Global Flicks 2025: Teaching with Film

In Film Studies classes at The College of DuPage, we teach students how to see the world differently. To do that, we study how images work to convey meaning, but also how that meaning is situated in a larger social and cultural context.  

Even beyond Film Studies classes, though, film can be a valuable teaching tool in every discipline. A documentary can shine light on a little-understood subculture or offer a historical point of view. A fiction film can express a series of themes or ideas that can be difficult to put into words. International films can provide a window into a part of humanity with which we are unfamiliar.  

No one has to be an expert in film to use it to support teaching. However, it is also important to understand some key principles about the art form; relying on these concepts will help you maximize its pedagogical potential.  

The most important thing for a teacher to remember when using film in the classroom is that cinema is an art form like any other, and art is really about the relationship between form and content. Sometimes, formal style matches the content, but at other times, film artists create deliberate disruptions. Above all, the key thing to consider when teaching a film is that images are ideas. This means that it’s not just what the image shows you that’s important—it’s also the design of the image itself. 

Look at the shot below from The Graduate (1967, Nichols). In this early scene, recent college graduate Ben (Dustin Hoffman) has just driven his parents’ friend Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) home from a party. To Ben’s surprise, Mrs. Robinson tries to seduce him. While Ben rejects her advance, he retreats to the first floor of the house, where he is met by her husband, Mr. Robinson (Murray Hamilton). The men sit on the couch, but director Mike Nichols and cinematographer Robert Surtees leave space for Mrs. Robinson, the woman who is literally between them, in the deep background. 

Some images reflect the relationships of characters to one another, which is a natural outgrowth of the drama. In other cases, images are designed to express an idea or emotion which the characters themselves do not even understand. This was the specialty of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who made a series of films in the early 1960s that attempted to wrestle with the alienation induced by modernity. Antonioni’s films expressed a sense of vague despair that was difficult to put into words; he captured it in his composition of images that placed his characters in a subordinate relationship to their environment.  

In the below shot from La Notte (1961), Antonioni shoots from high above the streets of Milan, looking down at his film’s leading lady Lidia (Jeanne Moreau), who is growing distant from her husband Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni) and is increasingly bored with her life. In this frame, Antonioni emphasizes the oppressive, imposing structure of modern society through his composition of the shot—Lidia is the size of an ant down on the street, while the building takes up nearly all of the widescreen frame. The entire film is constructed of images like this, which transfer the characters’ alienation to the audience.   

These examples illustrate a key cinematic concept—the actual composition of the images is carefully considered, and nearly always reflects some kind of embedded idea that is meant to communicate meaning to the audience. 

Cinema is a collaborative medium; each individual work is a product of tens, hundreds, even potentially thousands of people. In such a highly collective art form, individual points of view are going to struggle to reach a level of coherence because its artists have to work together. Unlike many art forms, like painting or writing, which are highly dependent on the individual, cinema is about the group. As a result, the final film is borne out of compromises, arguments, and tensions that may or may not have been resolved. This means that a single image often contains two (or more) potentially contradictory ideas.  

A particularly effective example of this comes in a scene from Missing (1982), a dramatic account of events that took place in Chile in 1973 directed by Costa-Gavras. The narrative of the film focuses on the disappearance of American journalist Charles Horman (John Shea), and unfolds in flashback as his father Ed (Jack Lemmon) and wife Beth (Sissy Spacek) try to find out what happened to Charles during a chaotic military coup.  

In one scene midway through the film, Ed and Beth visit the American embassy in an attempt to leverage Charles’s American citizenship to get the U.S. government to more aggressively aid in the search. The American Ambassador (Richard Venture) and consul Phil Putnam (David Clennon) tell them that the U.S. is doing all it can, and know nothing about Charles’s disappearance. Prominently displayed behind the Ambassador and Putnam as they try to reassure Ed and Beth—a photograph of then President Richard Nixon. In 1973, when the film’s events took place, Nixon had not yet been forced to resign in disgrace in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. But, in 1982 when Missing was released, audiences seeing the photograph of Nixon on the wall might be inclined to distrust Putnam’s answer by association.  

