Scott Higgins

My essential pedagogical task is to provide students critical skills to engage with moving-image media. In all of my courses, I strive to facilitate media literacy, which I define in part as the historical and analytical understanding of moving images and of how these images produce meaning. Students born into our media culture take the moving image for granted; they engage extensively but not critically with film and other visual forms. I work to instill in them a new visual sensitivity and an awareness of their own historically defined positions as spectators. I pursue this end by emphasizing the language and methods of close formal analysis, and by teaching the major perspectives and arguments in the film studies discipline. I also hope to engender a love of the medium, and an appreciation of film’s aesthetic variety.

Since arriving at Wesleyan, I have developed six entirely new courses and have completely redesigned the gateway course that I inherited from my predecessor (syllabi for these courses are included in this packet). I teach general-education and gateway courses (History of World Cinema, Science and Film), lecture courses for sophomores and majors (Cinema of Action and Adventure, The Horror Film), and advanced seminars aimed at juniors and seniors (Classical Film Theory, Early Cinema, Color in the Cinema). Courses range in size from over 100 to fewer than 15 students. In addition, I have directed 9 honors theses and co-directed 2 more (5 received high honors, 4 honors). In each of these activities I work to balance the coverage of principle content with teaching ways of thought. I want to help my students forge true intellectual autonomy by providing them with an array of critical frameworks through which they can interrogate film and other moving-image media.

In redesigning the History of World Cinema to 1945, (100 plus students) my goal was to give the course renewed academic rigor and make it a meaningful preparation for future study of film, while retaining its value as a stand-alone overview of film art. I substantially increased the student workload and I sought to integrate several critical paradigms (economic, cultural, and aesthetic) into the historical survey. Because students are required to earn a B+ or better in this class to be considered for the Film Studies major, I put special emphasis on the means of evaluation. Students write two major papers, take three essay and short-answer exams, and face semi-weekly quizzes on readings and screenings. Under the best of circumstances this course exacts a heavy toll on my time and energy, but the results have more than justified the effort. By the end of the semester, I feel that I have effectively gauged the abilities of my students, and they are ready to meaningfully engage with the discipline. I am passionate about teaching this course well because it stands at the forefront of our major, and for many students seeking a general-education credit this is the only film history course they may take at Wesleyan. It is a first, and sometimes only, opportunity to help students see the cinema through new eyes. I teach the historical cannon (Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane) but also confront my students with lesser known masterpieces (Naniwa Elegy, L’Atalante). Beyond covering the basic vocabulary of film analysis and the medium’s historical development, I most want to reveal cinema’s promise by challenging students with difficult and unfamiliar texts. Devoting half of the semester to silent cinema, for example, proves an excellent method for teaching how to view film art. The size of the enrollment has encouraged me to depend on a lecture format for the class, and so I strongly encourage individual meetings. For many students, writing about film is a new skill and I think it is best taught through close consultation on drafts and revisions. In recent years I have recruited and worked closely with writing tutors to further extend out of class contact.

I’ve also introduced two mid-level film genre courses to the curriculum, and these regularly enroll both majors and pre-majors. In part, these courses use popular film to explore key issues and methods in film studies. The course on the Horror Film, for instance, traces debates in the discipline between methods based on psychoanalysis, analytical philosophy, and cultural studies. The course on Action Film explores arguments about cinematic spectacle, narratology and the nature of suspense, and the use of myth and archetypes to make sense of popular forms. The point is not to favor one approach over another, but to acquaint students with the stakes of various critical positions. The courses are also very much about how these genres have developed on their own terms. We trace the artistic dialogue between filmmakers and audiences that has shaped each genre’s conventions. My overarching concern is to integrate the excitement of intellectual discourse with an awareness of historical context and the "real world" market pressures that influence popular art. In addition to tests and short writing assignments, students are required to undertake term paper projects that demonstrate persuasive critical writing and are grounded in primary historical research using the film industry trade press.

