Distinguished Professor Peter Bondanella is the department’s true cinematic pioneer. He began teaching Italian film with a course development grant from the Honors Division in 1974. The course, Studies in the Italian Cinema (M390), soon had the highest enrollment in the department. Subsequently he created Readings in the Italian Cinema (M455) in order to give graduate students in Italian a chance to obtain credit for the study of Italian film. Over the years, a number of graduate students have worked in film and have written theses on film-related topics under his direction: Manuela Gieri, PhD’89, now associate professor of Italian and film at the University of Toronto; Cristina Degli Esposti, PhD’91, now associate professor of Italian at Kent State University; and Virginia Picchietti, PhD’95, now assistant professor of Italian at Purdue University. In order to mentor two of these students, he did two books with them before they completed their dissertations: a critical edition of the continuity script of Fellini’s La Strada with Gieri and an anthology of contemporary criticism on Fellini with Degli Esposti. His own publications on film include Federico Fellini: Essays in Criticism; Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present (two editions and more than 15 printings, and winner of the American Association for Italian Studies Presidential Book Award); The Cinema of Federico Fellini (winner of the Agnelli Book Prize for the best book in Italian studies); The Films of Roberto Rossellini; Perspectives on Federico Fellini; and numerous articles.

Bondanella says: "Perhaps what I am most proud of is the introduction to my Princeton Fellini book written by Fellini himself and the international film conference in 1995, sponsored in part by the Baar Koon funds and West European studies, which brought Ettore Scola to campus and then to a tour of the Midwest to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the European/French (not Hollywood!) invention of the cinema. As for my philosophy of teaching film, about which this newsletter asks, my only comment is that Italian cinema represents one of Italy’s unique cultural artifacts of the 20th century. Since film is this century’s only unique art form, I am happy that FRIT is paying more and more attention to it in our culture courses and our language classes."

Professor Michael Berkvam, who is the recipient of a Founders Day award for his distinguished teaching, has also made film a vital part of his classes. He tells this newsletter: "I have restructured several courses in our undergraduate program by integrating film. F461 is now titled La France contemporaine: film et culture, and F311 (the same course in English) mirrors these changes. These two courses were taught in the new format during the spring semester of 1997 and included a regular film series along with the usual lectures and discussions. Each Wednesday evening students viewed films that (I hope!) shed light on an aspect of contemporary France and presented the uniqueness of French cinema during this time. From the traditional Jeux interdits by René Clément to the controversial Weekend and Masculin-Féminin by Jean-Luc Godard, students saw images of France, French aesthetics, and a French vision of the world. Among the other film directors presented were Louis Malle, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, Claire Denis, and Brigitte Rouan, just to name a few.

"Another course, F450," continues Berkvam, "is titled War, Literature, and Film and incorporates film in order to shed additional light on the literature. Among the novels are Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, La Comédie de Charleroi by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, La Mort dans l’âme by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Cette guerre qui ne dit pas son nom by Azzedine Bounemeur. Students see films such as La Grande illusion by Jean Renoir, La Vie et rien d’autre by Bertrand Tavernier, J’accuse by Abel Gance, Le Dernier Métro by François Truffaut, and La Bataille d’Alger by Gillo Pontecorvo as illustrations of viewpoints on French wars in the 20th century, from World War I and II to Indochina and Algeria. Students see nine films and read five novels during the semester; papers written by the students focus on the intertextual nature of film and literature."

Professor Gilbert Chaitin’s use of film is no less imaginative. He writes: "Last year I began using films in my course on 19th-century French drama. I was able to find videos of three of the plays we studied in class, Lorenzaccio, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Ubu roi. The students were required to write a short report on one of these videos, explaining what they liked or disliked about the film version in comparison to the written text. Viewing the films increased the students’ enjoyment of the plays while helping them to heighten their perception of significant aspects of the plays, such as characterization, setting, pace, and thematic interpretation. This semester I am using films of some of the novels we are reading in F306. In class, I show short segments of the video that correspond to the reading assigned for the day. This helps beginning literature students understand texts that are often difficult and confusing for them at first reading. After viewing the appropriate segment, we discuss the disparities – which are often enormous – between film and text. This contrast allows students to grasp in a concrete way aspects of mood, characterization, narration, and temporal order that might otherwise escape them. It also provides a nice change of pace from the usual classroom discussion. Students then can view the entire film in the library reserve room."

Professor Rosemary Lloyd, chair of the department and an enthusiastic proponent of innovative technological strategies in teaching, says: "l have long enjoyed using cinema in the classroom. I use it to provide images of the theater and the street in 19th-century Paris, for instance, through Les Enfants du paradis. I also find it useful to suggest the multiple levels of time and the optics of politics in Victor Hugo’s decision in Notre Dame de Paris to write about Paris on the brink of the Gutenberg Revolution in order to comment on the failed 1830 revolution, and Hollywood’s decision to make a movie of the novel as the United States was on the brink of entering World War II, changing the ending to one of hope. Showing movies inspired by novels is also an excellent way of raising questions of narrative technique and focus. I also use cartoons, notably ‘What’s Opera, Doc,’ to illustrate the importance of context and the way in which our appreciation of any work of art, including cartoons, is enhanced by understanding the references and allusions. In my course on Paris, I used several movies, including The Great Race and The Lavender Hill Mob, to explore the Eiffel Tower’s role as icon of the city."

Professor John Isbell, one of whose students in F300, Nathalie Gilbert, received an important national award for her poetry last year, has also used film to enhance the content of his undergraduate courses. He tells this newsletter: "I’ve used film in my civilization classes – Danton, Cyrano de Bergerac, Les Enfants du Paradis, Rosselini’s Louis XIV, Peter Sellars’s Mozart operas, and Kenneth Clarke’s Civilization series. This is mainly to provide narrative lines and to pick students up and place them in the centuries we’re studying. In literature classes, we’ve seen films of our novels – Dangerous Liaisons, Manon, La Symphonie pastorale – though I like saving this for when we know the plot already. Dangerous Liaisons I like for anchoring undifferentiated text with faces students know–Michelle Pfeiffer, John Malkovich, Glenn Close. It really helps them get what an epistolary novel is doing. For my first-ever F300 I inherited Cyrano as a text, which was totally over the class’s heads – so we turned it into a page-film comparison study, which the students liked a lot. We’ve also watched Molière, though I’m unhappy with the IU Library’s Ecole des femmes, and I can’t get the [Isabelle] Adjani version. For poetry, I also like to show Bill Murray reciting French poetry to Andie McDowell in Groundhog Day, just for kicks. Reservoir Dogs is great for offscreen violence and the use of silence – the scene of the severed ear, where we look at a wall while listening to Stealer’s Wheel. In F306, I also showed our film of Bloomington North’s Villon performance, the event I helped Professor Charlotte Gerrard with last year."

None of these professors told this newsletter whether or not they allow their students to bring popcorn to class. Be that as it may, there can be little doubt that those students are intellectually profiting from the creative use of film in the department’s classrooms.

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