asking for her daughters, and does not know what the object is that keeps evading her grasp. The film ends with a freeze frame just as the mother seem about to catch the apple, a technique that is likely a nod to the French New Wave, particularly the closing of Truffaut’s 400 Blows, and one which has been described by David Bordwell as “the very figure of narrative irresolution” (Bordwell, 2012, p. 156). It is perhaps strange that a film that has been ostensibly about the potential of new flourishing of Masoumeh and Zahra ends with this image of their paranoid mother, one whose portent is entirely ambiguous. The inclination may be to think: is this a moment in which the mother, until now blind both physically and metaphorically, is about to change? Can she achieve the kind of understanding that will transform her daughters’ future and freedom for the better? My sense, however, is that the freeze frame is not a focus on the mother’s subjectivity, which would simply invite a judgment of her guilt and complicity which furthers no conversation beyond an ­individual’s indictment, but a throwing of the question back at the viewer. It asks: can we change? Have we failed to see our children recently? This moment hands over the future of the film’s conversation to the viewer, rather than drawing its own conclusion. There is no surety of reproductive futurism here, and no feminist manifesto either. Doors have been opened, and things have been shown, but no change is guaranteed

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as narrative closure. The story continues, and the apple, with its potential for multiple interpretations, is now handed over to the audience, in whose mouth it must find and rediscover new and justifiable articulations through conversation and criticism. Hamid Dabashi, for example, takes the film to be about the emancipation of women, but I don’t think this accurately reflects the many aspects to The Apple. If the film were just about gender, the film would fall back on a political agenda that its imagery seems always to call into question even as it approaches affirmation. Any implicit critique of attitudes towards women in Iranian society that The Apple contains is also cut through with thoughts travelling in many other directions. Some of these might be seen to concern the education of girls, some the education of children more generally, some meditations on knowledge, language, socialisation, and even romance. I take these all to be important questions asked of the educationalist, how we situate ourselves in relation to their difficulties, what we are prepared to say in the face of them. One of the many things that both fascinates and resonates in The Apple is the idea that education begins with the exposure to new experiences. Formal education perhaps provides a framework in which that exposure can begin to be examined and interpreted, but is nothing without that initial freedom to risk oneself in the world, just as the girls are shown to do, unaccompanied and unsure of themselves. Their encounters with others, with knowledge, with the world of commerce and injustice, allude to the shape that a formal education might take (and perhaps also to what will be lost in the process). This freedom was offered to Samira as a young girl in the form of a camera: “They would give this camera to me, I took pictures, and we would analyse them” (interview with Said, 2009, p. 169). For Massoumeh and Zahra, freedom comes in many forms, but perhaps most poignantly in the form of the key with which they can either keep their father locked in the same house that he kept them prisoner, or let him out. With this freedom, much like Mina in Panahi’s The Mirror, the girls are shown to be (becoming) individuals in their own right, capable of making decisions for themselves, and learning from both the rewards and mistakes that ensue.

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Blackboards (2000) One of the striking features of The Apple is the way that the unusual movement of the girls disturbs and disrupts the flow of the everyday in the busy city of Tehran. The film’s poetry is secreted through symbols that catch the eye and cast their ordinary surrounds into question. The change of landscape in Blackboards to the mountainous border between Iraq and Iran removes from beneath the viewer’s feet the familiarity of the urban environment, and places the viewer before a scenery as sparse as that of any Spaghetti Western. Much as the sisters in The Apple were almost more childlike than children of our ordinary cinematic experience (their undirectability as polar opposite to the directedness of the Hollywood child), so the locations of Blackboards are almost so alien as to exceed our conception of the real, to make them sur-real, if only because it is so hard to locate them within familiar experience. The reality of those portrayed, although imbued again with poetic imagery, may be a deliberate challenge to the more comfortable one that we as viewers occupy, particular with regard to ideas of learning, loving, and survival. From within the frames, a question emerges that is alluded to by the title: a question concerning teaching, and whether it is possible, desirable, or even necessary in parts of the world where literacy and numeracy seem to make no claim upon human survival whatsoever. If teaching is to justify itself anywhere, Makhmalbaf seems to be saying, it must begin by justifying itself here. And if it is to justify itself, then what might it look like? The justification for education (as something more than instruction) in a given circumstance requires an adjustment of our sight to those circumstances. Hence why, in The Apple, a piece of fruit is transfigured throughout the film to draw attention to different aspects of the girls’ burgeoning exposure to new phenomena. The transfiguration of the apple throughout attests to the need to justify giving form to experience in each instance, constituting a new claim upon our aesthetic judgment of the apple’s meaning every time. The aspect-multiplicity of our objects, the ordinary ways in which one thing might be seen as something else, plays a role of equal importance in the director’s second film, in the form of the eponymous blackboards. If the apple had appeared as that most

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primitive of symbols in the previous film, harking back to both nature and the basic need for nourishment, but also Eden and its fertilisation of desire, consciousness, and knowledge, then the blackboards can be seen as the most basic symbol of that next stage in human development, the technologisation and institutionalisation of nature, hunger, desire, consciousness, and knowledge. But in the films, any symbolic function sits also alongside the fact that the thing only ever is what it is in any one circumstance, and nothing more. In the case of the apple, this meant: toy, weapon, currency, food source. In Blackboards, the blackboards are carried as a burden, the weight of the problem of their purpose traversing the frames always in search of their proper home (the teachers are framed by their profession, a self-reflexive device also adopted by Ryan Fleck in Half Nelson). They are put to multiple different uses over the course of the film, a utilitarianism that challenges their original purpose, that both pokes fun at the seriousness with which we often indulge the questions of education, whilst also strongly alluding to its necessity in some form. In this shapeshifting, there is the discernible influence of Chaplin and Keaton. Where Chaplin turned a boot into a roast dinner and forks into dancing legs, Makhmalbaf turns a blackboard into a stretcher, a marriage curtain, a splint, a form of camouflage. These transformations confirm the importance of the Heideggerian emphasis on “a disruption of the matters of course running among our tools, and the occupations they extend” (Cavell, 1978, p. 249), that do not inform us how to see a thing, but draw attention to the need to see our phenomena anew, and differently. Important in the case of the blackboard (for my sense that Blackboards is a film in pursuit of educational meaning), is the blackboards’ mobility. Whether in the Iranian New Wave or elsewhere, this is the only film of my knowledge which shows formal education as something that is not rooted in a physical structure, in a building to which individuals are either drawn or forced to be together. In most films concerned with teacher–student relations, the school setting presupposes that, given the necessity of school attendance, it is simply a matter of what constitutes good teaching that is at stake. By contrast, when education is deprived of the gravitational pull of the school, its self-interrogation is intensified. Education may not be synonymous with schooling, but if it has something to do with giving form to experience, how does it go about justifying

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this endeavour in the absence of formal institutions? The fact of the teachers carrying the school on their backs provides Makhmalbaf with the opportunity to explore whether any education is not simply a matter of either indoctrination/institutionalisation or emancipation, but is often one and the same process. On the one hand, the blackboards are frequently seen as pointless for their express purpose; on the other, they are also discovered to be effective for instituting unanticipated interactions. But they are also found, under certain conditions, to simply be continuing their more traditional function: learning to write, for example, as a way of giving expression to one’s interest. To recap briefly on the narrative, such as it is: in contrast to The Apple’s ‘entry into the world’ narrative, that lacks the figure of an educator, Blackboards features two teachers as its central characters. It is tempting to suggest that the repeated dualism is not a coincidence; just as Massoumeh and Zahra are presented as a pair who are already showing signs of individual interest, so Said and Reeboir give us a sense of bifurcating educational journeys that can emerge from the same starting point. In the case of Blackboards, this starting point is a steep climb up a hill for a large group of itinerant teachers with blackboards on their backs. Initially, the sunlight falls in such a way that there can be no distinguishing between the blackboard and the person carrying it, almost as if it were a shell. Suddenly, with the sound of gunfire, the men huddle together in a tortoise formation until they realise the danger has passed. The story then follows the splintering off of two of the teachers, and their ongoing efforts to sell their educational wares to unwilling characters along the way: child smugglers, elderly villagers, and nomadic Kurds. In these inhospitable climes, education is something to be sold to others like anything else, and you have to go to the client. Here is the first turning on its head of educational relations. The plot, minimal as it is, then unfolds through a sequence of episodes showing the encounters between Said and Reeboir with their potential customers. What emerges from these frequently comic and often pathetic vignettes is a complete mismatch between the service that the teachers see themselves as being able to provide (i.e. a rudimentary introduction to basic literacies) and the benefits that their potential students might accrue as a result. Said, for example, tries to persuade the wife he has acquired

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from force of circumstance (her father is dying of a urinary infection and needs to marry her off) to learn to read the phrase ‘I love you’ off the blackboard whilst she occupies herself with tending to her infant son’s ablutions. Here we have a whole cloud of Cavellian philosophy condensed into this one droplet of an image: the phrase Said is trying to teach has a semblance of semantic significance, but the learning of it can do nothing to overcome either the existential or sceptical difficulties of not meaning it when one says it. Meanwhile, Reeboir tries to convince some children acting as mules carrying illegal goods over the border that learning to read would give them the advantage of being able to understand a newspaper: Reeboir: Do you know what it would allow you to do? To read a book, or a newspaper, to work, to listen, to speak. When you can read a book, you discover stories. Hayyaz: I’ve got hundreds. Hayyaz then proceeds to tell one of his ‘stories’ that involves recounting an incident where he and his friends chased a rabbit in the mountains, caught it, and were divided on whether they should torture it or not before eating it. Reeboir then interjects: “Drop it! I don’t need your stories. I want to teach you”. Reeboir’s impatience with the boy captures this mode of cinema’s self-conscious exploration of the tension between storytelling and reality, a mode which distinguishes the New Iranian cinema from other variations of neorealism. To unpack this brief scene is both to engage the difficult relation between art and reality, as well the playful possibilities that the one offers the other. What do I mean? Here we have a barren landscape, vertiginous in altitude and the shots used to depict it. The scene of the story is prefaced with a long shot of the boys continuing their ascent single file, establishing Reeboir as indistinguishable from them as he carries his blackboard in the same manner as they carry their contraband. They arrive at an outcrop and pause for a moment; Hayyaz and Reeboir exchange words in shot-reverse-shot, the one (Hayyaz) with a backdrop of open and empty valley behind him, looking up to the other (Reeboir) with the only the clear sky to frame the blackboard on his back. It is as if the scene of learning has been cleared of

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all detritus, but also every prompt to imaginative stimulation. From whence does humanity derive its meaningfulness, or its ability to be meaningful, in a landscape of such severity? How can one begin to shape one’s own expression, with no experience of symbols? What is clear in these images is that Makhmalbaf ’s inquiry into educational purpose is not one that will discover anything independently of the people that already overwrite the idea. The whole point of using ‘amateur’ actors is that they are anything but amateurs in the lives which they are meant to represent; they are experts in them, simply because they already inhabit them. So no phenomenological assumption, or bracketing, can be made about ‘education’, ‘storytelling’, ‘self-awareness’ independently of the already-assumed lives of those who have entered our line of sight. What can be said about these things can only be said in observation of their unfolding on the screen. I invite the word ‘storytelling’ into the educational vocabulary of these films at this stage because I think it attests to two further important aspects of Samira Makhmalbaf’s educational film-philosophy. The first is one that invokes the storytelling traditions of Iranian culture, most notably the celebrated One Thousand and One Nights. In the various encounters of the two teachers in Blackboards, there are resonances with a number of the tales of Scheherazade, not least those to do with schoolmasters: ‘The Unwise Schoolmaster who fell in Love by Report’, ‘The Foolish Schoolmaster’ and ‘The Illiterate who set up for a Schoolmaster’. As the titles of these stories indicate, not much stock seems to have been set by the author(s) in schoolmasters, and the spirit of this lack of confidence pervades Blackboards also. Said and Reeboir frequently fulfil the roles represented in the One Thousand and One Nights, which are either of men who are equipped with certain skills but little intuitive (common) sense of the humanity to which those skills ought to be oriented. One scene in particular recalls ‘The Illiterate who Set up for a Schoolmaster’, which recounts the exposure of a fraudulent schoolteacher who is approached by a woman wanting him to read her a letter which she believes to hold news of her husband’s death. The teacher’s illiteracy leads him to deceive the woman, only for her to be informed of her husband’s good health by a neighbour. In Makhmalbaf ’s hands, the story becomes one in which an old man asks one of the teachers, Saïd, to read his son’s letter to him, written from

