Curriculum and Curation: film programs as a methodological research procedure between cinema and education

ABSTRACT

In this text, we bring together the notions of cinema, education, and formation (Bildung) to discuss pathways and methodological procedures in educational research with films. By exploring conceptual connections between the curriculum, as conceived and practiced in education, and curation, as developed in the artistic and cinematographic realms, we retrace the journey of a doctoral research experience. Ultimately, we propose the establishment of film programs as a methodological gesture capable of inspiring alternative ways of researching between cinema and education.

Keywords:
Cinema; Education; Formation; Curriculum; Curation.

RESUMO

Neste texto, aproximam-se as noções de cinema, educação e formação (Bildung) para, a partir de seus entrecruzamentos, discutir caminhos e procedimentos metodológicos na pesquisa educacional com filmes. Apostando em algumas relações conceituais entre o currículo, conforme pensado e praticado na educação, e a curadoria, como desenvolvida no âmbito artístico e cinematográfico, recupera-se o itinerário de uma experiência de pesquisa de doutorado para, por fim, propor a constituição de programas de filmes como gesto metodológico capaz de inspirar outras formas de pesquisar a intersecção entre o cinema e a educação.

Palavras-chave:
Cinema; Educação; Formação; Currículo; Curadoria

RÉSUMÉ

Dans ce texte, les notions de cinéma, d'éducation et de formation (Bildung) sont réunies pour, à partir de leurs intersections, discuter des pistes et procédures méthodologiques de la recherche pédagogique avec le cinéma. En investissant dans certaines relations conceptuelles entre le curriculum, tel qu'il est pensé et pratiqué dans l'éducation, et le commissariat, tel qu'il se développe dans le domaine artistique et cinématographique, l'itinéraire d'une expérience de recherche doctorale est récupéré pour, enfin, proposer la constitution de programmes de films comme un geste méthodologique capable d’inspirer d’autres manières de rechercher l’intersection entre cinéma et éducation..

Mots-clés:
Cinéma; Éducation; Formation; Programme d’Études; Curation

Introduction

If we imagine a room with chairs lined up, side by side, arranged so that they all face a large rectangular object suspended on a wall, strategically positioned at eye level for whoever sits in this room. Is it a classroom or a movie theater? Preserved the differences between these two; blackboard or screen, desk-chairs or armchairs, lights on or lights off, students or audience, teachers or films, chalk or projector, etc, would it be, without an intention of considering them as equivalent or synonymous, too strange to think of schools and cinemas as correlated institutions?

Or we may ask: beyond school space what exactly is education in broad terms? And, in this vein, what is cinema? Can we also consider cinema as an educational, formative, pedagogical practice? Could we say that cinema is also a space and time for education?

Perhaps this discussion seems to have been solved. At least since the early 2000s, there have been many writings, in the field of Brazilian research in education, about the pedagogical uses of the media, as well as the pedagogies of gender and sexuality exercised by cinematographic films. Moreover, since the beginnings of cinematography, passing through several movements and historical periods, producers and filmmakers have demonstrated that they recognize that “cinema has an intrinsically pedagogical vocation, with regard to cultural dissemination and the formation of the spectator” (Alegria; Duarte, 2008, p. 61). That means that films are often made and distributed with the direct and explicit objective of educating the public.

Even so, in certain niches, stating that cinema is an educational practice may seem to depreciate the artistic status of cinematographic works, as if the educational label indicated a lower category of audiovisual production (that of the educational film genre). Calling film educational may also over emphasize what is mere entertainment, spectacle, mass culture, therefore, the opposite of educational, instructive, edifying.

Furthermore, it often seems that the comprehension of the link between these two areas is too narrow, as if talking about cinema and education necessarily implied the use of films in the classroom, it means, cinema as a paradidactic and instrumental tool, of an illustrative nature, to be used in an environment that is legitimately established as educational: the school.

In this article, therefore, we intend to briefly present how the methodological procedures were constructed in a doctoral study that studied the intersection between cinema and education based on the relation between curriculum and curation. The research in question, entitled Lesbianidades juvenis em filmes coming-of-age: espaços de formação e tempos de amadurecimento entre o cinema e a educação, was conducted in the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Paraná, and within the scope of the Grupo Interdisciplinar em Linguagem, Diferença e Subjetivação (GILDA), at the same university.

To do so, firstly, we will conceptualize cinema, education and formation and then we think about the relation between curriculum and curation, as well as its possible developments within the scope of establishing research procedures with films. In the end, as part of the effort to illustrate our arguments, we bring, as an example, the methodological path followed by the research mentioned above.

Cinema, education and formation

Often understood as a synonym for the term education, the notion of formation, for the discussion proposed in this text, becomes an important starting point, as in a certain sense, the link between cinema and education - or, more broadly, among art, culture and educational processes - can be put into perspective through the idea of Bildung and its developments in the literary and, later, cinematographic fields.

In the productions of theorists as diverse as Humboldt, Hegel and Nietzsche, the concept of Bildung is notorious and it’s not univocal or unambiguous; it’s the opposite, it’s a term that contains ambivalences and contradictions. Initially developed in the context of German Enlightenment and neo-humanist thought of the 18th century, as well as marked by the civilizational ideals of Modernity, the classical ideal of Bildung refers to selfdetermined processes of aesthetic-moral formation that would lead and elevate the individual, through education and culture guided by reason, to humanity - understood, in this scope, as a universal, unique and total model. Thus, for this classic conception of formation, formation means both “giving shape and developing a set of pre-existing dispositions” (Larrosa, 2003, p. 12) and shaping the individual “to an ideal model of what a “human being” is that was fixed and assured in advance” (Larrosa, 2003, p. 12).

