Or is he too old?

[Paul Mackin]

On Nov 7, 2006, at 3:33 PM, Paul Nightingale wrote:

> "After the Film Generation" is unavailable (to me, anyway) but  
> Kauffmann has
> expressed himself in an interview with Bert Cardullo, in Jody  
> McAuliffe ed,
> Plays, Movies and Critics, Duke University Press (1993).
>
> With particular reference to what he had written in AFG Kauffmann  
> discusses
> the entry into academia of film, and then compares this to the way
> literature is studied. It's "a paradox" that film became an  
> academic subject
> and that turned off people from studying film. In the same way,  
> literature
> students no longer read books after graduation:
>
> "Let's assume that there were once people who read, read with  
> pleasure and
> freely; then literature became for them a straitened,  
> compartmentalized,
> curricular activity. At the beginning, I think the teaching of  
> literature in
> colleges and universities helped people -- I'm speaking always  
> about the
> general person, not the specialist. But later, I think, it became  
> for them a
> means of, in their minds, finishing with literature: 'I've read my  
> great
> books, now I'm free.'"
>
> And then, going back to film: "I don't mean that people stopped  
> going to
> films after they finished their film courses, which they took on  
> their way
> to becoming doctors, lawyers, or just general good citizens. But  
> that their
> interest in any kind of expansion or extension of themselves as the  
> result
> of film experience, in taking any kind of trouble to see films, was
> something they associated with the moribund past, with note taking,  
> exams,
> and papers." (All quotations, 231)
>
> Anti-intellectualism 101. Terrance might have quoted this, or  
> Kauffmann
> elsewhere to the same effect, but didn't.
>
> What to say?
>
> Most obviously, Kauffmann (who seems to have done pretty well out  
> of being a
> popular, if not populist, intellectual) makes a fundamental error in
> overlooking (or hoping his readers will overlook) that education =
> assessment regime rather than learning. It's not the intellectual  
> challenge
> of reading that puts readers off; rather it's the exposure of the self
> to/through assessment. This is what students I've worked with and
> interviewed for ongoing research have told me, one way or another.  
> They
> resent being force-fed something called Literature, not because it  
> makes
> their brains hurt, but because it's a means to an end. They opt in  
> and out,
> switch on and off--all as a way of maintaining a degree of control.  
> It's
> called resistance, and rather more complex than saying: 'School  
> puts me off
> thinking'.
>
>
Did Kauffmann's really mean to advance the idea  that "school puts me  
off thinking?"

Not to put words into his mouth but perhaps he meant " through higher  
education I've been exposed to and done a certain amount of critical,  
post-structural, deconstructive thinking, have understood what it can  
accomplish,  and now want to get on to something requiring at least  
as much thinking but promising more pragmatic results.

This would be a very American thing.

Why keep doing the same thing over and  over?

Maybe this is not anti-intellectualism, but post-intellectualism.

Something to think about anyway.