THE CHILDLIKE STRENGHT OF PHILOSOPHIZING AND OF CINEMA (DOCUMENTARY) AT SCHOOL¹

ABSTRACT:

This article seeks to deepen theoretical studies and inspire practical educational experiences in the fields of philosophy and cinema (practiced in schools). In it, we problematize the predominance of the so-called learning paradigm. From the philosophical thought studied here, the idea of childhood does not concern a period of human life but a dimension of "intensive temporality" (aion). It is a childhood that can be experienced by both children and adults. Thus, we suggest as a hypothesis that, in order to make cinema at school, outside the logic of learning, it is necessary to recreate a childhood time that suspends hegemonic devices and invites students to experience this aionic time. To this end, we work Jean-François Lyotard's (1993) notions, when he proposes different concepts and places for childhood; as well as with works by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2014) and Jacques Rancière (2005), when they think about school from its Greek etymology schole, which means "free time." To meet the childhood of cinema (documentary) in schools means to meet the childhood of cinema's thought, a disruptive, affirmative force that makes the world in school.

Keywords:
cinema; school; time

RESUMO:

Este artigo busca aprofundar estudos teóricos e inspirar experiências práticas de formação para os campos da filosofia e do cinema (praticado em escolas). Nele, problematizamos o predomínio do chamado paradigma da aprendizagem. A ideia de infância, sob o ponto de vista do pensamento filosófico aqui estudado, não diz respeito a um período da vida humana, mas a uma dimensão de “temporalidade intensiva” (aión). Trata-se da uma infância que pode ser experimentada tanto por crianças como por adultos. Assim, sugerimos como hipótese que, para fazer cinema na escola, fora da lógica da aprendizagem, faz-se necessário recriar um tempo infantil que suspenda os dispositivos hegemônicos e convide estudantes a experimentarem esse tempo aiônico. Para isso, trabalhamos com noções elaboradas por Jean-François Lyotard (1993), quando propõe conceitos e lugares diferenciados para a infância; bem como com obras de Jan Masschelein e Maarten Simons (2014) e Jacques Rancière (2005), quando pensam a escola a partir de sua etimologia grega skholé, que significa “tempo livre”. Ir ao encontro da infância do cinema (documentário) nas escolas significa encontrar-se com a infância do pensamento do cinema, uma força disruptiva, afirmativa que faz mundo na escola.

Palavras-chave:
cinema; escola; tempo

RESUMEN:

Este artículo pretende profundizar en los estudios teóricos e inspirar experiencias de formación práctica para los campos de la filosofía y el cine (practicado en las escuelas). En él, problematizamos el predominio del llamado paradigma del aprendizaje. La idea de infancia, desde el punto de vista del pensamiento filosófico aquí estudiado, no se refiere a un período de la vida humana, sino a una dimensión de “temporalidad intensiva” (aión). Se trata de una infancia que puede ser vivida tanto por niños como por adultos. Así, sugerimos como hipótesis que, para hacer cine en la escuela, fuera de la lógica del aprendizaje, es necesario recrear un tiempo de infancia que suspenda los dispositivos hegemónicos e invite a los alumnos a experimentar ese tiempo aiónico. Para ello, trabajamos con nociones elaboradas por Jean-François Lyotard (1993), cuando propone diferentes conceptos y lugares para la infancia; así como con trabajos de Jan Masschelein y Maarten Simons (2014) y Jacques Rancière (2005), cuando piensan la escuela desde su etimología griega scholé, que significa “tiempo libre”. Encontrarse con la infancia del cine (documental) en la escuela significa encontrarse con la infancia del pensamiento cinematográfico, fuerza disruptiva y afirmativa que hace mundo en la escuela.

Palabras clave:
cine; escuela; tiempo

SCHOOL BETWEEN CHILDHOOD AND CINEMA

This article seeks to deepen theoretical studies in a field between philosophy and education, without establishing any gap or hierarchy between these fields, placing philosophy into a dialogue with other studies in the interface cinema-education. This meeting has been increasingly demanding closer relations with a certain philosophical thought, mainly regarding the practice of cinema in schools. In this context, the idea of school also gains relevance. It not only determines the territory from which this study starts but also unveils the multiple thoughts that establish such a notion, thus demanding some conceptual definition of its pedagogical shape. Therefore, we mainly refer to the works of Belgian pedagogues Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2014) and the French Jacques Rancière (2005) to think about school from its Greek terminology schole, “free time." We also connect childhood and school from the inspiration of Paulo Freire (2015). In this direction, we distance ourselves from the so-called learning paradigm.