Although it is not the objective of this text to make a broad and detailed review of the tradition of this thought, its different meanings over time and by the most diverse authors who have dedicated themselves to it, it is interesting to realize that if, on the one hand, the understanding of formation expressed by Bildung has a prescriptive character, on the other hand, it is also usually synthesized by maxims links related to the selfcultivation and to the movement of becoming what one is, highlighting, as its fundamental aspect, autonomy in the individual capacity to self-form. For classical Bildung, this worked in correspondence with the conception of an a priori and substantial self, that is, a self that would already be given, which it would be up to us to discover so that, finally, we could become who we are.

It is especially from this dimension related to self-education that the concept of Bildung has functioned, over time, as an “axis of connection in discussions about education and culture, which is not limited to the specificities of each concept, but which makes the issue of the human formative process broader, not restricting it to formal school education” (Tommaselli, 2017, p. 93). This is because, in this frame of reference, aesthetic sensitivity and contact with art are recognized and valued in their formative aspect as they are configured as forms capable of leading the subject to himself (Larrosa, 2003).

For example, in the literary field, at the end of the 18th century, between 1795 and 1796, the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe published volumes of the book Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years, considered the paradigmatic work of the literary genre Bildungsroman, which in its nomenclature, it combines the terms bildung and roman, and both can be translated as formative romance. As explained by Thiago Bittencourt de Queiroz (2017), the definitions regarding this narrative genre, exemplified from Goethe's book, concern the journey of an ordinary young man towards maturity - understood as a consequence of a pendulum formation process, it means, a formation that occurs not only from the individual's relations with the world, but also from the individual's actions about himself. More than highlighting the effects of the hero's actions in the world, formative novels thus emphasize the inner transformations experienced by the protagonist based on the facts, events and happenings that act on him (Marcello; Seibert, 2017).

In this journey of transformation, the protagonist, generally a bourgeois boy, represents a new man and a new time, in which selfdetermination towards his own development, in constant negotiation with social environments, results both in his moral perfectibility as well as their integration into society - which is, in turn, also transformed and improved through the aggrandizement of its members. From this point, we can understand that the notion of formation in these novels is fundamentally linked to the idea of progress as a futurity model, the way it is produced and it sis founded by modern thought. In line with this idea and with the pedagogical concerns of 18th century Europe, in addition to their thematic and narrative characteristics, educational novels are also marked, as Fabiana Amorim Marcello and Lisli Seibert (2017) point out, as a kind of didactic intention, aimed at education and training of readers themselves. Literature is, in this scenario, taken as a formative and pedagogical instance.

Almost two centuries later, in a historical context in which, once again, the contours of youthful subjectivity were socially (re)negotiated, young characters also emerge in cinema as protagonists of coming-of-age or formative stories. In the second half of the 20th century, more specifically in the post-war United States, along with the rise of the American way of life, towards which consumption as a practice given to happiness, an intricate conception of a specific understanding of freedom as a nationalist ideal, becomes paradigmatic - the notion of teenager (young individuals aged between 13 and 19) acquires a new status: a potential consumer market, triggering a process of juvenilization in the cinema industry.

Hollywood classics from this period, such as the film Rebel without a cause (1955, directed by Nicholas Ray), with its iconic bad boy protagonist - a rebellious and socially misunderstood young man, facing family, love and law conflicts - are milestones in the establishment of teen films, teen pictures or even teenpics, a genre of which, finally, coming-of-age films are a kind of subcategory.

Popularized especially from the 1980s, with some of the most famous examples (in Brazil, becoming true classics of the Afternoon Session) the films directed by John Hughes, such as Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985) and Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986), the coming-of-age cinema has, in its genealogy, the formative novels of the 18th and 19th centuries as a particularly interesting point of passage, because, as Marcus Vinícius Mazzari points out, we can think of narratives “that put characters on stage in search of self-understanding, in a process of maturation, improvement, learning, in an educational confrontation with reality” (2018, p. 29), as are the cinematographic narratives of maturation, based on the continuities - and, certainly, also the ruptures - established in relation to the literary tradition of the Bildungsroman.

Since its emergence, this cinema of youth protagonism began to operate, as proposed by Luís Antonio Groppo (2004), youth dialectics. This is due, in part, to the fact that the films reproduce conceptions from adult perspectives regarding the young universe. On the other hand, since they target young people themselves, they also enable young people to identify and create meanings about themselves, also functioning as a formative instance of subjectivities.

In the wake of this understanding that emerges from the notion of Bildung, therefore art like formal education, it would be part of what makes up the formation of subjects. This understanding finds echoes in the idea that cinema, like school, also educates, teaches and forms ways of being, thinking, feeling, looking and relating to things in the world.