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prison in Iraq, where the son has been fighting. Saïd explains that he can’t read either Arabic or Turkish, but the old man insists until Saïd resolves to offer a conjectured summary based upon the conditions in which such a letter might have been written, and appeasing the expectations of the father. The story is therefore subverted: Saïd is not illiterate in his ability to read or write, but he is incapacitated before this human-all-too-human commission in the same way as his literary forebear. The subversion of the story, however, is one of greater sympathy with the schoolmaster: Saïd doesn’t make the decision to deceive the old man in order to preserve his professional identity; he does it in spite of that identity, as a response to a human need for reassurance. However morally questionable his decision, he has acted for the sake of the old man’s happiness, a move that ethically recalls the impossible situations that King Lear and Cordelia, as well as Ben Cash and his son Nai, found themselves in also. The doubt as to what constitutes right action in these cases can only be overcome by meaningful action, that is, by responding to the other and the situation, rather than according to normative determination. My sense is that this subversion of the One Thousand and One Nights’ dim view of the teacher is deliberate, and that its optimism perhaps stems from the director’s own experience of an education otherwise than that prescribed by the state. If she could take enjoyment in, and discover self-expression through, formal education as a mode of telling one’s own story, might others do so too? If the answer is yes, Makhmalbaf does not rush to this conclusion, and certainly tests the limits of a formal education’s use and function along the way. What unfolds in the scene with Reeboir and Hayyaz as they explore the latter’s storytelling abilities is a dialogue between the trappings of both romanticism and realism, its negative terms threatening to extinguish grand educational narratives altogether. Hayyaz’s ‘story’ pours cold water on romanticism’s celebration of a natural spirit of the child unshaped by external forces. The inconsequentiality, blithe cruelty, and lack of shape, tone and emotion within the tale make it less a story than a witness statement. Hayyaz is testifying to the sadness of his inability to tell his own story, to give a shape to his experience that will make a difference to him. He recounts events, but they have nothing of his own mark upon them, his voice or signature. This is not just a point about artistic expression, but of political expression also: to be unaware of one’s unique voice is to be unconscious of one’s status as citizen.

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We could see this as a point of social justice, in that such a self-­awareness would provide Hayyaz with the possibility of challenging those that exploit him, but it is possibly a right more fundamental than exemption from child labour that is at issue here: the story appeals (as did The Apple) to the right to a voice that is the basis for self-discovery. Reeboir, significantly, does not appear as the emancipatory saviour to this narrative. His own biases make of him the counterfeit of realism, an instrumentalist, rather than its advocate. Reeboir (at least at this stage) wants to get straight to his educational endgame of exchanging instruction for pay, without reflecting on what Hayyaz’s ‘story’ is really telling him about Hayyaz, the world he inhabits, and how Reeboir might be able to help him see that world differently. In the light construction of this dialogue, Makhmalbaf doesn’t condescend to propose solutions, but to expose realities of competing positions of disappointment. Hayyaz may be disappointed in the drudgery of his daily tasks, but nothing about him suggests that his situation can be otherwise; Reeboir may be frustrated in the boy’s recalcitrance in the face of the self-evidence of his educational good, but he can point to nothing in their surroundings that might support his claims to value. Situations such as these demand a Kierkegaardian leap of faith, perhaps something that is as much about intuition as intelligence, though I have called it attitude in previous chapters. This attitude ruptures the dialectic set up by Reeboir and Hayyaz (the informed vs. the ignorant, neither of which seems to carry greater weight or value in the circumstances) in the form of a third party, another boy who—significantly, I believe—calls Reeboir over to him in order to have a word. This summons, casual to the point of imperceptibility, places Reeboir in a different pedagogical relation to that in which he found himself with Hayyaz: he has not pursued this moment, trying to impose himself, but has been called to it. We are aware that the relation is different because this new boy is pictured front on. Reeboir must await the boy’s next move, to learn for himself what is wanted of him. Like Massoumeh and Zahra with their schoolgirl friends, these two must find an equal footing on which to found their relation, that isn’t presupposed by the teacher’s professional concerns. This footing is discovered in the form of a name: the teacher and the boy share the same one, Reeboir. Reeboir removes his load as the teacher explains to him what his name means (‘He who walks’, or, ‘The

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traveller’). The idea that one’s name might have a meaning beyond mere appellation, registers an immediate delight and fascination for the younger Reeboir, and opens the door to the possibility of a life having meaning beyond mere obeisance. And so from the scene of a storyless story, and an impatience with ignorance, emerges the potential for education to become the telling of one’s own story. The intimation of allegory that is provided by a name having a meaning (i.e. that it is linked to something other than fate) is sufficient to create a pedagogical space in which the ‘good’ of education is not to be assumed, but explored. The subsequent unfolding of the narrative of the two Reeboirs,2 sees the younger one learning to spell the letters in his name (which might be understood as the inheritance of a culture or traditional in the more conventional understanding of education), which culminates in his being able to copy a scripted version on the blackboard, to his evident delight. The boy has discovered the possibility of leaving a trace, or a mark, which itself marks the moment from which an interrogation of self, of self-discovery, can then unfold. If there is an affirmative dimension to be discovered in this moment of learning to inscribe one’s name into the world for the first time, making one’s own claim upon it as an individual and as someone with a story to tell, the hand of the director-­ as-­storyteller immediately asserts itself as one that refuses the desire to sentimentalise: the young Reeboir is immediately shot by border guards. Pedagogy, instead of guaranteeing the good life, is thus seen as something perilous, both to enter into and to sustain. Blackboards invites attentiveness to its ambiguities through scenes that are themselves carefully attentive to misunderstandings, lack of communication, and the need to listen as well as to talk. It is fairly characteristic  The relationship between the two Reeboirs is one that quite possibly references Rossellini’s Paisa, and the relationship between Joe and Pasquale that develops in the second episode of that film. Much like Pasquale, the young Reeboir is fighting for his existence in circumstances that forbid his childhood. Identity is not really on the cards for either of them when a lack of infrastructure and nutrition make that search seem a luxury. Joe and the older Reeboir both enter the lives of these boys as figures of ambiguity: they represent on the one hand the command and control of their existence that the boys are yet to fulfil, in the Joe is an occupier from the victorious allied forces, and Reeboir an educator with the set of requisite skills of his profession. And yet they are also incomplete: Joe in his drunkenness and Reeboir in his poverty appear as adults whose knowledge or skills haven’t realised the satisfaction they promised. 2

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of the director’s own method that she will elect to film in languages that are not her own, thereby freeing up further spaces for her actors to contribute to, and interrupt, the authorial control over their interaction, and thereby the hermeneutic strategies that a viewer might wish to apply. Samira has summed up her approach by saying that ‘the important thing for me was to deal with the way we fail each other in our relationships and the way in which we relate to each other’ (quoted in Wood, 2006, p. 163). Both failure and affirmation in this approach must be emphasised if the educational importance of the films is to be understood: yes, people are always failing to understand each other, which makes foundational approaches to intersubjective relations problematic; nevertheless, it is in human relations that the rewards of life are seen to be found, however frustrating that process often is. In Blackboards, just as Makhmalbaf ’s teacher has to blunder his way through translating the letter based solely on assumptions about the old man’s family background, so the viewer has to make certain assumptions about context, narrative, and language that will be supported by cinematic technique and subtitling in order for there to be any engagement (i.e. if I as a viewer am to get anything from the film, I must believe that I am invited to at least participate in its conversation, even if it is a depiction of difficulties of which I have no direct experience). There is something to be learnt, even if the viewer is not told directly what it is. This would appear to be because the director positions herself as inquirer, rather than author, and so her questions coincide with those of the viewer: Who is the person being educated? What does he or she need from education? How is it possible to know? Can people become free through education? What does that freedom look like? How does my education inform my appreciation of these issues?

At Five in the Afternoon (2003) Samira’s 2003 film, At Five in the Afternoon, returned ostensibly to some of the above questions, but this time situating them in post-invasion Afghanistan, rather than her native Iran. Afghanistan was also the location of two of her father Mohsen’s films, Kandahar (2001) and The Afghan

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Alphabet (2002), and would also provide the setting for her younger sister’s Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame (2007) all of which explore themes around the destruction wrought by war and the oppressive regime of the Taliban. But where Mohsen’s films communicate fairly explicit messages of social injustice, Samira’s films often seem to embrace zones of desolation or conflict as sites of contested meaning, if only to emphasise the conflicting emotions and experiences her characters are undergoing (the film takes its title from a poem by Federico García Lorca that explores similar themes). The distinction replays both the affiliations and differences between the approaches to neorealism of Rossellini and Pasolini: whereas the former could often be seen to give overly partial portraits of Italians in contrast to their invaders, Pasolini preferred to focus on the nuances of his countrymen. Makhmalbaf could easily be seen to draw on the strength of character of Anna Magnani’s Mamma Roma for her depiction of Nogreh, in that it is spirited and sympathetic, with an identity deeply embedded in political place. Equally, the director might be playing on the same kind of issues of revealing and concealment that Cavell explores in Contesting Tears as fundamental to the female protagonist’s assertion of her right to (self-)education: Nogreh, after all, is obliged by law to be fully concealed. In showing her face for most of the film, director and actress are united in a defiance that is as much about politics as it about visibility. Nogreh is rebellious, though not in any gratuitous sense, and even gives a glimpse of sensuality in her fondness for a pair of white pumps with a heel, just one of many symbols that contest traditional associations between femininity and empowerment, particularly in this region of the world. Her wearing of the shoes is both an act of daring and an assumption of dignity, the dignity of office. As the film progresses, however, the shoes will be seen as dialectical counterpart to another raiment, the burqa, and become as burdensome in their associations as much has the latter has. Just as armour cannot fully clothe the coward, so heels cannot elevate the person who refuses self-knowledge in pursuit of a position of power. The story is that of a woman in search of her education, and of her encounter with an immigrant poet who resolves to help her in her campaign to become Afghanistan’s first female president. The young woman, Nogreh, attends two schools: the one, a strict quranic recital at which her

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father drops her off every day; the other, to which she sneaks away from her recital, is a progressive school for girls in which everyone is unveiled and encouraged to think about the roles they would like to assume in Afghanistan’s future. Nogreh has no lack of ambition: she wants to be president of the country. But in order to make her case in class, she has to find out what a president does, what female heads of state look like, what they say. Her story, again punctuated in episodic form, is one in which education’s traditional ties with citizenship are asked afresh from the perspective of someone who has traditionally been excluded from the criteria for either. Nogreh must find a (public) voice for herself in a society whose ruined buildings still cling to an ideologically governed past, whilst auguring the potential for building them anew. What it means for a woman to become educated, and what it means for a woman to educate herself, is ripe for discovery, but riven with danger and a lack of foundation from which to build: it is not just the female president which has no precedent, but the female presence in this country. Nogreh’s father even advises two young girls he is taxiing that they should speak only with their fingers in their mouths so as to soundless feminine. The presidency Nogreh seeks (to recover), we might say, is not a claim to power over others, but the claim to speak to speak confidently for oneself (which might then entitle one to thus speak on behalf of others also). The disenfranchisement from which she must retrieve her voice, then, is not one to be reduced to politics, at least in the sense that the politics is itself reducible to representation. Upon their first meeting, the Poet refuses to tell Nogreh whether Pakistan’s president is a man or a woman, saying that he doesn’t like politics, that he’s after ‘real life’. Could this be a challenge to Nogreh’s pursuit of external criteria, questioning whether the knowledge that others have realised her presidential ambition will release her from the demands of self-knowledge? Nogreh makes many attempts to find out from other refugees what the president there is like, but they are seemingly uninterested amidst the turmoil of trying to settle themselves in a new country. Nogreh is struggling to find out about the voice that would provide her with the example of finding her own. There is one extended sequence which captures the dilemma of the voiceless woman in this new society, replete with all the poetic imagery that we have come to associate with the director’s work. Nogreh enters a