The interface cinema- education is central in the research conducted by one of the article's authors during his PhD. Among the unfolding possibilities pointed out in this study, Pereira (2021) highlights the importance of deepening the connections between philosophical and childhood studies. Regarding childhood, we refer, for instance, to what Jean-François Lyotard (1993) says when seeking to displace childhood of an age range; under this perspective, the idea of childhood is not a period of human life but an “intensive temporality” (aion), differing from more well-known temporalities, as is the case of chronos, which designates the continuity of a successive time, or kairos, which refers to the time of “opportunity” (Kohan, 2004). Therefore, it refers to seeking a childhood that children and adults can experience, which can also be thought of considering certain worldly things, such as cinema. Because of that, meeting cinema childhood means finding oneself in a childhood of thought, that is, practicing it as a decisive inaugural experience (Bergala, 2008). If this perspective does not interest cinema with its aesthetic and market logic, it has been fundamental for educational practices that oppose the predominance of the learning paradigm. According to the unfolding pointed out in Pereira (2021), thinking about how cinema can enter schools (mainly public ones) is a responsibility that requires the suspension of existing bonds between cinema and the world so as to experience cinema in a childlike manner as if it were the first time. Therefore, it demands a philosophical and childlike position and temporality.

In this direction, in fragment 52, Heraclitus (Kohan, 2004) connects the temporal world aion to power and childhood. In fact, the aionic time is a childhood power, that is, in childhood time there is no succession or consecutiveness but "intensity of duration”:

He [Heraclitus] says that “aion is a child playing draughts, the kingly power is a child's."There is a double relationship stated: time-childhood (aion - paîs) and power-childhood (basileíe - paîs). This fragment seems to indicate, among other things, that the time of life is not only an issue of a numbered movement and that this other way of being time seems like what a child would do. If the temporal logic follows numbers, the other plays with numbers (Kohan, 2004, p. 54-55, author’s highlights).

Several contemporary works affirm other concepts and places for childhood without associating them with the number of years in a life. Among them are the works from Jean-François Lyotard (1993), Giorgio Agamben (2005), Gilles Deleuze (1992), and Walter Kohan (2015a). Lyotard (1993) affirms philosophy as "a childhood of thought." Agamben (2005) argues that learning a language, even after forty millennia of the species homo sapiens, continues to be strongly connected to a childhood condition. It is a thought that understands childhood as a “condition of human experience […] childhood is a lack and the search for language” (Kohan, 2004, p. 59).

With Deleuze (1992), we find temporality to be different in two ways: the becoming and the history (p. 210-211). History is a set of conditions of an experience and an event instead of the experience itself. That is, history is the succession of effects of an experience or event that has a place outside history. Hence, the conditions and effects would be beside history, while the event itself, the creation, would be beside the becoming; that is, on the one hand, is history, the Chronos, the continuous, and, on the other, the discontinuous, the detour: the becoming and the aion. From this perspective, experience and event are temporalities that interrupt history and revolutionize it, creating a new history and a new beginning.

The childhood practice of philosophy is not necessarily an issue of chronology but different ways of experiencing childhood and, through it, philosophy […] that is why it is possible to say that philosophy is almost an exercise of childhood, as well as childhood is a way of philosophy. Because of that, we can say that philosophy does not necessarily go to school to educate children but that school and those inhabiting it find their childhood (Kohan, 2015a, p. 55-56, our translation).

To bring some materiality to the considerations drawn here, we will use in this article an experience we followed since the second semester of 2018, when an art teacher and a group of high school students from a public school in Rio de Janeiro did a documentary with people living in the streets². With this, we do not intend to answer the questions posed by the study but to reflect, from the materiality of practice, on other theoretical clues raised by the approximation among philosophies, childhoods, and cinema.

In the scope of the process that we followed, the teacher prepared a curatorship of movies by filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho to offer references to the group about the intended activity. The invitation to chat with the students arose in the context of these films' exhibition. When realizing that that moment would represent the beginning of the preparations to make a documentary, we were compelled to ask if we could follow the process, considering the research we were developing at the time in a PhD course. The students' film would be presented as a result of a school activity on human rights issues. The methodology is related to the questions provoked by this study: How does one follow a process when using a research method that seeks to discard expectations and predictability? The solution was to exercise the "suspension" of these "needs" and be involved by wandering affections, opening up to filming processes - although taken by a certain angst of all that could, finally, result in nothing for the ongoing research.