But taking these distinct instances - formal education and the arts or, more specifically, school and cinema - as forming subjectivities allows us to risk yet another approach. If “all pedagogy consists of the appropriation of different texts in a specialized communicative order” (Larrosa, 2003, p. 13), related to school education, the central artifact that organizes and represents both the meanings of space and time as the content and knowledge to be transmitted, there is the curriculum (Veiga-Neto, 2004), an invention from the 16th to the 17th century, that can be understood as:

[...] the portion of culture - in terms of content and practices (teaching and learning, assessment, etc.) - that, because it is considered relevant at a given historical moment, is brought to school, that is, it is schooled (Williams, 1984). In a way, then, a curriculum closely corresponds with the culture in which it was organized, so that when we analyze a given curriculum, we can infer not only the contents that, explicitly or implicitly, are seen as important in that culture, but also, in what way that culture prioritizes some content to the detriment of others, that is, we can infer what were the choice criteria that guided teachers, administrators, curriculum designers, etc. who put together that curriculum. This is why the curriculum is located at the intersection between school and culture (Veiga-Neto, 2002, p. 4 apudVeiga-Neto, 2004, p. 166).

If there are many perspectives from which one can think and formulate curriculum - of which we can highlight, at least, the traditional, critical and post-critical aspects -, as stated by Tomaz Tadeu da Silva (1999), a question seems serve as a primary trigger for any of these theories: after all, what to teach? This question involves, in turn, the development, explicit or not, of selection criteria and its justifications, effectively unfolding into a second question: why is it more important to teach this rather than that?

Taking care to not broaden the concept too much, at the risk of weakening the “ strongly pedagogical and political character that the school curriculum has for society” (Veiga-Neto, 2004, p. 169), maybe we could transpose it to the field of cinema the idea of something that selects and organizes content that is important or not for a given culture? Taking a little more risk: would the curatorial process be the creation of a kind of film curriculum?

Curriculum and curation: some approaches

Curation. There are those who say that etymologically the term derives from curare, from the Latin “to be careful with; take care of”, that can be translate into the responsibility of looking after and defending the interests of artists/filmmakers and works of art/films (Alves, 2010, p. 43). There are also those who propose a reflection based on the Tupi-Guarani: curare, a poison with a paralyzing effect, used by Amerindian ethnic groups in hunting activities. Empirically, however, curatorial activities are usually understood as the practices involved in setting up and supervising art exhibitions or cinema screenings, which include the processes of research and selection of works, conception of the expography or film program, mediation between works/artists and the audience, among others.

In summary, then, curation can be understood as a creative and imaginative practice of constructing and proposing discourses based on which a certain set of artistic works will be presented and offered for public appreciation. As occurs in the composition of the school curriculum, the choices about which contents will or will not be included and in what forms they will appear are inseparable from cultural components and, even more specifically, from the power relations that are present and that constitute the culture in question.

In this sense, if the curriculum reflects a part of the schooling contents and is understood as relevant in a given historical context, curatorial practices in cinema can be understood “as a gesture of historical inscription of works and authors” (Cesar, 2020, p 141). In both cases, whether in the school curriculum or in film programming, a game of recognition and appreciation is put into operation through which certain content/films/filmmakers become canonical to the detriment of content/films/filmmakers that are excluded and/or categorized as having less (or no) relevance. As proposed by Amaranta Cesar, “from this observation, one can infer the notion of curation and programming as an agency of visibilities and erasures” (2020, p. 142), more or less like the questions what to teach? and why this instead of that? They also end up operating in the processes of creating curricula in education.

The proposal for dialogue between curation and education, in fact, is not new exactly. Luiz Guilherme Vergara, professor, researcher and curator in visual arts, coined, back in 1996, the proposition of educational curation, for example, in order to bring together activities traditionally understood in art museums as distinct instances, namely: curatorial actions and those in the education sectors, generally associated with mediation work. For Vergara (2018), educational curation would be a way to unleash the powers of art as a cultural action, that is, as a catalyst for the relations among art, individual and society.

Expanding the reflection beyond exhibition and museum spaces, more recently, in the book Cinema-Educação: Políticas e Poéticas (2021), organized by Cesar Leite, Fernando Omelczuk and Luiz Augusto Rezende based on works presented between 2018 and 2019 at the Thematic Seminar of Cinema and Education of the Brazilian Society of Cinema and Audiovisual Studies (Socine), the idea of educational curation also began to be thought of in its close relation with cinema.

Considering that educating - as well as researching, documenting, defining, organizing, gathering and exhibiting films - is part of the set of actions involved in the curatorial process, the articles in the book oppose educational curating “to the instrumentalization of cinema through education or through teaching, going beyond a definition of curation simply as a choice of the best and most appropriate works for training and educating the gaze” (Leite; Omelczuck; Rezende, 2021, p. 22).

They also emphasize that there resides, in the gesture of sharing films and placing them in relation to each other - whether or not this gesture occurs in formal teaching spaces - a formative character that, at the same time as it educates gazes and subjects, it is not limited to a single objective or purpose, therefore challenging its own limits as a pedagogical device.

If the notion of educational curation, therefore, certainly helps us to think about educational practices that go against the “curricularization” of cinema - in the sense of a fixed, pre-determined and hierarchical establishment of what is intended for a selection of films should or can teach -, as said, perhaps we can also imagine, from another perspective, ways in which education (including curricular) can make use of some of the paths used by curatorial thinking to provide other forms of understanding the processes of subjective formation. To this end, it is also necessary to highlight, in addition to their points of convergence, the aspects that differentiate, to a greater or lesser extent, curation of the curriculum, as understood in its traditional meaning.