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long corridor in an abandoned building, alone. She enters the static frame shot from behind, and faces out towards an arched opening onto the ruined cityscape at the end of the columned corridor. She firstly removes the veil that covers her face, then replaces her flat shoes with the white pumps. She begins to walk down the corridor, as if in procession, and her heels echo around the walls. We then see her shot face-on for the first time, revealing an expression that is both proud and pensive. In all the silence that otherwise surrounds her, the camera’s focus on the face shows Nogreh to also be in equal concentration: something, as she conducts this march, does not sound right, does not feel right. She opens her parasol, and again looks around her, as if to test what might fit, or befit, the situation she is imagining. But then she pauses again, and begins to stamp her feet. The camera moves from feet to face, registering the coming to corporeal consciousness that the one brings to the other. It is the shoes that echo, that don’t feel right somehow. They are removed, and aggressively kicked to one side. A lingering shot of the shoes collapsed, much like the sculptural icons of the country’s past. The parasol is also cast aside, and as the camera then moves back to reverse shot, Nogreh continues towards the arch at the end, but this time playing hopscotch. Throughout the sequence, the camera returns to its absorption with the face of actress Agheleh Rezaie, which always seems to be marked as much by a percipient mirth as it is by melancholy. But where we are mostly given these expressions by way of response (particularly in her interactions with the Poet), here they play off one another in isolation. The camera fixes on Nogreh as she listens to the reverberations of her how footsteps, registering the thoughts, the disappointment with sound, that they make. A moment of doubt, then, as she realises that these shoes are not made for walking the path she wants to go down, because in echoing they discover themselves as echo also—an echo of ideological affinities that are but counter to those previously imposed, but not a departure from them. Released from the constraints that the shoes tie to the mode of procession, Nogreh finds herself not walking but playing. Once again, the binary imagery dissolves into self-discovery, and is expressed in a joyous moment of childishness, the experience of identity as play. The language game in which Nogreh participates by playing hopscotch is one that brings her into a community with the girls of Makhmalbaf ’s earlier

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film, The Apple, but also with the infancy of a primitive expression more generally. From this point, Nogreh must reconsider how she will negotiate the terrain of her own education, irrespective of the structures already available to her articulation (as symbolised by the burqa and the shoes respectively representing tradition and progress). At Five in the Afternoon draws attention to one of the most controversial—and perhaps most personal—uses of symbolism of the three films, in the form of the blue burqa, instantly recognisable to Western viewers as the stamp of Taliban oppression of women. Makhmalbaf does not fully condescend to this view, however, and introduces a greater aesthetic ambiguity into the garment than our perhaps more cautious instincts would care to allow. The poetic quality lent to the burqa’s vivid blue and aquatic flow against the Afghan desert is offset by the evidently cumbersome burden of moving around in one, as well as the intransigence and inscrutability that it represents. It is a forceful reminder of ideological imposition but also serves as metaphor for facial concealment, asking us how much one ever knows about the mind of the person we address. The spectre of Cartesian rationality raises its head: do we judge based on what we already know (that to conceal a face is to refuse the world, say), or do we always demand to know more? When fully cloaked, the women as a group recall the shuffling movements of the blind mother in The Apple (and the group of teachers at the beginning of Blackboards); but when lifted back over the head, Nogreh appears as a neorealist Madonna (or the figure of Christ in Pasolini’s Gospel According to St Matthew). This playfulness that borders on heresy is yet another invitation to dispense of prejudice if the film is to re-educate our sensibilities, not just affirm our indignation. To point at the burqa and cry ‘Oppression!’ is to finish the film and start the debate before the opening sequences are over. There is still a story to be told. The veil might be seen from the outside as the very symbol of oppression, but for the women that wear it, it is something quite ordinary: ordinary in the sense that it is cumbersome, hot, impractical, but not symbolic or metaphorical. I would go so far as to say that Makhmalbaf ’s use of symbolism is the same as the word in Wittgenstein having an ‘atmosphere’ about it, “a ‘corona’ of lightly indicated uses”. Yes, the bars on the door in The Apple can be seen as a literal and metaphorical form of

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imprisonment, but do they function in the same way when the girls stare through them as when the father does? “Then we see that it is not adequate to explain intention” (PI, §181). We cannot know what the girls think, so we go along with what they see instead; our blindness somewhat mimics theirs, even if it is not equivalent (I might have a cultural blindness, an age blindness, an acquired language blindness). Where they are blind to aspects not yet dawned, I am resistant to seeing because of what I have been told to see, what I want to see, what I know can be seen. Once again, education is undoubtedly foregrounded as conceptual framing for Makhmalbaf ’s work in At Five in the Afternoon. Nogreh is a young woman who, beneath her burqa, is motivated to secure an education for herself that she hopes could see her become Afghanistan’s first female president. The film would, however, be fairly one-dimensional if it played upon the simpler binary oppositions between dogmatic patriarchy and democratic progress. Instead, Makhmalbaf creates a sympathetic character out of the father who has insisted on his daughter’s quranic education. As with the father in The Apple, and the old men of Blackboards, the generation is seen to be behind the times, but not to blame. Blame, after all, does not achieve resolution in its discovery of satisfaction in external criteria over internal. So for all their misguided views, these men are also seen to be victims of the language games in which they are raised also. If humans are to be understood as real, then they cannot be reducible to metonymic functions. André Bazin wrote of Italian realism that “nobody is reduced to the condition of an object or symbol that would allow one to hate them in comfort without having first to leap the hurdle of their humanity” (Bazin, 2005, p. 21); in the same way, the symbols of At Five in the Afternoon are not intended to fully encompass the humanity of those with whom they are associated. Nogreh and her companion, the Poet, move among the ruins of Kabul neither as mourners for its past nor as people who envision its revival. In this, Rossellini’s post-conflict cities of Rome and Berlin are evoked, and certainly there is a sense in which Nogreh’s search to fulfil her own ambitions whilst taking care of both her father and sister-in-law, whose baby is starving from lack of breast milk, reworks the story of Edmund from Germany Year Zero to explore the rediscovery of relations between self and other in an environment only recently released from the ideological

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regulation of those relations. If, as Nogreh’s father keeps saying “The whole city is blasphemous”, can’t these conditions be taken as those in which a new piety can be realised? One, perhaps, that does not see the exposure of the female face as the mark of society’s downfall, but a precondition for acknowledgement that the veil denies. The veil attempts to throw something over the woman’s knowability, and her potential therefore to be educated, in much the same way that Cavell understands Cartesian scepticism to be an attempt to cast everything, including the other, into a position of doubt. The rubble and devastation of Kabul is the canvas against which the conversations between the Nogreh and poet take place, but the destruction is also a reminder of the possibility for renewal, the rough ground to which Wittgenstein wanted to restore language, as the place in which we rediscover its ‘requirement’. Notably, then, these are conversations less about the political state of the country as a whole (which would lean towards a remarriage to the idea of nationhood), and more about what Nogreh wants to achieve as an individual. They are the conversations of aspiration, and hope, and it is for the viewer to make the association between them and the background against which they take place. This religious attitude towards political action is one that is foregone in At Five in the Afternoon, disposing of convenient dialectics in favour of the difficulties of dialogue (recalling Cavell’s observations about conversation in the remarriage comedies, that it “leads to acknowledgment” and “a new perspective on existence”). The conversations between the Poet and Nogreh are interesting for the former’s attempts to deny politics, and the latter’s search to move beyond political infancy (the condition of being unable to speak) towards having a voice. In one scene, when the Poet is busy putting posters for Nogreh’s campaign around the city, Nogreh tells him that she can’t possibly speak to other people, as she only knows how to speak to herself (giving credence to the view that private language, like the burqa, is something imposed and not ordained). The Poet says that all presidents must learn how to speak, and that they must practice to perfect their public speaking. It is then that Nogreh asks him: “But how did they speak the first time?” The question, in all its seeming simplicity, is one that addresses a whole history of female repression, as well as the philosophy of origins, and of language. Nogreh wants

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to discover a voice, for herself and for women who have never had a voice, but she seeks to do so by wanting to know how the first people spoke, by recovering from some point in the past the key, or essence, to speech itself. This appeal to political community, explored further in the next chapter, is one which Cavell also highlights in The Claim of Reason, when he notes that “to speak for oneself politically is to speak for the others with whom you consent to association, and it is to consent to be spoken for by them” (CR, 27). Nogreh’s ambitions to speak on behalf of others require that she find some resonance with those that have spoken on her behalf, or behalf of those like her, in the past—and not those that have sought to silence her. The Poet replies to Nogreh that he has heard that some people imagine they are speaking to cows and sheep in order to overcome their fear of public speaking, and that he often reads his poems to cows and sheep before he reads them to people. “But cows and sheep don’t understand poems!” Nogreh says (recalling Wittgenstein’s lion). “Poets are inspired by nature, and nature well understands herself ”, says the Poet. The Schillerian sympathies with poetic naïveté reveal themselves here also as a precondition for triumphing over the despair of the private language myth. If Nogreh believes that she can only speak to herself, it is because her culture has taught her to believe that she cannot be understood by others. In suggesting that expression is not a matter of being understood by others (because that do not want to understand will never do so), but of doing justice to one’s self-understanding, the Poet shows how the responsibility for expression falls to the speaker and not to the rules of speech. Education, then, becomes a matter of owning one’s expression, or at least owning up to it. The Poet gives Nogreh the first lines of Federico García Lorca’s ‘At Five in the Afternoon’ to practice speaking out loud with, and whilst we never see him again, it is these lines that close out the film. As the decimated family trek across the desert (Leylomah’s husband confirmed dead, the baby having frozen to death also), Nogreh and her sister-in-law are sent off to look for some water they’ve been told can be found at a nearby tree. The final shot is again from behind, as the two women set out on their quest, with Nogreh reciting the lines she has been offered. The lines may not be her own words, but they may yet contain

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the seeds of an expressive affinity, an interest in freedom articulated across time and borders by the Spanish poet. And the image is therefore one that does contain hope: the hope that poetry itself can become the route to Nogreh’s public expression of self, just as the director has discovered her own self-expression through poetic imagery.