Resuming the temporality thought for childhood by the cited authors; it is worth stressing that in this study, we will seek to experience childishly not only the clues released by the film done by the school group but also by the idea of a school that gives existence to the film. When thinking about cinema as a school, the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard provides clues that the school has an obsession with the characteristic of the restart, the wait, and the suppression: "Each school year brings with it the simulacrum of the first time (it is the 'back to school'), a start from zero. A zero of not-knowing, a blackboard zero” (Daney, 2007, p. 111). Thus, cinema childhood seems to be strongly related to a certain childhood affirmed by the school. The French teacher and filmmaker Alain Bergala (2008) says that the establishment of a "decisive inaugural experience" requires, in the act of filming, the involvement of sacredness that a child or teenager lends to action when doing it "for the first time” (p. 210). Nonetheless, we know that the idea of school as a place that welcomes childhood as a beginning and the possibility of mistake and wandering to “start again” escapes objectivation and predestinations hegemonically affirmed (Larrosa, 2017; Masschelein; Simons, 2014; Pennac, 2010).

Normally, we think about school as something given, whose interventions and transformations to improve them would happen from our arrival and good intentions (Kohan, 2015a, 2017, 2020; Kohan; Martins; Netto, 2014). However, a question emerges: Is school already made or is it made when inhabiting it? Do we arrive at an already-made school, or is it to be made? In the case of philosophy practice, is it conducted in a school already given or does school take shape as philosophy happens in it when inhabiting it? This question, expressed here in different ways, proposes an exclusive or inclusive disjunction, that is, can two parts of a disjunction be true? What are the conditions for a school to practice philosophy or for the practice of philosophy to do the school? Can cinema intervene specifically and decisively in this making? Can cinema make school when inhabiting it with philosophy? If so, what are the conditions for these (epistemological, aesthetical, and political) forms of intervention in cinema?

In the scope of the crossings that inhabited the first meeting between the students, the teacher, and the group of people living in the streets, we highlight school as the most vigorous element. As it is known, the school has a consolidated rhetoric: an image that inspires trust, regardless of the arguments presented. There are no doubts about what a school (re)presents, mainly when the agenda is human rights. Even though it is a theme generally subjected to intellectual debate, it is possible to affirm that nobody in the group approached doubted this agenda's presence and meaning. Even the people who asked if they would be paid to participate in the film probably did it because of rhetorical suspicion: those bringing this agenda do not normally bring money.

The group, very attentive and eager to experience the wandering typical of the documentary practice (which partially differs from the fiction process)³, that is, those who are interested in suspending any predictably about the film defended the questions made with the following argument: “We don't know what the movie will be; we want to record conversations with you and discover how you can live the situation you do. We are curious about that". At this moment, a positive point was explicitly established between the two groups. The “reason of equals” was enacted. There was no promise. A type of start from ground zero inhabited that meeting and a common contradiction was used as a starting point: the equality between intelligences (Rancière, 2005). Even though we know that schools and universities generally attend these spaces with well-defined intentions about "data collection" for studies, showing the film as a type of opening to "not knowing" was an important step to (de)construct the idea of a school that controlled the meeting and, supposedly, made it clear that the proposal intended to make public the world and the reality of these people. Would that be a condition to make school? Would the cinema be intervening specifically and decisively in the establishment of this condition and, therefore, this making?

Following the clues given by authors such as Jan Masschelein, Maarten Simons (2017), and Jacques Rancière (2005), it is possible to think a school different from the hegemonic one. Masschelein and Simons (2017) considered school from its Greek etymology schole, “free time." For these authors, “the most important act that the ‘school does’ regards the suspension of the so-called natural unequal order” (p. 26). This means establishing a time and space separate from the time and space of society and family: a material and spatial displacement of students outside the "unequal" social and economic order lived and, at the same time, "within the luxury of an equalitarian time” (p. 26). The authors argue that this “suspension” of the current social order is precisely what bothers and provokes, until today, a certain condemnation of school, whose effects express attempts to modify, paralyze, or tame it towards making the free time a productive time, thus halting school's democratization power. In his turn, Jacques Rancière (2005), when discussing intellectual emancipation in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, helps to notice the procedures of Public Instruction as devices to build equality as inequality. The inequality of intelligence is, according to the author, the principle that supports this device: “A backward peasant does not have the intelligence of a republican leader," though people's sovereignty, as well as the equality of rights and duties, are Republican principles (p. 180).