In the field of education, the process of selecting what will appear in a given curriculum brings with it many other questions, including who will graduate from it. That is, if “a curriculum seeks precisely to modify the people who will 'follow' that curriculum” (Silva, 1999, p. 15), then every curriculum also presupposes an ideal model of the subject to be trained, in the way that:

At the heart of curriculum theories is, therefore, a question of ‘identity’ or ‘subjectivity’. If we want to resort to the etymology of the word ‘curriculum’, which comes from the Latin ‘curriculum’, ‘race track’, we can say that in the course of this ‘race’ that is the curriculum we end up becoming what we are.

In everyday discussions, when we think about curriculum we only think about knowledge, forgetting that the knowledge that constitutes the curriculum is inextricably, centrally, vitally, involved in what we are, in what we have become: in our identity, in our subjectivity (Silva, 1999, p. 15).

It would not be coherent to assume that a curatorial selection of films specifically aims to change the people who will watch that program. Unlike schools, with their investigation and evaluation processes, there are not even instruments that can indicate whether, after viewing a curated selection of films, such or what changes have occurred in a given audience. Nor would it be reasonable to disregard, as already explained, the potential that cinema certainly has to transform who we are. Nor would it be honest to assume that intentions linked to the ways in which screenings of a selection of films can touch, affect, make people think or raise questions for their audience, ultimately transforming them, are not present in the curatorial processes.

In countless ways, what guides - to a greater or lesser extent - the assembly of a film program is the understanding that the experience with cinema is crossed by the production of subjectivities, although fortunately the beauty of this process also lies in the unpredictability of how each person will (or will not be) changed after contact with a film; in other words, who each of us will become as a result of this encounter. This unpredictability, contrary to the normalization and standardization practices encouraged by the curriculum, is also present in the subjects who are trained by the school.

The problem, therefore, seems to concern another point. If the curriculum, in its traditional understanding, is organized in a way that tries to guarantee, in the end, that a certain subject ideal is its result - even if this claim is inevitably doomed to fail -, this does not imply saying, in other terms, that does training, in the way it is programmed by this curriculum, seek to ensure univocal and tight meanings to what is taught and learned through it? Does it not also imply the guidance of pre-determined positions relevant to the ways in which its content should be transmitted and received throughout the educational process?

It would not be possible to demand the same from the relation with the arts. Unlike the positive discourse of traditional pedagogy, artistic languages do not intend to “illuminate and clarify, explain, account for things, say everything” (Larrosa, 2003, p. 75). Thus, films always preserve - even if some more, others less - some mystery and the possibility of productions that are not immediately exhaustible in meaning. Therefore, in the ephemerality of its gesture of selecting and arranging a set of works, the curator operates the proposition of meanings that are known to be fleeting and not totalizing. As Cauê Alves (2010, p. 47) explains:

The syntheses that the curator makes are always provisional and necessarily unfinished, as they do not preclude new perceptions and taking positions. The work of art is an open totality and the curator, like the critic, without ceasing to express his point of view, needs to maintain the work in its primordial condition of also being open to the world.

In other words, at the same time that curation - through research, specific theoretical approaches and the assembly of a given program of works - provokes meanings within a film and/or a selection of films, it is expected that it also “it gives space for other meanings to emerge” (Alves, 2010, p. 46), configuring itself as an experimental work, of an essayistic nature (Ferreira, 2010). Since then, another idea of formation seems to be able to take shape, since the meanings are not previously instituted and exhausted, nor they are the subjectivities that can be formed prescribed and guaranteed. Thus, if for classical Bildung, for example, the self was prior to formation - which, through an itinerary (thus, a curriculum), would aim to lead the subject to himself -, here we can think of a notion of formation for which the self is always in the process of being invented, not configuring itself as something that would already be given and which, therefore, it would be reached through a pre-determined path.

However, it is important to highlight a caveat. By highlighting such divergences and incompatibilities between traditional curricular training and curatorial practices, we do not intend to contrast one thing with another, as if school training were necessarily a prescriptive experience, while relations with cinema would always and in any case be more open to emergence of the unknown, the unpredictable. It is the contrary: evidently, in its ways of managing visibilities and erasures, it is often the sameness that reaffirms itself in film curation.

The bet we try to launch in this work is that, from the encounter between one thing and the other, perhaps less normative and more inventive ways of practicing both curriculum and curation may emerge (and why not research in cinema and education as well?), enhancing its countless possibilities of producing meaning and difference. It is, therefore, about thinking about training processes in education and cinema that are less linked to a pre-established script of development and conclusion - or, in the words of Jorge Larrosa (2003, p. 12), “something like a plural and creative becoming, without pattern or project, without a prescriptive idea of its itinerary and without a normative, authoritarian and exclusionary idea of its result”. This methodological stance, so to speak, is also capable of finally inspiring our ways of research.

Curation and research procedures between cinema and education

Based on the considerations already made here, it seems possible to think, in summary, of curatorial practices as a provocative process of affection and production of meaning. In other words, placing it in the specific context of cinema curation, it is possible to think of the processes of selecting, arranging and offering films for the public to experience as an opening for the emergence of contingent possibilities of meaning, of irruptions of both affective and thought, which concern not the films themselves, understood as autonomous entities enclosed within themselves, but the relations that are made possible to weave among films, audiences and world(s).