Conclusion: Forming Education The pedagogical space originally made possible by the Italian neorealists is further developed in Iranian cinema as one in which a greater level of ambiguity is brought into play by the use of poetic symbolism and open images. This ambiguity and openness, I have argued, invites the viewer to further engage their capacity to see things as things, to see new aspects to the people, places, things and concepts represented on screen. In the films of Samira Makhmalbaf, the concepts foregrounded are particularly those concerned with education. In all of these films, concrete representations of institutional formal education are spare and have a tenuous claim upon the lives of their protagonists. In The Apple, school is something that is never seen, only spoken of and referenced in the form of the schoolgirls’ uniform; in Blackboards, teaching appears as something bordering on the absurd, as teachers chase students with no centre of gravity (legitimacy, necessity) to draw them in; in At Five in the Afternoon, the dialectical contrast between the two types of institutional education at the beginning is then dissolved in the dialogues that take place between the Poet and Nogreh, leading us to perceive of conversation as the ­pedagogical space in which Nogreh is to discover the self-knowledge she seeks. These intimations of the institutional, however, serve to remind the viewer that education must not be dependent upon the infrastructure in order for it to occur, because it begins with interactions. But if it is not institutionalised formal education that should govern our concern for education itself, the appearance of these references to the institutional all foreground something to which a new understanding of education must provide a response. If we are not satisfied with the institutional, what then? My view is that, in all three of Samira Makhmalbaf ’s films, there is an argument being made for formal education, in the sense that experi-

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ence deserves to be given a shape or form of some sort. Further, it is form and shape that distinguish education, as a concept, from experience. But the director doesn’t point us in the direction of what form exactly this education ought to take, except that perhaps it needs to be seen differently first. We need to look again at the requirements of the situation. To effect this seeing, and the possibility that education might take another shape, Makhmalbaf consistently challenges and reworks our preconceptions, both in the dialogue of characters on screen and in the director’s own use of shot and imagery. Makhmalbaf seems always to be erring towards the need for form to be present in a person’s life if they are to express themselves as they choose, to have a say in their own experience, whilst balancing that disposition carefully with an inquiry that is open to the possibilities of what form it should take. I have argued that part of Samira Makhmalbaf ’s curious sensibility in this respect might lie in her own education, in which the divisions between life, education, and art were always porous. And in everything she has said about her films, there is always an insistence on the idea that learning is a never-ending process, that the making of art is part of that process, punctuating it with self-expression. Her words, therefore, are perhaps the best to capture this unique (educational) philosophy: I want to continue making movies, but I also want to live and to continue to learn. I’ve learned that though it’s good to create it is also good not to try and force it, to sometimes not to create and to simply explore. (Ibid.)

This is not to say that Samira’s films exist in a negative relation to education; what is evident throughout is just how necessary education is understood to be, even if its precise character is elliptical, and still open for debate. There seems always to be the promise of a good education, or of the good that education can do. I might call this a care for education that comes through even in the moments of greatest sadness. She therefore uses the screen to think through education, and to invite others to do the same in her company. The sympathies between Makhmalbaf and Wittgenstein lie in their commitment to finding a style through which to investigate (again) the concepts of our everyday use. The child, teaching,

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the education of women: these are all concepts with which educationalists concern themselves, and yet don’t often address the degree to which they are meaningful for us, or what we mean by them. The filmmaker as educationalist is well positioned to reveal a greater meaningfulness in these concepts, by putting them into motion and into play with the poetry of ordinary experience. This chapter of this book will now turn to look at how the viewer (as educationalist) can respond to film’s efforts to conduct aesthetic investigations into our educational concepts.

Bibliography Affeldt, S. (2010). Seeing Aspects and the Therapeutic Reading of Wittgenstein. In W.  Day & V.  J. Krebs (Eds.), Seeing Wittgenstein Anew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bazin, A. (2005). What Is Cinema? (Vol. II). Los Angeles: University of California Press. Bordwell, D. (2012). Poetics of Cinema. Abingdon: Routledge. Cardullo, B. (2004). Mirror Images, or Children of Paradise. In In Search of Cinema: Writings on International Film Art. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Cavell, S. (1978). What Becomes of Things on Film? Philosophy and Literature, 2(2), 249–257. Dabashi, H. (2001). Close-Up: Iranian Cinema, Past, Present, and Future. London: Verso. Farrokhzad, F. (2010). Sin: Selected Poems (S. Wolpé, Trans.). Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press. Said, S.  F. (2009). ‘The Girl Behaves Against It’: An Interview with Samira Makhmalbaf. In C. Columpar & S. Mayer (Eds.), There She Goes: Feminist Filmmaking and Beyond. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Schiller, F. (2005). ‘Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’ in Essays. London: Continuum. Tapper, R. (2006). Introduction. In R. Tapper (Ed.), The New Iranian Cinema: Politics, Representation and Identity. London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd. Wood, J. (2006). Talking Movies: Contemporary World Filmmakers in Interview. London: Wallflower Press.

7 A Postscript on Film Pedagogy: Context, Community, and Criticism

Until now, I have focused on the representation of educational phenomena on film, in order to explore how we might come to our concept of education in the light of different interrelations between—or aspects of—those phenomena, and thus reflect upon why we might care about education at all. It might be taken, then, that the main purpose of this book is to promote the value of film-viewing as a mode of conceptualising education. But whilst I think that the appreciation of what film has to offer the rethinking of education will only develop with some experience of film-viewing, especially the repeat viewing of (relevant and particular) films, there is, I think, another key dimension to cultivating an aesthetic sensibility for our conceptual understanding of education. This dimension goes beyond a requirement simply to screen films in classrooms, for example, and is more contained in the exercise of the viewer’s judgment as a result of film-viewing. It concerns the need to come up with our own evaluations of what film has to tell us about education. A conceptual understanding, then, is arrived at not just from the impressions left by films, but—to return to the Wittgensteinian description— by the expression of our interest in what they have to say. The point of this postscript is to explore how someone with an interest in education (a student of education, an educationalist) might move from © The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5_7

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seeing its various aspects on film, to expressing what is seen also—to give voice to one’s own judgment, appreciation and thought. This is an important part of student learning within my own discipline of education studies, as it proposes to nurture a mode of response that avoids some of the more dialectical approaches to critique, focusing instead on finding the best words to describe our experience of a thing—call this criticism. I hope that my own discussions of the films looked at so far has already gone some way towards providing a model for conceptual criticism of this kind, demonstrating how filmmakers such as Vigo, Fleck, Kiarostami, Panahi, and Makhmalbaf might be understood as conducting conceptual investigations of education in the aesthetic sense. I took it that all these directors use the film medium to ask questions of what we want from education, by inviting us to see its various basic phenomena (teacher, child, school) in a different light. Makhmalbaf in particular points up something that is essential to the ability to conduct such an investigation in the first place: the need to have a voice. In the figures of Massoumeh and Zahra from The Apple, young Reeboir from Blackboards, and Nogreh from At Five in the Afternoon, we find representations of three characters whose circumstances have deprived them of the capacity to speak for themselves. Their subaltern status speaks for them. If their journeys into language (journeys that are understood as being simultaneously marking their entry into society as well as their individuality within that society) are shown to be worth the effort, it is because we cannot give an account of ourselves without such a voice (for all that the language we come into might contain traces of implicit bias and discrimination), and that no one should be deprived of the possibility (or challenge) of giving an account of themselves. So it is in encouraging the film criticism of students that I think they discover their own voice and aesthetic sensibility in relation to education (as the object of their study), to (re)discover their own relationship to it, and to consider how it can and might be taken forward. Cavell explores criticism as a necessary motion in philosophising, the testing of one’s own judgment as a mode of giving shape and form to experience through expression: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it” (MWM, 178). For students, as well as the critic, the challenges

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of doing so require an awareness of the context of that conversation, as well as the community to which that expression is addressed. This comprises an aesthetics of judgment (and therefore an ethics also) which is every bit as educational as the film itself. In this chapter, then, I want to address the matters of context, community, and ultimately the kind of criticism that can contribute to the education of the educationalist through film, largely in relation to my experience of using film to teach about education in the university setting.

Criticism as Conversation The screening of things reveals them as meaningful for the film’s creator, but how does their meaningfulness translate amongst us, the viewers? The causal relation of image to individual mind is simply not sufficiently generalisable for such assumptions to be made. So the most that screen images—or sequences of world projections—can do is to show things for our appreciation and judgment, and ask whether the things that it shows are ones that we share in common. What Cavell says of pleasure in art might well be said of education on film also, in that it will not be found as “a determinate property of a work of art, like its size or color, but is something to be determined by the kind of analysis of an object we expect of criticism; determining it is a task, of description, of connection” (CW, 361). The task of description and connection is better thought of as a conversation concerning the nature of the good, as regards the things that we, the community, care about. If we are to find out why and when we take education to be a good thing, something worth caring about enough to go on with it, we will have to talk about it. I have looked at a number of films in this book that arguably rediscover education for the viewer by presenting them with aspects of, and connections between, educational phenomena that allow for a seeing of the concept differently, if not more perspicuously. All this with a view to gaining a better aesthetic appreciation for how our concepts look in their ordinary and everyday manifestations. Sandra Laugier describes this process as developing “a perceptive capacity, the ability to see a detached detail or gesture against its background” (Laugier, 2015, p. 222). I take it that the

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films I’ve looked at are also an expression of their directors’ interest in the concept of education, both as an attitude towards the concept and an exploration of the possibility of it being otherwise. A lot of Cavell’s own ‘rediscoveries’ of philosophy come about through a consideration of the attitudes expressed in the works of great philosophers, as opposed to their substantive claims. Plato’s Republic, for instance, is discussed in Cities of Words as being less concerned with the “search for the definition of justice” (my emphasis), amongst other metaphysical notions, but more with the “fact of conversation”, and the “question of how and where and for whom philosophy is called upon, that is, begins” (CW, 322–323). This philosophical disposition to the text means thinking about how Plato gives us a picture of philosophical conversation that passes from those with experience to those who will inherit and reinterpret it. Preoccupations over the validity of claims made by various parties in The Republic are therefore something of a distraction from the pedagogical relation to which Plato’s writing bears witness, which is one of what Cavell calls “moral perfectionism”1 in practice, the possibility of setting up knowledge claims in such a way that those exposed to them may come to reconsider their values and construct their own responses in turn. Consistent with a philosophy which strives to be conversant with, rather than antagonistic to, philosophers of the past, Cavell expresses a preference for films whose conceptual investigations occur largely (though not exclusively) through dialogue, the conversations between couples that reveal both their natural affinities and familiarities with one another, as well as the areas in which they must come to know one another again if those affinities are not concede to social custom. The films that grab Cavell’s attention are those that “recapture the full weight of the concept of conversation, demonstrating why our word conversation means what it does, what talk means” (PH, 88). The films explore the concept of conversation as one which implies the possibilities for our living amongst each other also, because “talking together is fully and plainly being together, a mode of association, a form of life, and I would like to say that  Described in Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome as the process by which “Each self is drawn on a journey of ascent to a further state of that self, where the higher is determined not by natural talent but by seeking to know what you are made of and cultivating the thing you are meant to do” (CHU, 7). 1

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in these films the central pair are learning to speak the same language” (ibid.). Cavell acknowledges that conversationality may be a philosophical disposition unique, or most common, to Americans, that they work things through in dialogue rather than in solitary contemplation, which is perhaps a more European mode that can be seen in the great canonical works of Western philosophy. Conversation is also the mode which connects Cavell to Wittgenstein, whose writing the former takes to be carried out as a conversation between various intratextual interlocutors, as well as responding to the likes of Augustine. And dialogue is also the essence of the Hollywood screwball, or ‘remarriage’ comedy, the language that continually restores the film’s couple to the site of their original ease with and affinity for one another. Importantly, though, witty exchanges cannot be the total substance of a ‘good’ film in Cavell’s eyes, and The World Viewed goes to great lengths to show what other features must be necessary in order for us to want to declare a film so (including the director’s interest in, and attitude towards, the characters and the creation). The substance of the conversation must in itself also be of a certain kind: So am I saying that any film that contains conversations of a certain kind is therefore good? No, of course I don’t say that, both because for this to be part of the goodness of the film the conversation has to be good, and also because conversation of a certain kind is not the only feature that contributes to the value of these films. (Cavell, in Klevan, 2005, p. 202)

If the remarriage comedies provide a model for the ways in which we might pursue good judgment and good relations in our own lives, then we must recognise the craft of conversation as a part of that. This means attending to our expression, and attending to the whole matter of meaning things. Cavell writes of art objects that they don’t merely “interest and absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved with them, but are concerned with them, and care about them; we treat them in special ways, invest them with a value which normal people otherwise reserve for other people” (MWM, 183). Although this could be mistaken for the haughty tone of the aesthete, Cavell’s observation applies to people with