Classical Film Theory is a reading-intensive course created specifically for junior and senior film majors. This seminar’s animating precept is that filmmakers and film scholars have much to learn from writers who struggled to make sense of the medium during its first half century. Theorists like Sergei Eisenstein, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin pursued fundamental questions about the ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics of cinema. They sought answers by looking closely at film form, creating our contemporary analytical vocabulary along the way. The class is both an intellectual history of thought about cinema, and a creative spur for the young filmmaker. The theoretical emphasis fills an important curricular need for the major, while the aesthetic orientation makes this seminar a particularly good fit with the department’s dedication to marrying studies and production. I run the class as a guided discussion through which we parse the often abstract and difficult theory. Throughout I strive to connect theoretical issues to the practical challenges of filmmaking. Students write 40 pages for this course, split between bi-weekly papers, two major analytical assignments, and a take-home final. I offer this course yearly, and have been pleasantly surprised by the continued hunger and verve with which students meet its challenges. Ultimately, I endeavor to induce the students to think theoretically, and to recognize the theoretical assumptions that operate behind their own predispositions. The final assignment, in part, asks participants to forge an original defensible theory to explain a scene or sequence that they intuitively find cinematic.

My other upper level seminars, Color in the Cinema and Early Cinema, are viewing-intensive classes that emphasize aesthetic history and close formal analysis. In these courses I embrace the Wesleyan Film Studies tradition of teaching through immersion. Together, we watch a tremendous amount of film, and we strive to meet the texts on their own terms, to view them against the context of their production. This is particularly effective in teaching silent films, which demand a distinct set of viewing strategies. The medium’s first three decades were a period of unparalleled experimentation and change, easily outstripping the "digital revolution" of the past twenty years. In studying early and silent film, we come face to face with cinema’s radical potential to reorient the way we view the world. At the same time, the period highlights how economic and cultural imperatives channeled the medium toward feature-length narrative. I have built the seminar Color in the Cinema from my own research in the field with the aim of teaching advanced skills in formal analysis. Students read major color theorists (Albers, Itten), consult primary historical documents relating to color film production, and consider major writings in neo-formalist film analysis. The course combines lecture, discussion, and frame by frame analytical exercises. Together, we seek to understand how this perceptually rich medium operates on spectators and shapes our experience. This is, I think, one of the greatest challenges of film study. Both courses track recent trends in scholarship, but my emphasis is on providing students with a framework through which they can contribute significant and original historical analysis. I’ve modeled these seminars on my own experience of graduate study, and much of the work produced by students would be at home in a master’s program. I am especially gratified that these courses have spurred successful senior theses.

In spring 2006, I developed an experimental course with Robert Lane of MBB entitled Science and Film: Defining Human Identity. This team-taught class is part of the Science and Film initiative, and it was conceived as an interdisciplinary general education course, enrolling 51 students. The course considered how major projects in the biological sciences (Evolutionary Theory, the Human Genome Project, Systems Biology) have challenged our sense of self, and examined how the science fiction genre helps our culture negotiate this threat. I offered a historical survey of the science fiction genre, and together we explored how the films engage with the philosophical implications of scientific knowledge about identity. The class was truly collaborative, and it entailed a fairly steep learning curve for Robert and me. We developed lectures and discussions together, and attempted to weave a unified trajectory through the science and film material. We were also challenged by the need to balance the class between two distinct constituencies of science and film students. While we made great strides, student evaluations noted the need for greater integration between the two disciplines. By semester’s end, I think we had developed enough familiarity with one another’s fields that we were in a much better position to bind the parts together. The experience has convinced me of the project’s potential and importance. In the best liberal arts tradition, this course promises to compare and combine intellectual outlooks, exploring how the two disciplines frame questions and model thought. As Robert and I redevelop this course, we are foregrounding issues like observation, perception, and causal argument, which inform both of our subjects. Our next offering will build upon the common ground that we have discovered during our initial partnership.

Teaching is an indispensable part of my intellectual life. My courses draw on and feed directly into my research interests, and I never cease to learn from my dialogue with students. At Wesleyan, I have dedicated myself to helping students ask questions about popular culture and the moving image. My work as an educator proceeds from my conviction that learning is an active and ongoing process, a collaborationonversation shared by teachers and students. I believe that film studies has an important role to play in the liberal arts, developing critical methods and perspectives that will serve our students in their lives as intelligent consumers and creators of media.