Q: Growing up in the American public school system, I am sure I am not alone in the experience of films being used as substitutes for actual education; if a video was being shown in class it was a reprieve from giving lessons for the teacher, and an opportunity to tune out for the students. You've argued in the past — including a presentation at the 2000 Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference — that cinema has potential as a form of anarchist pedagogy. What is this potential, and is it in conflict with how we are generally taught to receive media images in this society, film in particular? When has this pedagogical potential been fulfilled in the past? Is it being fulfilled today?
Porton: The problem, as you imply, is that most of us -- and probably not just Americans -- associate words like "pedagogy" and "education" with drudgery and boredom, with classroom monotony instead of "recess." Given what I've written about aesthetic bliss above, I believe certain exemplary films offer a vision of "recess" instead of school. This belief engendered a desire to define a tangibly playful pedagogy -- manifestly pleasurable as well as instructive. (After all, even that old Stalinist Brecht hoped for a felicitous synthesis of "pleasure and instruction.").
Unfortunately, I had to confront the fact that some postmodern critics posited a superficially similar notion of pedagogy. I eventually dismissed the postmodern infatuation with pedagogy as arid, narcissistic and, in the final analysis, a dead end. A lot of these postmodernists, besotted with Derrida and his disciples, also invoke playfulness and opposition to rigid hierarchies. But I found their methodologies pseudo-radical since, whether consciously or not, they're more interested in the cleverness of their own deconstructive sleight of hand than in genuine social change or anti-authoritarian pedagogy.
I'd have to say that my notion of anarchist pedagogy was closely tied to a belief in the efficacy of self-emancipation, a vital, actually essential, component of anti-authoritarian politics. Political and personal autonomy are of course closely intertwined. If you read accounts of great periods of revolutionary upheaval -- e.g. the Paris Commune, the Spanish Revolution -- masses of people who once felt powerless became responsible for their own liberation. Similarly, anarchist filmmakers -- Vigo comes to mind -- are involved, perhaps unwittingly, in both self-emancipation and the creation of movies that allow viewers to emancipate themselves in a fashion that might be termed, if the terminology is made flexible, "pedagogical." In a parallel vein, activist filmmakers who chronicle social ferment also help to dissolve the boundaries between teaching others and teaching themselves. It would obviously be silly to assert that children don't need help from adults in learning to read and performing basic skills. But the fundamental goal is to eventually efface artificial divisions between teacher and student. A film like Zero for Conduct, which is such a perfect synthesis of lyrical beauty and anti-authoritarian critique, might enable us to pursue such a goal. And, in a more utilitarian fashion, non-fiction films are often a spur to action; the recipient of knowledge becomes more than a passive consumer.
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