DAVID THORBURN: One of the ways
that the study of literature
and the study of film
differs from the study
of technical things, and
the reason I teach it,
is that it belongs to
everyone, that it's
valuable for everyone.
Not everyone needs to know
about quantum mechanics.
But I believe everyone should.
And if they don't, I feel
they're impoverished.
Know how to read a good
story, enjoy plays,
know how to enjoy the movies.
So I feel that what
I'm giving my students
is, in some sense, something
even more valuable to them
because it will be
something that they'll
have with them for their whole
lives and their whole careers.
One of the things MIT
students often do not realize,
is that a very
large number of them
do not end up making
their living in the areas
in which they majored.
But all of them end up
wanting to go to the movies.
All of them end up
with the capacity
to read and enjoy literature.
And I hope that coming
out of my classes,
they'll do those
things with greater joy
and with greater intelligence.
One of the things
I hope all of you
will have when you come
out of this course,
is a much more confident sense
of how to look at movies,
not to spoil your enjoyment
of kicking back and looking
at a stupid Schwarzenegger
entertainment
if you want to, not to make
you feel guilty about that,
but to make you be able
to tell the difference
between something like that and
what I'll call a work of art.
Implicit in my film
course is an admiration
for a certain kind
of achievement,
and admiration for a
certain kind of artist,
and artist like Jean
Renoir, the great filmmaker.
If I were deprived of the
pleasure of seeing Boudu again
for the rest of my
days, I would never
forget that grass, that
dust, and their relationship
to the liberty of a tramp.
The point of this
exercise is to remind you
of the immense
power, the potency,
of even a single camera move.
Think what that 180 degree pan
suggests as Bazin brilliantly
argues for us.
So the conclusion then is that
the visual style of a film,
or of certain films anyway,
can express a moral vision.
And by moral vision, I
don't mean moralistic,
what's didactic right
and wrong, but a vision
of having to do with the
values and assumptions
you make about the
nature of the world.
There's a moral vision
implicit in the tentativeness,
the hesitancy, the
retarding impulse
to dwell and linger on
things in Renoir's camera,
and in the basic habits
of poetic realism
that you will see
brilliantly embodied
in the film you're going to
watch tonight, Grand Illusion.
Because I want to set up, as a
candidate for their admiration,
and alternative to Wall
Street, an alternative
to entrepreneurial genius.
I admire Jean Renoir's genius,
Or Orson Welle's genius,
or James Joyce's
genius universes
more than I admire
what entrepreneurs-- I
respect what entrepreneurs do.
But I am in awe of
what great artists do,
and of what great doctors do,
while we're on the subject.
Which, I'm uneasy about
the extent to which even
within MIT's
culture, we've become
so preoccupied by
what we might call
commercial or financial success,
instead of the kind of lasting
success that great art, or
the practice of medicine,
or the practice of
nursing, or dare I say it,
the practice of teaching,
might also embody.