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all kinds of interest: the football fan is not simply knowledgeable about football, but is knowledgeable because s/he cares, because s/he invests football with a particular value. Academics in any discipline might be said to do the same with their subject matter—and presumably they hope to communicate something of that care to their students also. As such, one aspect of teaching about education becomes a matter of demonstrating the ways in which it can be meaningful in our lives. In my classes, I want to communicate to students that education is not just something about which it is good to care, but about which students are allowed to show why they care (if at all). In the case of education, I would argue that this begins with our concepts; there is something about the things we talk about in education that has brought us there because we are concerned, prompted to act. And to affect a distance from that concern via the adoption of language that does not express that concern is to absolve oneself of the task of commitment that criticism entails. Whether it is abstract or performative, this language fails to do justice to that which we wish to share with and express to others, which some of our words can fail to do. In Captain Fantastic, for example, Ben Cash forbids his children from using the word ‘interesting’, because it is a ‘non-­ word’. Whilst we might take the censorship to be too strong, we might also recognise that the promiscuity of words like ‘interesting’ and ‘amazing’ today is such that they frequently lose their ability to be expressive of something that we should take an interest in, or be amazed by. Instead, it helps to discover modes of expression that allow us to answer questions of the things we care about and ourselves at the same time. Andrew Klevan writes of film interpretation that our focus on particular moments in films “become the beginning of our questioning and investigation (of the film and our self ), and the beginning of finding words for our experience” (Klevan, 2011, p. 55). The kinds of questions that we might ask here are not conventional: “What was it I saw there? Why did it touch me? Why does it leave a memory?” (ibid.). The critical conversation that education invites is not one that is submitted for objective evaluation or assessment; it is the exercise of the subject’s expression. Criticism, then, is conversation, but one in which we strive to do justice to ourselves by doing justice to things perceived, as we see them. Rothman and Keane have summarised Cavell’s approach to criticism as

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one which seeks understanding not just of the film, but of the “film’s understanding of itself ” (2000, p. 11). To observe the ways in which film explores its own limits of expression to achieve its fullest expression, serves as a reminder that we “cannot understand a film’s worth, its meaning, by applying a theory that dictates what we are to say, but only by entering into conversation with the film” (ibid.). To apply theories, such as that of the Male Gaze, not only enforces a kind of aspect-blindness, but devolves responsibility for our expression and interaction with others, to a higher power. The matter of community extends from this. To proffer judgment as an expression of one’s experience is to make a claim upon community, to ask whether the form that one gives to one’s experience can be acknowledged by others, if not accepted.

Context Conversation, however, cannot afford to ignore its contingency on context (and it is much like learning in this respect), or meaning will descend into relativism. A sensibility for context helps to attune our ear to the kind of use of a concept in the conversation. We would not have an appreciation for the variations in the use of the word education in Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, for example, if we didn’t have an ear for the historical periods in which they find their expression. At the same time, too much contingency is what our formal education systems are always endeavouring to drive from pedagogy and curricula, so as to secure greater consistency in understanding through reason and repetition. We are forced towards standardisation in the name of fairness and equality. But the more we standardise, the more a sensibility for contextual concerns then becomes endangered. In ‘The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy’, Stanley Cavell reminds us that “[w]e learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts” (MWM, 52). The fact that “nothing insures that this projection will take place” (ibid.) is not just a matter of information transmission: being able to repeat the word back says nothing of how it has been received. Attention to context invites an awareness of just how precarious our judgment is: both in assumptions of other contexts and of our own.

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When I speak of context as being an important factor in criticism, I do not mean that we can know what is the appropriate way to speak of films as long as we are able to define the context in which we are speaking, for then we will have mastery of the rules of the language game. I have already said that one of the advantages of exploring education in Iranian cinema is that the context of its locations set the knowability of its intentions outside of the viewer’s reach, whilst still giving us enough within the frames to suggest that we are invited to interact with its meaning. To overly assume the context (by trying to provide a recent geo-political history of Iran by way of a preface to criticism of its films) would once again take us into the realm of privileging (Western, say) rules over (other) realities, for which Wittgenstein provides the caveat that it should not be our aim “to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways” (PI, §133). Just because rules for communication, whether verbal or visual, exist, the confinement of meaning within any particular set of rules would be to prevent meaningfulness from being projected into other contexts, and also to exclude those who haven’t fully mastered the rules. When I say to students that I think a film like Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants (discussed below) is an exploration of education as intellectual friendship, this is a statement about a meaningful aspect of education, but only one aspect of it, as observed and developed in particular context. I do not want to claim that, as a result of watching the film, we should see the film as being only about this concept, nor that we should come to understand all education as intellectual friendship, but that the concept can include this possibility, one which may feature in other contexts also, and it may also be an aspect worth cultivating in practice in other contexts which seem deprived of its opportunity. To be and become alive to contextual concerns is another advantage of approaching a conceptual understanding of education through film with students of education. To be sensible to the contexts of films is to be alive to the possibility of our own reacting to different situations on our own terms also. This is the phronetic aspect to Aristotelianism that Cavell emphasises in Cities of Words, the “exercise of my perception of a situation—not an intellectual grasp of necessity, but an empirical judgment, an a posteriori cognition, of practical intelligence, of course one that has been educated in a certain

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way—that determines the course I shall take” (CW, 357). The necessity of having been “educated in a certain way” is doubtless problematic: for Aristotle, like Wittgenstein, a person has to have assumed rules in order to break them—but how then can we know which rules are sufficient to allow for their breaking thereof? An attentiveness to the context of a film extends also then to the context of its viewing. We cannot be confident that someone who watches Au Revoir Les Enfants at home with a friend will have the same experience as that same person would watching it during allocated teaching time at the university. What is the difference between the cinema, the sofa, and the classroom? Does the meaning of a film vary according to these locations? If meaning is less something that inheres in the film itself (whose privacy can never be known), than it is the public exercise of value attribution, then certainly our responses to films under these different conditions are likely to vary. The language games that already govern each situation are at a remove from one another, and perhaps not detrimentally so. Factors to consider are the level of choice and engagement that viewers experience in each situation. The cinema is usually a matter of personal preference and interest; the curriculum is invariably not. Students on an Education Studies programme may view some of the films I show them with a mixture of trepidation, curiosity, intrigue or apathy, emotions that may have everything to do with thoughts about assessment and very much less to do with their personal preferences. We therefore have different relations to those things we have chosen to those that are imposed upon us; further, those things we have not chosen may invite further concentration and reflection than those whose viewing contexts are more familiar and reassuring. To make matters more complex, then, our ability to see aspects is frequently conditioned by dispositions towards the media and environments in which we encounter them. Dispositions find a slightly slippery usage in Wittgenstein’s conceptual vocabulary, but in large part they tend to refer to ‘ungrounded ways of acting’ (or what John Searle calls ‘the Background’). Wittgenstein insists that a ‘disposition’ is not the same thing as the unconscious awareness of things that directly contrasts to the conscious, though he does not fully explain why such an elision would cover up a “grammatical difference”. His first mention of a disposition

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(PI §149) describes it as something like knowing the ABC.  In being trained in this way, we come to see manifestations of knowledge that are extensions of it. We have a disposition towards road signs, for example, that allow us to feel a kind of familiarity around them without actively thinking that they are particular arrangements of the alphabet. Dispositions are a curious phenomenon within Wittgenstein’s language, but no less important for our discussion here, because they suggest that we can be inclined towards the acceptance of things in different ways. Believing is a disposition, he says, and therefore we are more likely to accept that certain things are the case if we believe in them. Again, thinking is not required here. Just as I do not have to think a person has a soul in order to have an attitude towards that person, so I do not have to think that a knife is sharp to be disposed towards it with caution. Dispositions thus characterise a certain intuitive inclination towards the world that is not contained or defined by epistemology. The slipperiness, however, comes from distinguishing a disposition from an attitude. I would say that a disposition has no affective dimension to it: I am not cautious around a knife because I have a certain feeling towards it, but because of a sense of its potential to cause harm. My attitude towards another soul, however, is something that is affectively construed, and not conditioned by a knowledge of that person. A disposition only sets up the possibility of acceptance. In order to accept, accepting-as-disposition must be in place. But does this mean that education should cultivate methods for acceptance? I think Wittgenstein points more towards the idea that dispositions should not be imposed, but the conditions for them made possible. His style of writing does this, and I take it that the films that I have explored in this book do also. These are not forms which enforce a disposition, or tell us that we must adopt a particular attitude towards certain concepts. Instead, they may trouble either attitude our disposition. Through the exercise of criticism, the seeing of new aspects to a concept and the expression of that seeing, may allow a student to feel differently disposed to the learning environment also. Wittgenstein gives us an apt picture of how easily our dispositions can change according to circumstance:

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Take the case that one of you suddenly grew a lion’s head and he began to roar. Certainly that would be as extraordinary a thing as I can imagine. Now whenever we should have recovered from our surprise, what I would suggest would be to fetch a doctor and have the case scientifically investigated and if it were not for hurting him I would have him vivisected. And where would the miracle have got to? (PO, 43)

The example suggests that we quickly acclimatise to the miraculous, sometimes so quickly that we fail to treat it as such (whereas Wittgenstein is inclined to think that this makes us forget the more general miraculousness of our being here at all). The extraordinary quickly becomes ordinary, just as superhero films soon tire in their capacity to astonish. Which makes it all the more important that we continue to tend to the ways in which the ordinary is itself always extraordinary. The cultivation of this sensibility requires more than just instruction and explanation, but an invitation to look and see for oneself, to begin to trust in one’s own voice as a response to what one sees. This is not to overestimate the conditions that higher education pedagogy currently finds itself in, inheriting a legacy of assessment and instruction-oriented educates who frequently think that their voice and interest is irrelevant in the learning process. This means that we can only say as much for film’s educationality as we can for the educationality of anything: a person must be disposed towards the thing in a certain way for it to have effect. The child that hates school will struggle to learn there, just as the person who does not like the politics of another will have trouble learning from them. Equally, works of art can struggle to find an audience amongst those that see art as a deliberately elitist or wilfully obscure enterprise. Whilst many of these attitudes might seem to be ones that people have formed at will, most will have emerged from the forms of life in which individuals find themselves. These dispositions are contextual and cultural though need not be thought of as such in any deterministic sense, although the overcoming of their prejudices is not easy. This can certainly be true of the higher education teaching context, for example, where student dispositions are often more oriented towards their assessment

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than their interest; if the use of film in the classroom were intended entirely to appease the former, then the aesthetic value of film would actually be of little import—things would be taught so as to be learned, and appreciation would have no place. But my aim in the education studies classroom is to show how films are best placed to explore and interrogate educational concepts, and thereby encourage an appreciation for education in its different aspects through discussion. This remains a process of overcoming the assessment orientation (as a disposition), such that the focus is on the films themselves. The screening and discussion of films in this context is not just a matter of learning about education, but developing an “aesthetic attitude” towards it. In his book on Aesthetic Evaluation and Film (2018), Andrew Klevan writes that there is such a thing as an aesthetic attitude, which clearly differentiates itself from any kind of technical specialism or dilettantism as regards the artwork. The aesthetic attitude is described as “a disposition which wishes to engage with the form and style of an artwork, and where there are many aspects to the engagement” (2018, p. 21). He remarks that some people might already be well disposed in this respect, perhaps because their parents have raised them in a certain way, whilst others do not have this predisposition. This does not mean that all is lost for the latter, because “it might be encouraged through education or through books like this one” (2018, p. 22). This point affirms one that is played out both in the Philosophical Investigations and, I have argued, in the films of Samira Makhmalbaf, where some form of rule-observation is required if we are to form (shareable) attitudes to the world at all. But the formal educational environment will also need to attend to its own attitudes and dispositions (e.g. whether it fosters a culture of assessment dependency) if it is to cultivate the aesthetic attitude—not just in individuals, but amongst them.

