PT Journal
AU Cesalkova, L
TI Moving Image and Socialist Pupil. Film Reception Research within the Pedagogical Dispositif in the 1950s and 1960s
SO Iluminace
PY 2018
BP 45
EP 62
VL 30
IS 1
DI 10.58193/ilu.1551
WP https://iluminace.cz/en/artkey/ilu-201801-0003.php
DE film reception; child audience; pedagogical dispositif; educational film; state socialism
SN 0862397X
AB No other teaching tool received as much teacher's methodical attention as film, and examination of pupils' reception should help teachers to define specific strategies for its integration into teaching. Despite the authoritative conditions traditionally created by school institutions, teachers were concerned about the instability of the meaning of moving image. These fears in the 1950s and 1960s created a series of research into children's film reception within a pedagogical dispositif. The present study analyzes how the school's institution responded to political assignment under the conditions of state socialism, and, as a result, modulated the dominant modes of pupil's film reception. It shows that educators have developed two strategies for anchoring the meaning of the moving image, considered as unstable. Neither of them predicted that the film could work independently in the pedagogical dispositive. The first one, typical for the 1950s, was motivated by the ideological priorities of socialist education and aimed at framing the film with a number of didactic practices (preparatory reading for homework, introduction, discussion, follow-up tasks) and incorporating it into a system of other teaching aids. The screening was highlighted as a special event and the film experience should spread to the wider context of teaching. Within the second tendency, typical of the 1960s, on the contrary, the specificity of film screening as an event wiped out, film's mediality should be eliminated, and teachers aimed at endeavoring the film as a partial sequence, a "loop", a fragment, to the stream of teaching in which the teacher plays a key role. The pupils' reception in this regard points to two distinctive strategies, through which the pedagogical discourse copes with the problematic medium of the film - on the one hand, spreading the pedagogical into the public in the period of emphasis on the ideological interpretation of the film, on the other, the embedding of the film into the pedagogical in the period emphasizing the information potential of the film in the classroom.
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