But what connections can we suggest for our research procedures between education and cinema based on what can be deduced from curatorial practices?

Aligned with the perspective that “education is no longer limited to being a synonym for school, since several instances of culture today are concerned, in the most different ways, with producing, training, ultimately, educating subjects” (Marcello; Fischer, 2011, p. 506) and that, therefore, “in a world in which multiple and differentiated images cross our daily lives in a unique way, our ways of researching in education are equally expanded , they change” (Marcello; Fischer, 2011, p. 506), in 2011, Fabiana de Amorim Marcello and Rosa Maria Bueno Fischer wrote the article Tópicos para Pensar a Pesquisa em Cinema e Educação. Surrounding the discussion about the construction of research objects (which enable a link between cinema and education), the authors list, as a kind of agenda, points related to the investigation of cinematic images in the area of education, as they explain:

[...] for us, researching cinema and education implies operating with filmic narratives, constructing an object in such a way that, at least, three major dimensions are covered: the complexity of the specific languages which cinema is made, the public to what the materials in focus are intended (or the subjects the narratives talk about, or even the group we wish to deal with or to whom we propose certain investigative action); and, lastly (and not least), philosophical, historical, cultural, aesthetic or pedagogical questions that, although possible to be thought of based on films or interventions with cinema, carry with them questions about the present time (Marcello; Fischer, 2011, p. 506).

According to their argument, the division into these three categories of operation (language, subjects involved and questions about/for the present time) is merely didactic, since the dimensions are interconnected, and aims to contemplate a research relation that looks at cinema not in search of what is behind its images, words and sounds, but that, in another way, takes cinema as an experience of looking. In other words, this research is carried out based on the understanding that “cinema looks at certain themes of today, and, in doing so, invites and teaches us to look at them in another way” (Marcello; Fischer, 2011, p. 507).

More than establishing a meeting between cinema and education, this perspective also outlines, in a certain sense, a theoretical-methodological orientation regarding a way of looking at and analyzing cinematic images. Research by constructing cinema as an object, but also, above all, without losing sight of cinema as an experience - that is, with openness and attention to what touches, moves and affects us in a film, what also transforms and makes us who we are when researching.

In the same direction, Ismail Xavier (2008, p. 17), when asked by the journal Educação & Realidade about how to think about event-images, answered that it is an analytical exercise that moves away from a “reading pragmatic that generates recognition of what is already given”, that is, an attempt to verify codes already established a priori. On the contrary, in the author’s terms:

[...] what counts - aesthetically, culturally and politically - is the relation with the image (and the narrative) which does not immediately create certainty about ‘what it is about’ and launches the challenge to explore nonencoded from experience. [...] In this context, it would be illusory to assume that the productive and enriching relation with disconcerting images and narratives is based on the exclusive strength of a knowledge of forms and an analytical repertoire that enables us to receive an 'adequate' reception, because here, as in other areas, almost everything depends on posture, availability, a way of interacting with images (and narratives), which have to do with all dimensions of our personal formation and social insertion. Reception must be an (original) event that is not reducible to this idea that the ‘expert’ (knower of codes) holds the key to reading films in the most competent way (Xavier, 2008, p. 17).

It is in this same sense - of seeking to keep films alive as experiences - that we are inspired by reflections on curricular/curatorial processes and their relationships with formation and the field of education to think about putting together film programs as a methodological research procedure. Thus, the differentiation that we have tried to establish between outlining a curation in and for research instead of delimiting, for example, a corpus for work resides in the distance that is imposed between taking a film merely as materiality to be analyzed and starting from what it happens between researcher and film, hence also between cinema and education, in that fleeting space-time of the encounter as a force that makes us think precisely between places.

Understanding that, when we watch a film, it is the other films that we think about - because, just like a book, which apparently refers to the themes it deals with, in fact, “it is with the other books that it relates” (Larrosa, 2003, p. 29) -, it is through recognizing the attraction between films and placing them side by side, in friction, that the fundamental methodological gesture of this way of research is made. If, as curatorial processes teach us, “when one work is next to another, in our field of vision, or even in memory, they communicate and contaminate each other, not just one giving meaning to the other, but allowing the emergence of meanings through their approximation” (Alves, 2010, p. 55), perhaps it is precisely this ability to provoke provisional and contingent meanings from the approximation with and between films that research in cinema and education can also make use of.

Another aspect that emerges in the context of these concerns is autobiographical writing as a methodological procedure, a way of writing and inscribing a self as this self is constituted and transformed in research, it means, a self that will become doing in experience, in the relation with/between films, with/between memories, with/between studied texts, with/between stories simultaneously shared and made their own. As José Kuiava, Jamil Cabral Sierra and Juslaine de Fátima Nogueira Wiacek point out:

A ‘singularity research’ is at stake because we understand that singularities are what drive resistance, collective transformations. With Tadeu, Corazza and Zordan (2004), we share that ‘far from being regressive, singularity reaches its peak in acting together, in the plurality of voices. The collective does not harm individuation, but pursues it, increasing its power immeasurably’ (p. 63). And the reverse also needs to be made clear, as the option for individuation, in the sense of a history of the self, cannot harm the perspective on the history of the collective. On the contrary, to paraphrase the quote, this individuation ‘increases immeasurably’ the power of the collective, stories increase ‘immeasurably’ the power of History. In fact, there is no History, there is nothing that we can describe as historical without the stories of the self-pulsating there (Kuiava; Sierra; Wiacek, 2009, p. 171).