As there is no way to decree the equality of intelligences, the requirement for the endless compensation of this social backwardness is the instruction of the ignorant (by wise ones), “the instruction of the empirical people, programmed by the representatives of the sovereign concept of the people” (p. 180). Thus, so that the hierarchical relationship imposed by the principle of equality does not endanger the project of progress, it is permitted, through people’s instruction that they learn to:

to “use wisely" its regained rights […]. Public Instruction is the secular arm of progress, that is to say, the way to equalize equality indefinitely. […]. Public Instruction, the instituted social fiction of inequality as lateness, is the magician that will reconcile all these reasonable beings (Rancière, 2005, p. 181-182).

With these authors, it is possible to infer- against appearances - that, when thinking about access and social rights, the dominant idea of school is summed up to the deepening of inequalities. This seems to be the principle (without end) that the capitalist society makes prevail. On the contrary, we bet that school - and its utopia (of democracy and equality) - is an exercise that can happen immediately and not wait one hundred years to be enacted; it overflows the limitations imposed on it and escapes the threats, thus maintaining the resistance alive in time.

In Elogio da escola [School Praise], Jorge Larrosa (2017) treats school as a “pedagogy-form” that is “in itself” the materialization of a utopic belief: one that does not promise a place to be reached or an objective to attain (school as a future project), but that is, nowadays, the starting point from which "each one can learn everything."

What school form does (if it works as a school!) is the double movement of bringing someone to the position of being able (and, therefore, transforming someone into a student), which is simultaneously an exposure to something from the outside (and thus act of presentation and exhibition to the world) (Larrosa, 2017, p. 22).

A dimension renewed in time stands out in school; a school able to reinvent itself, the role of a very powerful element that is inherent to it, what solidly establishes a side of its problematic contradiction: the offer to every and any human being of "being able to," through the school experience. This power, different from the “promise” of Public Instruction, rejects the predetermination of any destiny and, at the same time, allows anyone the capacity to start. Equality is no longer a promise but a starting point. This is the possible exercise, updated by those who live it. That is, the experience of equality as a start - in Greek society or nowadays - is the device that updates and keeps this very particular school dimension alive. This common non-hegemonic point of school opens gaps, fissures, in what escapes from the general and dominant framework of the promise. This common point (that suspended the relations with the “productive” world) is what makes a school a school, differentiating itself, for example, from other teaching and learning activities due to its starting power: school is the place of childhood, a force to start.

Is affirming equality as a condition to start a way to experience and situate school in a childlike position and power? Would it also be sheltering aion as the reigning time of school (even if temporarily) instead of the current omnipresence of chronos? Could cinema participate in this childlike positioning and power of school? Why not offer the possibility for students to experience equality and contact with the image-in-movement as if it were the first time? Under which rules can this game of image (and sound) production happen in school? Under which pedagogy-form can this pedagogy effectively build itself as a childlike power of beginnings?

As seen, the experience of equality experienced in the meeting between the groups could have surrendered to the control of the consolidated rhetoric of the hegemonic school - it is a powerful traversing able to establish certain discourses a priori, such as those that would take shape in the movie produced. In a sense, considering what is known about school, this would be a way towards the easiest path and a way to guarantee the ongoing process. Affirming not knowing how the movie would be was a gesture that, on the one hand, exposes the group to an apparent fragility, also exposing the own idea of school that supported the proposal. This perspective has even authorized some participants to give up. On the other hand, it inevitably established a new start to this encounter among those that remained, effectively constituting a corpus of common interest in that process.

However, the affirmation of not knowing should not be understood here as a rule applicable to all films; it is not a method but an effect of an attitude or sensibility (or ethos) required by the practice of documentaries. It is also in this direction that we might think the encounter with reality through cinema as something able of producing a type of start (or childhood?). Faced with the relationships that could be established and negotiated (with no promises) between both groups, it was possible to experience something as if it were the first time as if another school was starting: in fact, the cinematographic practice became, in some measure, another way of making school. In other words, an experience of equality created the conditions to start school, unfolding its positions and childlike power. In this start, would there also be an opening for the typical thought of a philosophical experience?