Cultivating Community We have to assume language, both through experience and through instruction in rules, in order to then decide whether and when is sufficient for our purpose. With the assumption of language, comes the assumption of a responsibility also: to use that language according to a

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common understanding with a given context, unless a deviation from that understanding can be justified. The idea that a word can mean anything you want it to unleashes language from any kind of care for others, and leads down a political path in which words have no ethical implication at all (i.e. a post-truth world). So language is in fact a point of recognising that we can all participate in a community (at least of words whose meaning we take to be the same, even if not of the same political beliefs and principles), but that we can only transform that community if people both know its rules and how they can be transformed if necessary. We have to recognise that we do have things in common, if we are to do something about them. Wittgenstein addresses commonality at various points in the Investigations: Instead of pointing out something common to all that we call language, I’m saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common in virtue of which we use the same word for all—but there are many different kinds of affinity between them. (§65) …if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. (§66) And the upshot of these considerations is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing: similarities in the large and small. (§66) Seeing what is in common. (§72)

Commonalities in phenomena are described here as having an affinity with one another, and it is affinity that underpins the possibility of commonality and ultimately community amongst those with experience of these phenomena also. The departure point for the community is a recognition that the interest we take in our own experience extends to an interest in the experience of others, and a willingness to share these. Wittgenstein provides a model for the approach in his ‘Lecture on Ethics’, in which he proposes to describe his own experience of things first, “in order, if possible, to make you recall the same or similar experiences, so that we may have a common ground for our investigation” (Wittgenstein, 1965, p. 8). Films, like all other modes of artistic expression, attest to the possibility of common interest and experience, and as such profess a belief in the community that extends from commonality. To paraphrase

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Walter Pater, all criticism aspires to the condition of community. To simply experience works of art leaves the individual in a state of isolation; it is only in and through expression that our commonalities are revealed. For Timothy Gould, Cavellian film criticism is just one example of how shared interest translates into political community: when Cavell describes the point of taking an interest in a film as the same as the point of learning to take an interest in your own experience, he has already invited us to merge our own acts of taking an interest in Cavell’s words for his experience with his acts of taking an interest in the film. (Gould, 1998, p. 149)

Criticism is an exercise in community because the critic invites the reader to see what they have in common, where they differ, and where that conversation might take them. This conversation, like those in the remarriage comedies, can entertain all forms of assent, consent, and dissent, as long as the participants are willing to engage. Community breaks down, however, if one party resists communication altogether, and this is to be witnessed in aesthetic judgment as much as in political discourse. The example given by Cavell takes the form of a conversation that he adapts from Kant’s Critique of Judgment: A.  Canary wine is pleasant. B.  How can you say that? It tastes like canary droppings. A.  Well, I like it.                        (MWM, 85)

The ‘retreat to personal taste’ in this moment constitutes a dissociation between the exercise of taste and the discipline of accounting for it, argues Cavell, in that it closes down the conversation before its conceptual implications have had a chance to reveal themselves. Speaker A has rejected any possibility of agreement in favour of the entirely arbitrary: “I like it”.2  Alain Badiou also distinguishes between possible ways of responding to, or talking about, film. The first is to offer value judgments, or ‘indistinct judgments’, about a film, but simply saying whether one likes it in terms of actors, scenes, shots, or plot. He contrasts this with the ‘diacritical judgment’, an attempt to overcome the superficiality of the indistinct by ascending to the level of style, particularly that which associated with a film’s author. Style trumps techniques by virtue of 2

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In so doing, Speaker A also renounces their subjectivity through a collapse into subjectivity, because “the problem of the critic, as of the artist, is not to discount his subjectivity, but to include it; not to overcome it in agreement, but to master it in exemplary ways” (MWM, 87). The collapse into subjectivity thus mimics the retreat into Cartesian introspection explored earlier in this book, and in the figures of those educators who shied from the justification of their practice in the face of any challenge to it. Criticism compels a response from someone who thinks they have seen something, that it is something with validity in public discussion, “Because if you do not see something, without explanation, then there is nothing further to discuss” (ibid.). To paraphrase the phenomenological dictum, all criticism is criticism of something; the art of criticism is to establish what that thing is, where it comes from, whether it is of value to us in rethinking our understanding and appreciation of things. Finally, though, this does not mean criticism for the sake of it: “At some point, the critic will have to say: This is what I see. Reasons—at definite points, for definite reasons, in different circumstances—come to an end.” (ibid.). Whilst this might sound like the critic’s own retreat into subjectivity, it actually constitutes the moment at which the critic is prepared to say, I have said all I can for the time being. It is the moment at which Wittgenstein declares “My spade is turned”, which, as Paul Standish observes, is a passage in the Investigations “tinged with a note not of triumph but of sadness” (2017, p. 568). At the point of exhausting our reasons for seeing things this way, we must then be prepared once again to see them another way. The exercise of criticism in the classroom, then, becomes the possibility of giving expression to student subjectivity in ways that allow them to master it, through the recognition of the limitations of their expression. transcending the mere pleasure of cinema that the latter affords, but ultimately, according to Badiou, is no better in its elevation of the author’s status than the indistinct judgments fixation with actors. Badiou proposes a third way of talking, that begins by being indifferent to judgment, at least in the sense that, if a film is being talked about, it is tacitly assumed that it is thought to have some worth. He suggests instead that we think of an ‘axiomatic judgment’, that looks to explore “what are the effects for thought of such and such a film” (Badiou, 2013, p. 96). The other dimension to this third way is that the film needs to be considered in terms of the Idea it conveys within that particular film, especially the ways in which the ‘native impurity’ of the idea appears. Where painting is celebrated on the grounds of its being able to concentrate and refine an idea to its most integral form, cinema, for Badiou, commands its viewer to access an idea “through the force of its loss” (ibid.).

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This possibility is contained in the very smallest matters of our language, such as the claim to a first-person plural utterance, about which Paul Standish, in an interview with Cavell, made two observations: [Firstly,] that the individual speaker is offering something for others to register their thoughts or their responses against; and, equally, that there must be an assent to the political realm within which one finds oneself, such that the offering of the words is a continual attempt to express or test the possibilities of that assent. It seems very important to me that that’s happening not just at the level of overt political discussion. It actually pervades what we do. It runs through all our ordinary words. That same responsibility is there. Is that about right? (Standish, 2012, p. 158)

Responsibility to both ourselves and to the community underpins our efforts to express the things of our experience. Cavell responds to the question by affirming that (ordinary) language itself is the site of the potential for community because community is not fixed, but rather “is always in the process of forming itself in every word” (ibid.). Community, context and criticism are all intensely folded into one another here, as things assume their meaning always in the situation and the speaking of them. The concept of community employed here refers to the establishing of concrete experience in common, and is not to do with the way a person feels about those experiences. The whole idea of community is often overly associated with emotional experience, which again is inclined to breed suspicion towards those that do not share in the same emotions. The things that establish experience in common do indeed inspire emotional response in each of us, but these are a question then of attitude, and not of community. School, for example, is an experience that many, if not most, of us will share in common. It creates a community of those who have school in common. But there can be no assumed value attached to being part of that community, because that is associated exclusively with personal experience. Attitudes are an expression of the experience we attach to the concept we share in common, the point at which we

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discover whether our interpretation of our experience in relation to that concept coincides with that of others (at least as it is manifest in their behaviour), or whether we’ve given greater weight to the experience than the concept can support (i.e. whether the concept has become simply a matter of my experience of it). Film is an interesting way to experiment with this idea of community, because it can have the effect of establishing a community of individuals who previously had very little in common other than the film itself, within a couple of hours. This phenomenon receives fairly little attention in classroom contexts, but it is a valuable exercise in the critical evaluation of our concepts. Concepts themselves depend on community (language games within forms of life) for their meaningfulness (irrespective of the political system in place), but they are also best tested in the company of others. The difference between film-viewing as a classroombased, pedagogical activity and, say, reading in preparation for a class is that viewing takes place amongst others. Film’s unity of sound and the visual marks its expression of public interest, the idea that the camera can’t possibly be addressing itself to you, leaving you in private conversation with yourself. The intervention of the camera is one that marks its address as a public one, the concepts that it articulates as publicly contestable. The ontological (dis)comfort we experience in the face of film (squirming, laughing, wincing, etc.) are all markers of a response to film’s publicness, its affrontery at saying and doing certain things in front of others. In order for us to have these responses, they must be underpinned already by our sense of propriety, our capacity to be shocked, our attitudes towards certain ways of being that we find acceptable or not. That film-viewing should be such a bodily involved activity in this context is important for our understanding of certain things as things towards which we have a bodily inclination, not just an intellectual one. The same fears reign over our responses to film as they do with faces: have we read them right? Have I understood what they mean? We are afraid that the meaning of the situation lies with the other, and not in our reception of it. Criticism, therefore, has to begin with trusting one’s own experience as a legitimate claim upon the acknowledgement of others within the community.

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 aking an Interest in One’s Own Experience: T The Example of Au Revoir Les Enfants Good films are an invitation to a conversation about the things and concepts we (already) care about, and that conversation is a test of whether we all (i.e. the community) care about them. In this sense, they often constitute an investigation into the reasons why some concepts seem to have fallen into rote—or even inert—usage, such that speaking of them no longer carries with it any expression of care. We just continue with them from force of habit. Cavell’s exploration of marriage in Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s provides one of the best examples of how a film can be seen to be “thinking through” some of the more tired aspects of the grammar of marriage, when marriage is taken for granted as something sanctified by the state, but is no longer daily a matter of couples committing themselves to one another—of remarrying. The remarriage comedies, for Cavell at least, are a study in how couples can come to rediscover their commitment to one another on their own terms, rather than simply accept that their union is one solely of state recognition— and perhaps lose sight of its meaning as a result, the meaning of marriage for them. This book has so far attempted to show how certain films might conduct similar investigations into the concept of education, along the lines of why it matters to us, rather than why it ought to matter. I have tried to show why teachers might still matter, by looking at teachers who fail, rather than succeed, and therefore have to rediscover their purpose as educators through that failure. My teaching practice with students is somewhat similar: I want them to come to see education in its different aspects, rather than decide on its definitive meaning as social solution. If students are not to aspire to a definition of education that sits outside of their own experience, then their learning about the concept requires engaging with that experience as part of the inquiry into education. To speak of the things that matter to us, requires that we take an interest in our own experience, if we are not to assume that things are important independently of whether we care about them or not. In the Introduction to Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell writes that we have to trust that our own experience is something worth bringing to philosophical conversations

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about the good life, rather than being something that has to be overridden if we are to understanding that concept objectively. Criticism becomes not just a process of evaluation, but a process of self-­discovery, the discovery of our capacity to put experience into expression. Cavell advances a notion of criticism as self-education in the Introduction to Pursuits (significantly titled ‘Words for a Conversation’), where he speaks of the importance “of consulting one’s experience and of subjecting it to examination, and beyond these, of momentarily stopping, turning yourself away from whatever your preoccupation and turning your experience away from whatever its expected, habitual track, to find itself, its own track: coming to attention. The moral of this practice is to educate your experience sufficiently so that it is worthy of trust” (PH, 12). I take it that Cavell offers an important distinction here between education and experience, that is, that they are not one and the same thing, and therefore are not to be mistaken. “To educate your experience” is to do something to it, to give a shape, a form, and expression, but in such a way that you take it to be worthy of communicating to and sharing with others. Cavell cautions that “one learns that without this trust in one’s experience, expressed as a willingness to find words for it, without thus taking an interest in it, one is without authority in one’s own experience” (ibid.). But as mentioned before, a child or student may find it hard to discover this authority on their own, and Cavell acknowledges the key role of an educator in this process: “I suppose the primary good of a teacher is to prompt his or her students to find their way to that authority” because without it, “rote is fate” (ibid.). Exploring education on film hopefully does something to interrupt the rote character of learning, but only if students are able to find a way towards the discussion of what has been seen also. I often explore with students Louis Malle’s 1987 film Au Revoir Les Enfants, as one which is (possibly) about the concept of intellectual friendship that sits at the heart of our understanding of education, the notion that we would not want to learn or teach if there weren’t others with whom we wanted to share and express our interests. This is a different take on the film than that which would describe it as World War II drama, or Holocaust movie. It unfolds as the intense and intimate negotiation of the terms of friendship between two bright young boys in a Catholic boarding school in German-occupied France, one of whom