Thus, it is a self that is not prior, but intrinsic to researching and writing, forged in its depths, an effect; a self, finally, that combines, as expected, also others, also areas of inseparability between the individual and the collective.

Taking self-writing as a path to composing research between cinema and education can also be seen in the light of so-called narrative research which, as defined by Clandinin and Connelly (2015, p. 32), pursues “narrative as a phenomenon under study and as a method of study”. This connection also occurs because, as the authors highlight, the autobiographical narrative, fundamentally the process of narrating the experience of research, is the central point and trigger of narrative research:

When narrative researchers are in the field, they are never there as (disembodied) minds recording someone's experience. They are also experiencing an experience, namely: the research experience that involves the experience they want to investigate. [...] The experience of the researcher's narrative is always dual, it is always the researcher experiencing the experience and also being part of the experience itself (Clandinin; Connelly, 2015, p. 120).

Although Clandinin and Connelly, notably, have as a reference the carrying out of research involving life stories, their assertions - or at least part of them - are capable of inspiring investigative propositions that are woven through the narrative of the experience with films, that is, interacting with their images and the stories they tell. As narrative researchers, who “outline possible encounters and connections” (Clandinin; Connelly, 2015, p. 101) between the varied and multifaceted narratives with which they become familiar in the field, a research that is inspired by curatorial processes, as we understand them, also focuses with particular interest on the possibilities of connection and dialogue among different films, on the way in which experiences with some open up spaces to pull the threads of thoughts and affections left by the experiences with others.

It was following this itinerary above that the procedures of the doctoral research mentioned in the introduction of this text, about the relation between cinema and education, were carried out methodologically, from which we bring elements to exemplify the possibilities about which we are arguing. Based on the composition of a program of films more or less linked to coming-of-age codes and, to some extent, belonging to a lesbian audiovisual culture (although its protagonists do not always explicitly declare themselves to be so), the aforementioned research dealt with to discuss the ways in which spatial and temporal regimes (school, but not only) are activated and articulated in cinematographic narratives of the maturation and formation of juvenile lesbianities.

In line with what was previously stated, the study in question did not rely, as a starting point, on the prior delimitation of a set of films to be analyzed. On the contrary, the film program (understood, therefore, as the empirical material of the research) was designed as a work in process based on the search for films that we had not seen yet, the memories of those already seen and the chance of unexpected finds, which emerged through nominations or the fortuitous event of coming across an unknown film at a show, festival or streaming platform.

Even so, concomitantly with the composition process the curatorial framework for the study and as a way of facilitating and nourishing it, we carried out a search of films and videos with potential interest for research, taking into account their problems and their main axes of discussion. As a result of this search, we first came to a list of more than 70 fictional feature films that narrate the process of maturation and formation of a protagonist characterized, to a greater or lesser extent, as a dissident from the cisheterosexual norm.

Evidently, not all of these films - or better said, only a very small portion of them - appeared in the final scope of the research. The methodological approach, also conditioned by the possibilities of access or not to the works, was delimited as, in the process of watching and watching again the films, some of their images and narrative constructions, as well as the affections and insights they aroused in us, they worked like magnets, attracting other productions (several of them, made in other formats or categories, such as short films and documentaries) for the curatorial selection of the research.

Finally, 12 films were selected to compose the discussions presented, being organized and articulated based on two main ideas, about the spaces of formation and times of maturation, as triggered by the approximation between the works and outlined by the dialogues interwoven among narratives, images, languages and theoretical productions. The short and feature films were thus arranged into two programs or sets, each of which was assembled and discussed by an essay. For this article, we only bring the programs, without their respective essays, as what interests us here is precisely to point out how this methodological organization that intertwined curriculum and curation in research between cinema and education came about.

Chart 1
Program 1: Juvenile Heterotopias and the Erotic in the Lesbian Continuum. Source: Made by the authors.