Nevertheless, we should add that the approximations made here among philosophy, childhood, school, and cinema are not free from a certain belief in cinema itself, in school, and childhoods as potentially transforming elements and/or creators of worlds. Following the clues by Adriana Fresquet (2013), we are faced with the idea that the concepts of belief and doubt almost get confused in the studies of the interface cinema-education, affirming other intensities in the pedagogical scenario: “What movement is it, if not the same one that supports the relationship between teacher and students with knowledge?” (p. 24). About this topic, the author adds fundamental suspicions that help us to think:

The first doubt could lie in cinema itself, as something absolute, whose kindness, in itself, could handle the school content and the activities needed as a formula to solve the contemporary problems of basic education. A second doubt would tension school as that ideal space, in which art could, in fact, transgress, question the order of current educational models that often muffle projects and the participants' wishes. The third doubt could be connected to the child that, in many cases, was used to consuming endless hours of televisual soups, which little by little anesthetized the capacity to move, the will to explore and search for other things to do (Fresquet, 2013, p. 25).

Before ending this section, the clues given by Paulo Freire (2015) also help us to think the political unfolding for this school of child cinema or for the cinema to childlike inhabit school. Dialoguing with A. Faúndez, Freire defends the importance of the question and a question that is concrete and committed to the transformations of the life conditions outside school (Freire; Faúndez, 2015). They add that asking is a childlike action needed in adult political practices. It is so necessary that they celebrate its presence in a revolution:

On my first visit to Managua in November 1979, speaking to a large group of educators at the Ministry of Education, I said that the Nicaraguan revolution seemed to me to be a revolution in its infancy — in its infancy, not in the sense that it was newly arrived, but by the evidence it was giving of its curiosity, its restlessness, its delight in questioning, its not being afraid to dream, its desire to grow, to be creative and to bring about change. (Freire; Faúndez, 2015, p. 234-235).

In a Freirean sense, the school of childlike cinema that we want to affirm here is a childlike school due to its love of asking and dreaming, affirming in its questions and dreams, and the wish to transform. Its starting power unfolds in a curious, restless questioning concerned with the dominant way we inhabit the world. It insistently asks why the world is like this and, at the same time, dreams, no less persistently, about other worlds.

PHILOSOPHY AS THE CHILDHOOD OF THINKING (OR CLUES FOR A PHILOSOPHICALLY CHILDLIKE PEDAGOGY OF QUESTION)

really think, think about oneself, make of philosophy an exercise of placing oneself in question demands, at each moment, to go until the most hidden infancy of thought, to start thinking everything again as if we had never thought it, as if, at each time, we were thinking for the first time. Thus, childhood is almost a condition for philosophy.

(Kohan, 2015b)

We can say that philosophy has many starts. In one of them, among the Greeks, the figure of Socrates emerges childlike. In this childhood, philosophy also offers itself to those who want to inhabit it as a childhood of thinking (Kohan, 2015b). It was Socrates who, through his questions, found meaning in what seemed unthinkable, for example, that “ignorance and wisdom are not opposites” (p. 219). This means that, though in the adult world of wise people ignorance appears as a void, in the child world of philosophy, ignorance might seem like knowledge; that is, the wisest is the one who does not know: "Ignorance stops being a lack, a void, and insufficiency to become a power and an engine of possibilities” (p. 219). Ignorance (as knowledge) reveals that “everything can be in a different way” and, this, as Socrates, philosophy is born as childhood: “Fragile and powerful; open and provoking; foreign and hostile” (p. 219).

Socrates affirmed he was nobody's master but was, in fact, accused of corrupting young people with his knowledge, considering that, differently from the educators at the time, he did not teach - as the polis demanded - content knowledge. In this sense, he inaugurates a childhood not only of philosophy but also of education: Socrates “creates another teacher, another relationship with those who learn and another possibility of teaching” (Kohan, 2015b, p. 220). In this way, "free time" - schole (school) - appears in his thought as one of the conditions to be within philosophy.

In the Socratic way, under infant and foreign forms of expressing oneself in a community, philosophy is completely atopic: it seeks to ignore all things, question them, unlearn what we know, affirm the value of not knowing and search for answers, with all our power, questions that cannot be answered. This practice of philosophy is unbearable when legislating a state of things. It is not and does not let itself be knowledge; it is only a disturbing relationship with well-known knowledge. At the same time, it does not teach- no knowledge has something to teach-but provokes learning about itself and the forms of shared lives. Socratic philosophy is too childish and unbearable for any specialist in ruling life (Kohan, 2015b, p. 221).