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(Jean) arrives in the dead of night with three other boys whose origins are unexplained to their peers. Jean’s gentleness and ease of learning immediately presents with a threat to the precocious but lazy Julien, who takes measures to both undermine and find out more about his new classmate. Julien does not want to be seen as someone who cares too much for his education, whilst at the same time we can see that his keen intellect keeps him both curious and often isolated. Jean, on the other hand, has no qualms about wearing his intellect on his sleeve (even as he cannot do so with his faith). The boys are undoubtedly of a different ilk, and yet their curiosity for one another gradually moves from a deep suspicion to a tremendous bond. This relationship is crafted by the director by means of an unobtrusive camera that attends almost exclusively to these two boys throughout (carefully balancing full shots of the boys in amongst their school friends, with shots that more closely capture the interactions between two people), with the interwoven narrative of the downtrodden, Bosola-like Joseph providing the tragic counterpoint to the story of Julien and Jean’s burgeoning mutual regard for one another. Their conflicting feelings of distrust and affinity are played out through a series of scenes, initially set in different parts of the school: the washrooms, the classroom, the playground, the dormitory, the music room—and in school film screenings (cinema’s self-reflexivity registering on the boys’ faces as they watch Charlie Chaplin). In every instance, we see just how significant a precise location is in determining the ways the boys relate to one another, the degrees to which they compete, tussle, envy, engage, and identify with the other. It is all the more notable, then, that the friendship becomes galvanised when the two are removed entirely from the school locus, lost in the woods during a treasure hunt. The fuel for their suspicion of one another dispelled, it is a confidence in their mutual curiosity that develops, despite the political and religious differences that they are yet to fully comprehend. They play together, read from the Thousand and One Nights together, and discuss their futures in anticipation of the war’s end. Au Revoir les Enfants is made all the more interesting by virtue of the fact that it represents an attempt by the director to take an interest in his own experience, because it contains traces of his own autobiography in the story. As such, it becomes a matter not just of communicating something about what education itself consists in, but also, perhaps, an expres-

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sion of regret, and of enduring curiosity in the very different modes of association of children. Malle’s fascination with the child’s gaze is also evident in Zazie Dans le Métro (1960), Le Souffle au Coeur (1971), and Pretty Baby (1978), and everywhere it is deployed to question and hold to account the social norms that hold things—often arbitrarily—in place. But Au Revoir les Enfants is the most intensified expression of that fascination, and is a film almost entirely conducted through looks and glances. In every corridor and room of the school, Julien attempts to observe and understand the rules that the adult world abides by, and how those weigh with or contravene his own instinctive sense of justice and other people. The homage to Vigo’s Zero for Conduct is also in evidence, and yet Vigo’s faith in the more general spirit of youth is here translated to a belief in individual character. Gaspard Manesse is perfectly cast to play a boy whose face simultaneously accepts and interrogates the world as it presents itself to his gaze. It is in cinema’s unique achievement of capturing this world in motion, at the very moment in which the world and gaze meet, that these elements are most significantly and devastatingly brought together in the film’s climactic scenes. When German soldiers enter the school to seek out the four Jewish boys concealed there, the camera makes a point of responding to the Gestapo officer Muller’s question “Which of you is Jean Kippelstein?”, by taking Muller’s viewpoint and looking straight down at Julien. The boy’s expression refuses an answer to this question, as if to suggest it is unanswerable: in this instance, for the reasons that the Officer puts his question, all the boys and none of the boys are Jean Kippelstein. Jean resists Muller’s inquiry, just as Cavell has said that film in many ways “resists interpretation” (Klevan, in Read & Goodenough, 2005, p. 179). This lingering on Julien’s face is also to remind the viewer of the power of the child’s gaze, a guilelessness whose nuance would be entirely lost on stage. But to be without guile does not make the child incapable of guilt, and just when Julien believes Muller’s back to be turned, he passes a glance back at his new friend. Putting the two in the frame, one with his backed turned and the other seated right at the back of the classroom, binds the boys together. It is this look that finally and unwittingly betrays Jean, being one that extraordinarily seals and betrays their friendship at

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Fig. 7.1  Julien looks at Jean, Au Revoir les Enfants

the same time. The extraordinary is met in the entirely ordinary, in that Jean simply packs up his pencil case, and leaves without protest (Fig. 7.1). The dexterity behind crafting the culpatory gaze in an innocent child is one which leaves the viewer feeling complicit and discomforted, as if we ourselves condemned Jean to death by creating the world in which both wartime atrocities, but also the technology for revisiting them on film, are possible. It is not our look that condemns Jean as if we were at one with the gaze of Julien; instead, we are guilty of failing to allow such a look to be of no consequence. But if there is something of despair at this acceptance of our own guilt, the friendship between the boys remains the expression of the film’s hope—both for human friendship and for an education that makes it possible. Contra Vigo, who represents friendship as an energy that resists subordination, Malle seems to suggest throughout the film that the friendship between Jean and Julien is of a kind that flourishes in relation to an institution, even as that institution constrains it and sometimes causes ­conflict also.3 The boys are not simply interested in one another; they are interested in the fact that they find the(ir) world to be of similar interest. Their interest is necessarily defined by the institution which brings them together but is not reducible to the curriculum that the institution seeks to impart. What the boys might end up knowing as a result of the teach3  Malle’s 1960 film, Zazie Dans le Metro, might be seen as more the successor to Vigo’s Zero for Conduct, not least in the closing scenes in which the entire set collapses around the cast as they engage in a food fight. The scene emulates vision of childhood bringing down the artifices of the adult world. Lindsay Anderson’s 1968 film if… is also thought to pay homage to Vigo’s anarchism in this respect.

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ing at the school is not the same thing as what they will end up caring about as a result of their intellectual friendship. Timothy Gould has identified a similar distinction in Cavell’s attitude towards the relationship between reading and philosophy: Cavell will sometimes say that reading is a matter of caring about texts and hence a matter of finding out what allows you to stay with the text (Pursuits of Happiness, 14). He distinguishes the mode of philosophical reading that keeps you connected to a text in the appropriate way from the mode of philosophizing that wants to take something away from our reading— whether an argument or a moral. (Gould, 1998, p. 149)

Just as we stay with texts as long as we care about them, so we will carry on taking an interest in the conceptual development of things on screen as long as we care about them also. Again, this interest is not defined by what can be appropriated from the film but simply by our engagement with it. The kind of intellectual curiosity that manifests in Julien and Jean’s friendship therefore plays out much as this mode of philosophising described by Gould does: the attention is drawn, curiosities are aroused, the desire to know more exceeds the desire simply to have completed knowledge.

Conclusion: Cinema’s Call Criticism sits at the intersection of aesthetics, ethics and politics. It is aesthetic in the sense that it gives form to personal experience in expression. It is ethical in the sense that one desires to do justice to one’s personal experience, because communicability—our ability to join in understanding with others—is at stake. But criticism is also political, because in making our claims to interpretation, we do so in the spirit of believing that it is possible that others might share in the same interpretation, the same understanding. The study of education can’t afford to separate its aesthetic, moral, and political dimensions, and the criticism of our educational concepts shows why this is the case. We give shape to our

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beliefs, in the form of institutions, curricula, professions, in order to do right by ourselves, by others, and by society. In this sense, all education is formal. But in giving shape to them they are not to be considered complete; they will always need rediscovering for the current time. A school does not provide a solution to a problem as such but is as much a question as to whether a new solution is needed, or whether the problem still exists in the same way. If I try to tie these various strands of thought and practice together in my own classroom, it is because I think that cinema is the medium best suited both to the call to seeing new aspects and connections in education, for drawing our attention back to aspects of shared experience (rather than abstract ideas), and for prompting the conversations around them that we might come to call criticism. Criticism is the exercise of creatively experimenting with the expression that most does justice to our aesthetic experience of a thing and what it means/meant to us, for the sake of staking a claim to a community and for the benefit of self-­ knowledge as a consequence of making that claim. I cannot claim to know myself if I refuse to test that knowledge outside of my own experience. The classroom is therefore an opportunity for me to share with students films both that I care about and that I think reveal education in meaningful ways. In return, I ask them their thoughts on these films, whether they find some meaning for them, particularly as regards the educational themes they both represent and investigate. To take films seriously as reconceptualising education suggests that we must care for them also in the first place, much as we come to care for the best educators. Cavell affirms this position in Contesting Tears, when he says, “Nothing much to me would be worth trying to understand about such as film as Now, Voyager…unless one cares for it, cares to find words for it that seem to capture its power of feeling and intelligence, in such a way as to understand why we who have caused it (for whom it is made) have also rejected it, why we wish it both into and out of existence” (CT, 117–118). It is care that provides a precondition for thinking about things otherwise; revaluation requires that there has been some ascription of value. In the spirit of Wittgenstein’s imagining other possible worlds, it is not hard to imagine the same thing being said of the school in today’s society. Questions are often asked about the performance of schools, how

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it can be improved, and whether private schooling is fair or not, and whether schools should teach certain things but not others. But very few people seem to address the matter of whether we care for schools in such a way to try and understand why we who continue to bring them into existence (daily, by allowing teaching to go on in them) also reject them (for a child’s disaffection towards schooling can only be an extension of a societal attitude). Do we care about the school, the teacher, the child? And if we think that we do, that these things are of interest to us, then do we care—as Cavell puts it—enough to continually rediscover those concepts in our language, as words which can express the hope and feeling for such concepts? Care for concepts will always be somewhat determined by the contexts in which they are encountered. Our conversations around education are therefore always deeply embedded in, and quite often compromised by, the tensions and conflict between disposition and attitude. The lecture theatre, the classroom, the dining hall, the academic conference, the academic journal: these are all environments in which conversations around educational concepts, what they mean for us, can occur, but different people will have different dispositions towards these spaces such that they feel either enabled to or prevented from expressing their attitudes. The tendency towards the objective that arises from ignoring such dispositions is one which suppresses care for language, for concepts, such that they become dull, performative, inert. What I am suggesting here is that meaningful conversations, the criticism of education, has not to do with finding the meaning of things (an objective concern), or even being able to say things meaningfully (a subjective concern), but to do with creating the space in which people can make their claim upon community by stating what educational concepts mean for them. The study of education (or Education Studies, or the Philosophy of Education) comprises both an interest as old as Ancient Greece and a relatively juvenile discipline. That makes of every class and lecture an opportunity for the renewal of our concept, as well as the instruction in its criteria. An aesthetic sensibility for the concept of education is therefore necessary, I would argue, to guard against its theoretical abstraction and practical inertia. Films are an excellent place to begin the wresting of education from its theoretical overcomplications, because they restore us to the point at which we

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first encountered the kinds of phenomena which theoretical thinking then resolves to explain. Films will show us the things we already know, and reveal them to be less complicated than our teaching would have us understand them to be. But they also show us how we might see and think things differently, through the seeing of different aspects. A conceptual aesthetics of education involves both the experience and expression of education its various aspects: not with a view to discovering something determinate in education, but with the aim of determining the many views we might take of it.