OLIVIA Olivia France, 1951, 96’
Adapted synopsis: At an all-girls French boarding school at the end of the 19th century, Olivia, a newly arrived English student, becomes involved with the director, Mademoiselle Julie. Jealous and suffering from severe migraines, Mademoiselle Cara, also a teacher at the school, does not take kindly to her colleague's relationship with the young students.	Direction: Jacqueline Audry Screenplay: Dorothy Bussy, Colette Audry e Pierre Larroche Production: Jean Velter Photography: Christian Matras Art direction: Jean D’Eaubonne Assembly: Marguerite Beauge Music: Pierre Dancan Cast:: Edwige Feuillere, Marie-Claire Olivia, Simone Simon, Yvonne De Bray, Suzanne Dehelly, Marina de Berg e Lesly Meynard
QUEBRAMAR Quebramar Brazil, 2019, 27’
Official synopsis: Young lesbians from São Paulo travel to a deserted beach to ring in the New Year. There, they build a physical and emotional refuge for their bodies and affections through friendship and music. In this safe, mutually caring environment, they can relax.	Direction: Cris Lyra Screenplay: Cris Lyra, Camila Gaglianone, Raíssa Lopes, Lana Lopes, Yakini Kalid, Elis Menezes e Nã Maranhão Production: Camila Gaglianone Photography: Cris Lyra e Wilssa Esser
	Assembly: Beatriz Pomar e Henrique Cartaxo Music: Obirin Trio e Nã Maranhão Cast: Raíssa Lopes, Lana Lopes, Yakini Kalid, Elis Menezes e Nã Maranhão
UMA PACIÊNCIA SELVAGEM ME TROUXE ATÉ AQUI Uma Paciência Selvagem Me Trouxe até Aqui Brazil, 2021, 26’
Official synopsis: Tired of loneliness, biker Vange decides to cross the Rio-Niterói bridge to a lesbian party, where she meets four young people who share their home and affections, in a meeting of generations.	Direction: Érica Sarmet Screenplay: Érica Sarmet Production: Lívia Perez, Silvia Sobral e Érica Sarmet Photography: Cris Lyra Assembly: Clarissa Ribeiro e Bem Medeiros Music: Natália Carrera Cast: Zélia Duncan, Bruna Linzmeyer, Camila Rocha, Clarissa Ribeiro e Lorre Motta
A PRIMEIRA MORTE DE JOANA A Primeira Morte de Joana Brazil/France, 2021, 91’
Official synopsis: Joana, 13 years old, wants to find out why her great-aunt died at 70 without ever having a boyfriend. When facing the values of the community where she lives in southern Brazil, she realizes that all the women in her family keep secrets.	Direction: Cristiane Oliveira Screenplay: Cristiane Oliveira e Silvia Lourenço Production: Aleteia Selonk e Cristiane Oliveira Photography: Bruno Polidoro Art Direction: Adriana Nascimento Borba Assembly: Tula Anagnostopoulos Music: Arthur de Faria e Gustavo Breier Cast: Letícia Kacperski, Isabela Bressane, Joana Vieira, Lisa Gertum Becker, Emílio Speck, Pedro Nambuco, Rosa Campos Velho, Graciela Caputti e Roberto Oliveira

Chart 2
Program 2: Outing, Happiness and Excellence in Guiding Lesbian Youth for the Future. Source: Made by the authors.

VOCÊ NEM IMAGINA The Half of It Estados Unidos, 2020, 104’
Official synopsis: A shy girl helps the school's athlete win over a girl they both secretly like. They end up connecting and learning about the nature of love.	Direction: Alice Wu Screenplay: Alice Wu Production: Alice Wu, Anthony Bregman e M. Blair Breard Photography: Greta Zozula Assembly: Ian Blume e Lee Percy Music: Anton Sanko Cast: Leah Lewis, Daniel Diemer, Alexxis Lemire, Enrique Murciano, Wolfgang Novogratz, Catherine Curtin, Becky Ann Baker e Collin Chou
2 GAROTAS IN LOVE The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love United States, 1995, 94’
Adapted synopsis: It's the story of two schoolmates, very different from each other. Randy is a lesbian from a lower economic class who lives with her aunts, also lesbians. Evie is a rich, popular girl who has a boyfriend. A series of comical events brings them closer and closer, until the relationship becomes quite intimate.	Direction: Maria Maggenti Screenplay: Maria Maggenti Production: Dolly Hall Photography: Tami Reiker Assembly: Susan Graef Music: Terry Dame e Tom Judson Cast: Laurel Holloman, Nicole Parker, Maggie Moore, Kate Stafford, Sabrina Artel, Toby Poser, Nelson Rodríguez e Dale Dickey
AMIGAS DE COLÉGIO Fucking Åmål Sweden/Denmark, 1998, 86’
Official synopsis: In the small town of Amal, Sweden, there live two girls. Elin is the most popular girl in school. She is tired of the peaceful routine of the place where she lives and doesn't want to follow the path of most women she knows: becoming a lonely housewife. Agnes is the new kid at school. Shy, she doesn't have many friends, but she has a platonic passion for Elin. When Agnes' family insists on throwing a 16th birthday party for the young girl, she is sure it will be a failure. Until Elin appears at her door and, unexpectedly, gives her a kiss because of a bet with her sister. Then begins a series of identity crises between young women, who don't know how to accept what they really feel.	Direction: Lukas Moodysson Screenplay: Lukas Moodysson Production: Lars Jönsson Photography: Ulf Brantås Assembly: Michal Leszczylowski e Bernhard Winkler Cast: Alexandra Dahlström, Rebecka Liljeberg, Erica Carlson, Mathias Rust, Stefan Hörberg, Josefine Nyberg, Ralph Carlsson, Maria Hedborg, Axel Widegren, Jill Ung e Lisa Skagerstam
LESSONS IN BABY DYKE THEORY Lessons in Baby Dyke Theory Canada, 1995, 3’
Adapted synopsis: Where do young lesbians hide who are neither in the school corridors nor on television screens? TJ Cuthand, just 16 years old at the time, uses his video camera to imagine possible whereabouts and, who knows, convince other teenagers to come out of the closet too. Filming toys, notebooks, sweets and his own body, Cuthand creates, in his first video, playful and ironic images for the feelings of isolation and loneliness that permeate all queer childhood and adolescence.	Direction: TJ Cuthand Screenplay: TJ Cuthand Assembly: TJ Cuthand Cast: Carla-Marie Powers, Lyndsay Baillie e TJ Cuthand
AINDA NÃO Ainda Não Brazil, 2017, 21’
Official synopsis: On the eve of Marina's birthday, her mother visits her in São Paulo and prepares a family party. They seem distant, but it's because the girl has a secret.	Direction: Julia Leite Screenplay: Julia Leite Production: Amanda Pó Photography: Pedro Andreetta Assembly: Arhur Paulino Cast: Gilda Nomacce, Clara Gallo e Shaya Lambert Bihari
PÁRIA Pariah United States, 2011, 86’
Adapted synopsis: Alike, a young lesbian from the Bronx, tries to forge her own identity while also having to negotiate the different expectations that her family, friends and school place about her.	Direction: Dee Rees Screenplay: Dee Rees Production: Nekisa Cooper Photograph: Bradford Young Assembly: Mako Kamitsuna Cast: Adepero Oduye, Kim Wayans e Aasha Davis
MOSQUITA E MARI Mosquita y Mari United States, 2012, 85’
Adapted synopsis: Yolanda, also known as Mosquita, is a diligent student. After being assigned to help Mari, the troubled new student, with her studies, she starts to get closer to her classmate. Despite the differences, an intense connection is established between them.	Direction: Aurora Guerrero Screenplay: Aurora Guerrero Production: Chad Burris Photograph: Magela Crosignani Assembly: Augie Robles Music: Ryan Beveridge Cast: Fenessa Pineda, Venecia Troncoso e Laura Patalano
AS MIL E UMA Las Mil y Una Argentina/Germany, 2020, 120’
Official synopsis: Iris meets Renata in a housing project in Argentina and feels inexplicably attracted to her. Together, they face hostility and prejudice	Direction: Clarisa Navas Screenplay: Aurora Guerrero Production: Diego Dubcovsky, Lucía Chávarri e Carolina Penelas Photography: Armin Marchesini Weihmuller Assembly: Florencia Gómez García Music: Claudio Juárez e Desde el Barro Cast: Sofia Cabrera, Ana Carolina García, Mauricio Vila e Luis Molina

