ShaunHuston filmblog

It's Spring "Break" for the Oregon University System this week, which mostly means faculty get a few days to prep for their Spring term courses. To that end, I have established a list of the films I'll be screening in my Geography and Film class on Spout. I choose a different theme each year, and this year the theme is "immigration and the experience of place."

My interest here is in how filmmakers have represented the experiences of immigrants in different times and places and the ways in which immigrants and immigration contribute to place-making. Even though I teach film within a social science, I do not use movies simply to illustrate social themes. I also endeavor to teach students film theory and criticism. My text of choice is James Monaco's How to Read a Film. Monaco's focus on semiotics works well in a social science context as it raises questions about film practice and social contexts.

Monaco devotes an entire, extended chapter to semiotics, which I cut up into small pieces for students. Each term I make more or less use of other chapters depending on the individual films I've selected and what the theme is. This term some of the films, The Godfather, part II, for example, are ways of discussing issues like the relationship of films to novels and the role of music.

In choosing what to screen, I had a number of criteria in mind. I wanted to provide students with a diversity of stories and representations of immigrants in the U.S. At the same time, I wanted to emphasize the diversity of contemporary experiences, although not to the exclusion of historical examples. These two choices are motivated by the tendency in U.S. politics and in the mainstream media to treat immigration as purely a matter of Mexicans streaming across the border, and to treat immigration from places other than Mexico as part of the distant past somehow. In choosing Lone Star as the primary film for discussing the U.S. and Mexico, I want to draw attention to the longstanding nature of that particular "mobility." I also selected a range of films set in Europe to get students thinking about immigration in a wider context and to guard against the idea that only the U.S. is somehow unique in its attraction as a destination state.

I am using Doreen Massey's essay on "A global sense of place" to frame our discussions, which, as I note here, is available free online in an archive of Marxism Today. I've also selected a variety of background readings on specific immigrant populations and patterns of immigration, and some articles that address theoretical issues related to transnationality, mobility, and globalization.

In the past I've relied on introductory lectures to provide the geographical grounding for the term, and I'm still going to do this, but this will be the first time that I will have a consistent textual reference to use. I plan on using class time on day one, we meet once a week, to do a collective reading of Massey's essay.

I also look forward to this class with a sense of optimism and excitement. Sometimes that carries through the term, and sometimes it doesn't. Usually I tip the scales in favor of the film studies aspect of the class. This year I'm going to be asking students to do some heavier lifting on the geographic side as well. I can only hope that my currently fairly small group will respond well to this challenge.