Breaking into the Movies: Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Film

This article argues that how we think about education must extend far beyond matters of schooling and include those spaces, practices, discourses and maps of meaning and affect produced through a range of cultural and pedagogical technologies. We live at a time in which the educational influence of the larger culture has become the major force in producing subjectivities, desires and modes of identification necessary for the legitimation and functioning of a neoliberal society. If pedagogy has become central to creating particular modes of agency, public pedagogy represents a new cultural politics in which pedagogy has become central. One such mode of public pedagogy is film. As a form of public pedagogy, film combines entertainment and politics, and a claim to public memory, though in contested ways given the existence of distinctly varied social and cultural formations. In this article, I argue that films not only provide a pedagogical space that opens up the ‘possibility of interpretation as intervention’, they also make clear the need for forms of literacy that address the profoundly political and pedagogical ways in which knowledge, practice, discourse, images and values are constructed and enter our lives. Central to this article is the belief that the decline of public life demands that we use film as a way of raising questions that are increasingly lost to the forces of market relations, commercialization and privatization. As the opportunities for civic education and public engagement begin to disappear, film may provide one of the few mediums left that enables conversations that connect politics, personal experiences and public life to larger social issues. Not only does film travel more as a pedagogical form compared to other popular forms such as television and popular music, but film carries a kind of pedagogical weight that other mediums lack. As a quintessential element of a screen culture, film offers a way to rethink both the importance of cultural politics and public pedagogy as central to what it means to make the political more pedagogical and the pedagogical more political.