Introduction
Jean Luc Godard claimed that film is an art that allows us to think about things. However, the presence of film in existing study plans does not coincide with its unquestionable cultural importance.
Film undoubtedly has a relatively short history compared with other arts and expressions of culture. But in just over a century, what began as popular entertainment at fairs, has become an art form, with its periods, genres and masterpieces that now form part of the cultural heritage of humanity.
Furthermore, as Alain Bergala says in The Cinema Hypothesis: Teaching cinema in the classroom and beyond (L´hypothèse cinema. Petit traité de transmission du cinema a l´école et ailleurs), if cinema is not taught in schools, a privileged place for transferring knowledge, art and culture in general, most probably will never come to enjoy this art form.
With the aim of combining these ideas, the Laboral Cinemateca Film Classroom is a learning resource for the classroom and the school communities of the educational centres in Principality of Asturias, aimed at ensuring a basic “alphabetised” display of films.
The Film Classroom is made up of twenty basic and essential concepts of the cinematographic language, explained clearly and concisely, each illustrated with a fragment of a film, followed by a synopsis of this and then completed with the director’s bio-filmography. Therefore, by explaining the selected twenty basic concepts, students are introduced in some detail to twenty relevant films from the history of cinema and twenty directors. Furthermore, while explaining each concept, other films and directors are mentioned.
In addition, the twenty fragments chosen to illustrate the basic concepts of film language enable a possible periodisation of the history of film to be built and an elementary classification of film genres in as far as each film selected to illustrate each fragment, belongs to a specific historical period and genre.
The Film Classroom is offered entirely in Spanish, English, French and Asturian, with the aim of extending the potential scope of the teaching method to other subjects.
The contents of the Film Classroom have been expressly developed by Fernando de Felipe Allué and by Joan Marimón Padrosa, two renowned and prestigious specialists in the teaching profession and in the field of film criticism with a wealth of experience in cinematography.