Written works convey information sequentially; there’s really no way to read a short story, novel, poem, news article, or journal piece other than one word at a time. Because films deal in images, they narrate simultaneously. A viewer taking in information from a single film shot must weigh a variety of factors at once. In this scene from Missing, actor David Clennon’s performance communicates concern and empathy; the stately environment and muted colors express a kind of stability and authority designed to induce calm; the aforementioned photograph of Nixon invites the audience to distrust both of those other feelings.  

Contradictions are inherent in film images because of this simultaneous narration, but also because of the way they are made. Movies are highly collaborative, and the ideas they convey are always negotiated among those collaborators, all of whom have slightly different interpretations of reality, even if they all generally agree to row in the same direction during production. As a result, almost no image, and by extension, no complete film, can be ideologically coherent. What is a film really trying to say? Often several competing things at the same time.  

Cinema’s inherently democratic properties—it is the result of a collective’s efforts in production and designed for a mass audience in reception—make it uniquely positioned as both a driver of cultural context and a barometer of it. Films have a cyclical relationship with the society in which they are made. They both shape culture through the power of their images and are informed by the values that dominate at any given historical moment.   

A documentary film like Harlan County USA (1976), in which director Barbara Kopple embeds in a coal-mining community in Kentucky to document a strike, remains a valuable historical document of labor unrest in the 1970s. 

For students to really understand what a film like this is trying to do, they would benefit from some interaction with larger contextual information. Those ideas could include but are not limited to the history of coal mining in Appalachia; the structure of organized labor; inflationary pressures on energy prices in the 1970s; the tradition of folk music and union songs; a history of violence associated with labor actions; and cultural and social attitudes towards unions in the broader public. All of these ideas are present in the film itself. 

In making Harlan County USA, director Barbara Kopple used a style rooted in the techniques of cinema verite, in which the filmmaker tries to simply observe rather than interfere with the action the camera captures. This approach was designed to maximize the film’s authenticity. The whole idea was to show the audience images that were as real as possible. However, those images, real as they are, still had to be placed into a structure that inevitably creates a kind of persuasion. When you watch Harlan County USA, you are not seeing a factual historical record—you’re seeing a film that has been engineered to express a set of ideas.  

Teaching documentaries comes with risks; though they often present themselves as authoritative in tone, it is important to recognize that they are constructed, just as fiction films are. A documentary is shaped through one of cinema’s most important formal tools: editing. Through the use of juxtaposition, which places scenes, ideas, and images next to one another, documentary filmmakers make rhetorical decisions. Calling attention to those rhetorical decisions is a great critical thinking exercise for students. With any documentary, ask students to consider the following questions. 

1. What are these images trying to tell me? 

2. How do two consecutive images relate to one another? 

3. What has been left out of this film and why?  

4. What is the film’s structure, and why is it built that way? 

Contextual factors are always significant, and can totally change students’ perceptions of a film’s meaning. Films are useful reflections of a historical moment in which they are made because they do not reflect a single author’s point of view, but offer a larger sample of the ideas, fears, and beliefs of a group.  

Select a film that is appropriate to your curriculum. It can be a work of fiction, a documentary, or something in between. Remember these key concepts: 

1. Images are ideas 

2. Ideas in images are contested 

3. Films are products of context 

This approach is universally applicable. Press play. 

For more information: 

Brian Brems 

Professor, English/Film 

bremsb@cod.edu 

The Graduate. Directed by Mike Nichols, Embassy Pictures, 1967. 

Harlan County, USA. Directed by Barbara Kopple, First Run Features, 1977.  

La Notte. Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, United Artists, 1961. 

Missing. Directed by Costa-Gavras, Universal Pictures, 1982.