It's Not Kansas Anymore: It's Cinematic Thinking
So, students are doing more than exploring the meaning and reasoning behind the narrative. They are discovering connections among elements that are usually larger than their own stories, the way everyone makes different connections when they watch the same movie. That's why it's so valuable for students to read each other's blogs.
Blogs are like a screenplay to a mental movie the student has made. It's a kind of narrative, but in a way that's more associative, the way film can be. And that's how students go down a path that may eventually arrive at cinematic thinking.
Blogs are like a screenplay to a mental movie the student has made. It's a kind of narrative, but in a way that's more associative, the way film can be.
Grush: What about your recorded online class sessions? Do they present another path to cinematic thinking?
Campbell: Yes! A couple years ago I started describing what I did with online learning as making movies on location. That referred to the way that I really wanted each of our class meetings to be: a kind of experience, not just for students to be here as I'm lecturing, though I may be doing that, but an experience that's similar to a live television show. Or almost like a live recording session. Of course, we're making something that is recorded on video, and you can go back and look at it to get the flow of the experience of our time together: the way in which that story exists through time.
Grush: So for you, the recorded online sessions tend to become little movies?
Campbell: Sure.
Grush: Let's talk for a minute about your film class. I'd guess that you could more easily find elements of cinematic thinking in that environment, and maybe that would help you define it.
Campbell: Yes, certainly. I've taught an introduction to film class every year for most of my teaching career. I've been continuing that tradition at VCU, and I keep thinking about this: What is it that we gain when we learn how to pay attention to a movie — as we begin to know about mise en scene and cinematography and editing and sound?
What is it that we gain when we learn how to pay attention to a movie — as we begin to know about mise en scene and cinematography and editing and sound?
How might that learning be generalizable to the way we think about writing and other endeavors, or analogous to constructing your writing to be reason-based but not just information or a transaction?
When we understand all that, we know and can act with cinematic thinking.
Grush: So that's really the basis for cinematic thinking.
Campbell: Yes, you could say that.
Grush: What else can you draw on from your film class that helps you arrive at cinematic thinking?
Campbell: I'd pick from one of the books that we use, Making Movies, by Sidney Lumet, a very famous and accomplished film director.
It's a lovely book, very approachable and very much an account of Lumet's own experience as a director. But even more than that, Lumet uncovers the creative process, which includes thinking, deliberate planning, and really cold, hard logic: You have to coordinate with other people. There has to be some kind of a plan. There is a carefully controlled schedule. So much is involved in the process of making a movie.
Grush: That seems to echo what you mentioned earlier about creativity and logic.
Campbell: Indeed it does…
Anyway, I've been using this book for about 15 years, but this time around, this semester, how Lumet wrote about editing really caught my eye in a way that it hadn't before.
Lumet talked about how for him, editing a movie is something that happens after the whole movie's been shot; everybody's gone home. There's no more cast, no more crew. It's just the director and the editor, typically, in a room watching all of the different pieces of the movie that they've shot, sometimes wildly out of order over the course of production, and deciding what goes where — how long should that shot last, which shot is going to be best before a subsequent shot, which might be better afterwards. It doesn't always have to do simply with the linear flow of the narrative. But it usually does have to do with what Lumet refers to as juxtapositioning and tempo.