John Fried teaches film and creative writing at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA.
Whenever I’m teaching a film course at the beginning of a new semester, I am transported back to my own experience as a freshman taking my first film class at the University of Michigan, an introduction to cinema course taught by Hubert Cohen. Professor Cohen, who sadly passed away in March 2024 after teaching into his 90s, stood in front of a class of what must have been 250 people and told us, “My plan is to ruin your experience of going to the movies.” Of course, 18-year-old presumptuous me, thought “Who is this guy? And what’s he got to tell me I don’t already know about movies?”
I miss 18-year-old me.
In his friendly and approachable manner, Prof. Cohen explained that his goal was to make us unable to simply sit back and let the film wash over us passively. We would start to recognize those techniques we were learning about that semester—mise-en-scène, composition, editing, and so on—in films we watched outside the classroom (which we called “movies,” because they were for fun) as much as we did during our time with him watching “films” (classwork). We might be able to lift the veil on what theorists and scholars often call cinematic invisibility—the seamlessness of techniques used in films that make us forget about their very construction—and notice everything we had failed to see before.
After that semester I saw Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1994), a film as entertaining as it was masterfully made, and noticed the breathtaking handheld camera technique used in the surfing and skydiving scenes. I thought to myself, “Well played, Professor Cohen. Well played.”
This idea comes back to me whenever I’m putting together a list of films for the courses I teach in my current position. My goal in these classes, whether it’s an intro to film class like the one I took back in the day or a genre class on horror or film noir, is always to give the students both the language to talk about film and something of a history lesson. Certainly, I want the students to differentiate between a long shot and a medium shot and consider what the director’s choice of shots might suggest in a particular moment. I want them to understand the difference between diegetic sound (sound from within the world of the film) and nondiegetic sound (often the soundtrack) and how each type shapes meaning.
But I also want to show them how films can speak to us on multiple levels, teaching us not just about the texts themselves, but also about the time in which they were made. It’s tough to talk about a film like Mike Nichols’s The Graduate (1967) without putting it in the context of the sixties and the counterculture movement and, in turn, how that context relates to the lives of my Gen Z students. Like the crusty old prof I’m afraid I’m becoming, I want the students to recognize that what was made in the past has something to teach us about the films we watch and the lives we live in the present. I want my students, on some level, to be like Neo in The Matrix, standing in wonder as the artifice of the film is revealed to them.
Aim high, I say. How can I pick from the entirety of film history, say, only 14 films that are going to sum it all up? Which ones get the vaunted position of being watched in their entirety rather than in short clips? It’s like going to the greatest buffet in history and being told you can eat only one thing.
My approach has always been to balance what might be considered important films in the history of cinema with more current well-made films students might have already seen. For a long time, I started my intro to film course with Jason Reitman’s Juno (2007) for what I thought of as very practical reasons: For one, Juno was extensively discussed in their textbook for the semester (Monahan’s Looking at Movies.) It’s a lot easier to read an analysis of a text we’ve seen or read than one we’re simply supposed to imagine, particularly for undergrads. What’s more, Juno was a film most of them had seen or at least heard about, something I consider when choosing more contemporary movies.
Juno is a comedy and therefore teaches the students that while, yes, we’re doing work, it’s okay to be entertained. Not everything educational is a grind. Some might call this approach pandering to student desire, but I call it being a good teacher. Just because I’m teaching film doesn’t mean we have to watch only Birth of a Nation and Battleship Potemkin (although in my discussion of editing I show clips from Battleship Potemkin along with the scenes from The Untouchables that pay homage to the Potemkin scenes. I mean, c’mon. . .).
Does Juno still hold up as a film? Maybe, maybe not. Some call it a deeply conservative film, while others consider it far more self-conscious and measured in its take on abortion and a woman’s right to choose. That’s a point of discussion for us in the classroom. If anything, it very clearly speaks to its time, and it gets the student talking—which, as a teacher, is the best thing you can hope for.
From there, I try to balance old films and new ones, showing classics like The Graduate (1967) and Citizen Kane (1941) or even Singin’ in the Rain (1952) with more contemporary films like The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Moonlight (2016) and Winter’s Bone (2010). While I hope to hit on films students might not have seen, an intro to film class is inevitably an exercise in formalism; I want each film to illustrate a technique or style in a way that is easily discussed.
These days, I teach my horror film class nearly every other semester. It’s a popular and always over-enrolled class, which makes everyone up the university administration food chain happy. I tend to teach it as a genre history/intro to film class combination, using horror to introduce students to the language of film analysis as well as some of the theory behind the genre. And it’s often populated with self-described horror fanatics who love all horror and have seen it all—at least from 1978 (Halloween) on. They love the slashers and splatters, the found footage films, and the psychological horror. They come to me after class with names of films they want to discuss, to know if I’ve seen them. They want me to affirm that their list of the best horror films is the list of the best horror films. They are fans.
What’s more, once that first class is over, they tell me they’ve read the syllabus and now know that I’ve included films like Nosferatu (1922) and Freaks (1931), films they know more from memes or SpongeBob, alongside some of their favorites like Barbarian (2014) or Hereditary (2018). Those old films, they tell me, aren’t scary. That’s okay, I say. The end goal isn’t to generate a “best of” list. The end goal isn’t just to be scared. I tell them I want them to see how these new directors—like Zach Cregger or Robert Eggers or Julia Ducournau—speak to the old films in their design, in their stories, in their play with the genre tropes. And maybe, I tell them, in the process of gaining this understanding, I’ll ruin their experience of going to horror movies forever. Now that’s a truly scary thought.
MEET THE AUTHOR
John Fried teaches film and creative writing at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA. His creative work has appeared in many journals, including The Gettysburg Review, North American Review, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. His debut novel, The Martin Chronicles, was published in 2019 by Grand Central Publishing. His nonfiction and film writing has appeared in various magazines, such as The New York Times, Rolling Stone, Cineaste, and New York.
Image Credit: Thurner Photography