Bibliography Badiou, A. (2013). Cinema. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gould, T. (1998). Hearing Things: Voice and Method in the Writing of Stanley Cavell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Klevan, A. (2005). What Becomes of Thinking on Film? Stanley Cavell in Conversation with Andrew Klevan. In R.  Read & J.  Goodenough (Eds.), Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Klevan, A. (2011). Notes on Stanley Cavell and Philosophical Film Criticism. In H. Carel & G. Tuck (Eds.), New Takes in Film Philosophy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Klevan, A. (2018). Aesthetic Evaluation and Film. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Laugier, S. (2015). The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary. New Literary History, 46(2), 217–240. Johns Hopkins University Press. Read, R., & Goodenough, J. (Eds.). (2005). Film as Philosophy: Essays on Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Rothman, W., & Keane, M. (2000). Reading Cavell’s The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Standish, P. (2012). Skepticism, Acknowledgment, Learning. In N.  Saito & P. Standish (Eds.), Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups. New York: Fordham University Press. Standish, P. (2017). Something Animal? Wittgenstein, Language, and Instinct. In M. Peters & J. Stickney (Eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations. Singapore: Springer. Wittgenstein, L. (1965). A Lecture on Ethics. The Philosophical Review, 74(1), 3–12.

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Index1

A

Aesthetics, 5, 6, 9, 15, 18, 35, 43–49, 58, 60, 61, 64, 66, 69, 73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 82, 84, 90, 92, 118, 119, 122, 124, 139, 143, 157, 159, 160, 172, 184, 190–193, 202, 213–216 The Apple, 140, 156, 162–172, 174, 178, 184, 185, 188, 192 Appreciation, 9, 14–16, 18, 25, 44–47, 117, 157, 169, 180, 191–193, 197, 202, 205 Arendt, Hannah, 5, 12 Aspect-seeing, 16, 33, 47, 67, 75, 82 See also Seeing-as At Five in the Afternoon, 156, 180–188, 192 Attention, 6–9, 16, 22, 31, 31n2, 38, 41, 42, 44, 47, 57, 59,

61–63, 82, 83, 85, 89, 95n5, 96, 98, 112, 120, 125, 130, 135n5, 142, 145, 147, 150, 155, 157, 159, 160, 165, 172, 173, 184, 194, 197, 207, 209, 213, 214 Attitude, 13, 29, 34, 39, 41, 45–47, 49, 52, 60, 61, 64, 69, 70, 79, 81, 86, 95, 98, 102, 112, 115, 117, 118, 126, 127, 130, 131, 136, 155, 161, 166, 169, 171, 178, 186, 194, 195, 200–202, 206, 207, 213, 215 Augustine, 3, 4, 9, 20, 24, 31, 77, 120, 121, 167n1, 195 Au Revoir Les Enfants, 198, 199, 208–213 Austen, Jane, 11, 12, 197

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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© The Author(s) 2019 A. Gibbs, Seeing Education on Film, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33632-5

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224 Index B

Bardot, Brigitte, 41, 126 Bauer, Nancy, 27, 28, 39, 42 Bazin, Andre, 37, 40, 58, 61, 126, 145, 185 Beauty, 11, 44, 45, 88 Becoming, 17, 26, 36, 43, 44, 91, 98, 108, 113, 114, 127n3, 130, 137, 150, 164, 171 Blackboards, 92, 156, 162, 164, 172–180, 184, 185, 188, 192 Bond, James, 38, 42 Bronte, Charlotte, 11, 12 C

Capra, Frank, 70, 75, 76, 87, 91, 94, 127 Captain Fantastic, 94, 107–115, 152, 159, 168, 196 Care, 48, 52, 69, 109, 115, 118, 124, 135–137, 141, 152, 166, 167, 184, 185, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 203, 208, 210, 213–215 Cartesius, 65–67, 65n8, 160 Cavell, Stanley, 6, 7, 17, 18, 21, 25, 27–29, 35, 37, 40, 42, 48, 49, 52, 53, 59, 62, 67, 69–72, 75–91, 84n1, 89n2, 93, 94, 96–98, 101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 107n6, 108, 110–114, 117–120, 122–124, 127–132, 127n3, 135, 135n5, 138, 139, 139n7, 151, 152, 159, 160, 167, 167n1, 173, 181, 186, 187, 192–195, 197, 198, 204, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213–215 Chaplin, Charles, 52, 53, 83, 117, 130, 173, 210

Child, 2, 19, 55, 90, 117–152, 155, 192 Cinema, 17, 23, 37–40, 42, 46, 54, 58–62, 60n4, 63n6, 64, 68, 69, 69n11, 75, 76, 80–85, 88, 94, 115, 119, 121, 122, 124, 129, 130, 133–135, 138, 141, 143, 144, 151, 152, 155, 157–159, 161, 162, 175, 188, 199, 205n2, 210, 211, 213–216 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 40, 41 Cogito, 27, 28, 72, 150 Community, 6, 96, 106, 109, 170, 183, 187, 191–216 Concept, 2–5, 8, 9, 13–16, 18, 30, 32, 34, 38, 47, 48, 51, 52, 62, 64, 72, 78, 81–83, 85–88, 90, 91, 106, 107, 115, 119, 122, 123, 126, 129, 131, 132, 137, 139n7, 146, 148, 150, 155, 189, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198, 200, 206–209, 215 Connections, 23, 24, 30, 47, 48, 54, 64, 75, 80, 83, 88, 90, 115, 117, 119, 120, 159, 164, 193, 214 Context, 6, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19, 25, 39, 47, 83, 111, 119, 132, 155, 165, 180, 191–216 Criticism, 17, 18, 25, 35, 46, 52n1, 59, 64, 78, 94, 96, 131, 161, 171, 191–216 D

Definition, 1, 4–6, 8, 9, 13, 16, 18, 34, 39, 39n4, 48, 61, 88, 112, 194, 208 Descartes, Rene, 16, 26–29, 36, 40, 66–73, 75, 78–80, 84, 118, 160

 Index 

Dewey, John, 5, 12, 93 Dialectics, 62, 72, 95–102, 105, 106, 110, 178, 186 Dickens, Charles, 10–12, 19, 136, 197 Dictionary, 1, 2, 6–8, 12, 112 Disappointment (in criteria), 71, 73, 76, 77, 81, 86, 87, 95–102, 115, 129, 147, 178, 183 Dr No, 38, 41 Duck-rabbit (Jastrow), 33, 34, 68, 102, 157 E

Education, 1, 4–6, 19, 46–49, 51, 73, 81, 107–114, 117, 155, 188–191 Explanation, 15, 16, 30–32, 37, 42, 48, 55, 58, 63, 66, 71, 80, 86, 111, 129, 137, 159, 201, 205

225

I

Iran (cinema of ), 17, 115, 129, 130, 138, 144, 151, 152, 155, 161, 162, 175, 198 J

Judgment (aesthetic), 44, 46, 47, 204 K

Keaton, Buster, 52, 83, 87, 173 Kiarostami, Abbas, 140, 141, 143n8, 144, 147, 150, 156, 158, 161, 162, 167, 192 Kierkegaard, Søren, 44, 88 L

Likeness, 30–32, 33n3, 35, 38, 68, 70, 75, 115, 119, 126, 139

F

Face (of a word), see Physiognomy (of a word) Farrokhzad, Forough, 162–165 Friendship, 54, 91, 107, 169, 170, 198, 209–213 G

Germany Year Zero, 62, 63, 128, 185 Gosling, Ryan, 95, 102, 104, 105, 119 H

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, 54, 122, 141

M

Makhmalbaf, Mohsen, 158, 159 Makhmalbaf, Samira, 17, 115, 139, 140, 155–190, 202 Male Gaze (theory of ), 40, 42, 197 Malle, Louis, 198, 209, 211, 212, 212n3 McLuhan, Marshall, 22–24 Meaning, 1, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, 20, 21, 23, 35, 44, 48, 49, 52, 61, 62, 73, 78, 80, 82, 83, 89, 98–100, 104, 114, 117, 119, 134, 145, 150, 155, 157, 163, 166, 172, 173, 175, 179, 181, 195, 197–199, 203, 206–208, 214, 215

226 Index

Meaningfulness, 6, 14, 15, 20, 72, 115, 166, 176, 190, 193, 198, 207 Meaning something, 6, 11, 35, 199 The Mirror, 139, 140, 146, 148, 171 Mise-en-scène, 39, 39n4, 61, 66 Mr Deeds Goes to Town, 70, 72, 73, 75, 127 Mulvey, Laura, 37–39, 42, 118, 137 N

Neorealism, 60–63, 63n6, 140, 175, 181 O

Ostensive definition (pointing), 4, 6, 34

101, 104, 112, 114, 122, 136, 149, 150, 164, 171, 194, 200 Private language, 24–26, 85, 94, 110, 113, 186, 187 R

Rancière, Jacques, 61, 63, 67–69, 69n11, 122, 136 Realism (cinematic), 17, 55–59, 61, 120, 124 Realism (philosophic), 17, 56–58 Remarriage, 85–92, 100, 108, 110, 114, 119, 127, 129–131, 133, 135, 135n5, 139, 186, 195, 204, 208 Renoir, Jean, 60n4, 89 S

P

Panahi, Jafar, 139, 140, 142, 146, 147, 149, 156, 161, 167, 171, 192 Perspicuity, 29, 48, 49, 119 Perspicuous representation, 30, 47, 48, 125 Peters, Richard Stanley, 5, 12 Phenomenon, 3, 5, 31, 33–34n3, 52, 73, 83, 118, 125, 200, 207 Philosophical Investigations, 3, 6, 16, 17, 19, 20, 23, 28, 30, 44, 59n3, 77, 78, 82, 117, 119, 121, 202 Physiognomy (of a word), 34, 35 Pictures, 2, 4, 8–16, 19–29, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 51, 56, 59, 63–68, 71, 72, 77, 80, 84, 94, 100,

Seeing, 16, 17, 19–49, 51–73, 75–115, 117–152, 160, 185, 189, 192, 193, 200, 205, 214, 216 Seeing-as, 16, 30–36, 47, 65, 75, 82, 91, 117, 130 Sensibility, 6, 9, 11, 14, 15, 40, 69, 155, 184, 189, 191, 192, 197, 201, 215 Skepticism, 16, 24–27, 29, 35, 59, 66, 67, 77, 79, 81, 106, 118, 167, 206, 210 Style, 43, 47, 59–62, 59n3, 67, 77, 80, 84, 86, 87, 89, 94, 100, 101, 108, 119, 120, 123, 124, 130, 140, 156, 161, 162, 166, 189, 200, 202, 204n2 Suspicion, see Skepticism

 Index  T

Teacher, 12, 14–17, 73, 92–99, 94n4, 102, 105, 107, 108, 110, 112–115, 119, 120, 140, 150, 173, 174, 176–178, 180, 184, 188, 192, 208, 209, 215 Teaching, 11, 14, 69, 94, 95, 101–104, 107, 110, 112–115, 129, 136, 138, 152, 172, 173, 188, 189, 196, 199, 201, 208, 212–213, 215, 216 Theory, 9, 13, 20, 22, 24, 25, 30, 31n2, 36–43, 58, 62, 64, 88, 93, 96, 103, 105, 107, 122, 136, 158, 197 The Truth, 40, 43, 126

227

Voice, 10, 12, 18, 20, 94, 100, 110, 139n7, 148, 149, 157, 164, 177, 178, 182, 186, 187, 192, 201 W

Umiak, 6–8, 98

Where Is The Friend’s Home?, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 150 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 3–6, 8, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 19–26, 28, 28n1, 30–37, 43–49, 56, 57, 58n2, 59n3, 63–65, 68, 70, 73, 75–80, 82, 83, 85, 89, 90, 101, 105, 112, 113, 118–123, 125, 150, 151, 165, 166, 169, 184, 186, 187, 189, 195, 197–201, 203, 205, 214

V

Z

U

Vigo, Jean, 51–53, 55, 58, 60, 137, 192, 211, 212n3

Zero for Conduct, 51–54, 60, 137, 211, 212n3