Film Culture (Winter 1955)

jejuneness of the films before one’s eyes. Is this general deficiency. in quality » accidental? Would. raising the standards of production solve the whole problem of “educational” cinema? In order to answer these questions, we must first ask a fundamental one: What are the possibilities and limitations of the film as an audiovisual medium for the purposes of education? It is therefore necessary to examine the use of the film in schools both on the plane of theory and practice. The rapid increase in the use of audio-visual materials in the classroom is not merely the outcome of technological development, manufacturers’ attempts to sell their product, and the consequent availability of specialized modern equipment, although these have undoubtedly played a part of major importance. Parallel to technical progress we have witnessed the appearance of an everaugmenting body of theory. THE ANALYTIC TEMPER The point of departure for all the audio-visual theories of education advanced in this country is a reaction against “verbalism,” with a consequent advocacy of a return to “basic experience.” This anti-verbalistic theme recurs in all the more ambitious manuals of theory in the field. Mr. Wagner, the president of the Film Council of America, condemning the “Basic Habit of Verbalism,” complains that “man insists on verbalizing instead of communicating.”* It would be easy to dismiss this diametric opposi tion for its lack of the basic habit of logic for, clearly, “communication” and “verbalizing” are not necessarily opposable. What interests us here, however, is why and how this significant opposition has been arrived at. We find an explicit answer in Andio-Visual Methods* tre Television Demonstrations Dramatized Experiences Contrived Experiences Direct, Purposeful Experiences garded by the official consensus of educators as the authoritative Summa on matters of audio-visual principles and practice. In an attempt to impress his theory on the minds * Introduction; Sixty Years of 16mm Film. 3 Audio-Visual Methods in Teaching by Edgar Dale, The Dryden Press, 1954. of his readers, the author, Mr. Dale, dramatizes it by means of a visual aid in the shape of what he refers to as the Cone of Experience. ‘The very act of setting up so specialized an institution as a school may promote verbalism,” warns Mr. Dale, and he explains that the base of his cone represents “‘direct reality, . . . the bedrock of all education. . . something you can get your hands on, something you can sink your teeth into.’ While the Cone, as shown above, is largely self-explanatory, two points should be stressed here: (1) conceptual thinking, according to the author, is reducible to the data of experience and therefore (2) verbal symbols as vehicles of thought and feeling are the furthest removed from the sole reliable basis for communication: pure experience. If we are to understand the full impact of such theories—as Mr. Wagner's opposition of verbalism to communication and Mr. Dale’s conical view of man’s experience—upon educational practice, we must go to the sources from which they have been derived. For these conceptions, far from being original with these two authors, are but the simplified and distorted. reflection of philosophical trends that underlie, not only audio-visual theory, but educational theory in general, and, for that matter, most levels and domains of thought in this country. While in Europe, both Germanic and Romance countries have in the past decades shown a consistent development of the spirit of synthesis, of existential, phenomenological and other doctrines emphasizing ontology and its ethical implications for man’s ttansformation of himself and the world, American philosophical thought has been marked by an almost exceptionless adherence to various shades of logical positivism, a doctrine whick, because of its lack of Weltanschauung, of ethic, is strictly speaking not a system at all, but rather a mere fool of thought. That logical positivism should have become the predominant credo in our universities, where it indeed holds almost unlimited sway, is not surprising when we remember that it is the rationalized expression of an underlying philosophical temperament, which may be characterized as empirical, pragmatic, psychologistic, and, above all, analytic,—tendencies which, though in seeming contradiction on the level of pure theory, are on a deeper level united in their common cpposition to the voluntarism and ethical emphasis that dominate contemporary thought abroad.4 What is preeminently characteristic of all types of thinkers in the analytic vein is the need to dig beneath appearances to the essences behind them, to the one static reality behind changing, and therefore for them illusory, phenomena. In this attempt to arrive at the pure, the immutable object as it really 7s, man as perceiver, as evaluator must of course be eliminated from the picture. Thus the profoundly meaningful discriminations—value judgments—expressed by man through differences in words and in combinations of words are reduced by the analyst to mere ‘verbal discriminations;’’ we are advised to disregard the distinctions between, for instance, monism and dualism, realism and idealism, good and evil as 4 It is not a matter of accident that the phenomenological theories of cinematic art 1dvanced by such an outstanding American scholar as Rudolph Arnheim have had no influence upon audio-visual methods in this country.