Some of the films featured - such as Olivia, Quebramar and A Primeira Morte de Joana - begin on the roads. Others, like The Half of It and Pariah, end there. Almost everyone, at some point, evokes the idea of displacement, transit, travel or circulation. Understanding that, in these works, the notions of maturation and formation are linked not only to the understanding of a subjective crossing between phases, but also to the passage between spaces through time and time through spaces, the main question of the research mentioned before - it means, how do coming-of-age cinematic narratives relate spatiality and temporality to the processes of maturation and formation of juvenile lesbianities? - was able to find some answers, as well as launching so many other discussions.

A remote boarding school, an almost deserted beach, a nightclub and a house connected by a bridge. Distant, but still nearby, a small coastal town, where giant weather vanes point towards the sky. The rapprochement between these different and distant - temporally and geographically - scenarios made it possible, in the essay launched by the program Juvenile Heterotopias and the Erotic in the Lesbian Continuum to outline the understanding that certain spatial regimes enable body experiences in which shared pleasure, sensuality and the expansion of senses lead young lesbians to encounter themselves and others, to intergenerational exchanges and to be enchanted by the things of the world.

In the essay based on the second program, Outing, Happiness and Excellence in Guiding Lesbian Youth for the Future, leaving home for university, coming out of the closet, leaving school - movements sometimes treated as rites of passage or moments of crucial and irreversible transformation in the course of a life story - give rise to some questions: what different times the past - that is, what is left behind, that place that is no longer occupied - can inaugurate in the lives of young lesbians racialized and/or peripheral? And what futures, from the present, also emerge for them?

Even though they contemplate a certain multiplicity of formats, stories, aesthetic proposals and production contexts, the composition of these programs did not aim to create a panorama or a retrospective of cinema starring young lesbian characters, nor did it intend to highlight achievements that could be understood as especially significant or important for the constitution of a lesbian story in coming-of-age films. What interested us, in each of the sets presented, were the ideas that one film was able to trigger over the other and the senses that, together, allowed us to explore.

Final considerations

By reaching this point, which is not the end, but a point that opens up to dialogue and new experiments, we hope to have, in some way, contributed to the field of studies in cinema and education. In our case, we seek to argue, initially, how the notions of cinema, education and formation are intertwined in order to enhance methodological procedures in working with films. Next, we try to think about how the relation between curriculum and curation, both in terms of what brings them together and in what puts them in different places, can contribute to the creation of new methodological paths of investigation.

Finally, based on a research experience, we try to show, from a procedural point of view, how the creation of a film program can perhaps reverberate in ways of research that not only take cinema as an experience and thinking form, but that seek to make the movement of bringing films together, arranging them into sets, an exercise in thought. This methodological gesture is capable, we believe, of inspiring us and launching us into other ways of researching between cinema and education.

Availability of research data:

the dataset supporting the results of this study is published in this article.

This original paper, translated by Thuila Farias Ferreira, is also published in Portuguese in this issue of the journal.

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Edited by

Editor-in-charge: Gilberto Icle

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  15 Jan 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  31 July 2023
• Accepted
  12 Sept 2023