Because of that, a certain philosophy - through the questions it poses, the uncertainties, and the detours it proposes - is seen as incapable of forming children for the “real” world (Kohan, 2015b, p. 222). This is the “Socrates paradox” (philosophy/childhood): something that has no place in the polis but is, paradoxically, what the polis needs the most and what it cannot stand because it affirms "childlike" what it cannot and does not want to hear (p. 222).

From another perspective, Jacques Rancière (2005) shows how Public Instruction carries a form of this same paradox in the scope of modern education. School, until the end of the Middle Ages, was seen as a secondary form of education, considering that the main model was life itself and the work process. When becoming a dominant form in modern society, at least in the West, a paradox established itself together with the social purposes of Public Instruction: while the bourgeoisie was revolutionary, the expansion of school offer to the whole population made sense because it contraposed the feudal domination; but when the question was no longer surpassing the old regime - because the bourgeoisie consolidated itself in power -, the focus became stopping the revolutionary process; if not, there was the risk of an equalitarian regime, void of class division. Once in power, the perpetuation of the existing order interested the bourgeoisie, and school became then a problem (a contradiction) with which society needs to deal today. Hence, school grows as a dominant form of education in modern times and, at the same time, goes to a second plan, that is, has its specific role emptied by a series of tendencies that will affirm other forms of education, thus softening the contradictions of capitalist society.

So, Socrates had started a form of this paradox: he affirms a childlike figure in thinking and in life, a certain idea of school, and questions the "promise" of ways of thinking and practicing education at the time. The polis demands a Socrates but also cannot live with him and sentences him to death. Michel Foucault (2011) shows that with Socrates, two philosophical lines emerge: one - tensing the established politics - is assumed as a "way of living," and the other is affirmed as a "cognitive exercise." As if philosophy could not overcome the tension of the first in itself, with time, the second overlaps the first. Thus, most of those we nowadays call philosophers are associated with this dominant tradition of conceiving philosophy as a cognitive and intellectual activity. However,

[Socrates] is a childlike philosopher, a childhood friend. He creates a childlike way of inhabiting philosophy as a life form, as a style of living, asking, questioning, bothering, speaking a strange, foreign, uninhabitable language…Lives the philosophy and lives childhood… (Kohan, 2015b, p. 222).

Besides the Greek Socrates, many Socrates were born in Latin America. Simón Bolívar himself called his master Simón Rodríguez, the Socrates of Caracas. We highlight others, such as the Socrates from Pernambuco, disturbing and disquieting not only due to his insistent valuing of questions and questioning in educational practices (Freire; Faúndez, 2015), but also to his educating life. Paulo Freire is clearly part of the first line of philosophy, according to which philosophy cannot be dissociated from the affirmation of a way of life (Kohan, 2019). Paulo Freire’s life and his restless wandering against oppressive practices witness this way of practicing philosophy.

In these two traditions of philosophy, some authors paid special attention to childhood. In the second strand, we highlight the writings from J.-F. Lyotard (1993). In one of his most emblematic books (The Postmodern Explained to Children), philosophy is described as "self-education", a practice that associates thinking with restarting. This book ends with a singular observation about the relationship between childhood and age. Here are the book's three last phrases:

Maybe there is more childhood available to thinking at thirty-five than at eighteen, and more outside a degree course than in one. A new task for didactic thought: to search out its childhood anywhere and everywhere, even outside childhood. (Lyotard, 1993, p. 126).

This passage affirms two senses for childhood: it can be beyond childhood itself, that is, outside the chronological age delineated as childhood, and it can inhabit us regardless of the chronological phase we live (Kohan, 2015b). Hence, Lyotard (1993) thinks about this non-chronological childhood (that inhabits us) and, among the various meanings given to the idea of childhood, he proposes the concept of infantia: “an unspoken that works as a condition of possibility in order that something meaningful could be said.” (p. 223). As a latent condition situated behind each word spoken by any human, infantia can be taken as a form of “inhuman”. Lyotard (1989) distinguishes the inhuman into two types, presented in opposition:

It is indispensable to keep them. The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development (among others), must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage. […] The system rather has the consequence of causing the forgetting of what escapes it. But the anguish is that of a mind haunted by a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating it delirious but also making it think - if one claims to exclude it, if one doesn’t give it an outlet, one aggravates it (Lyotard, 1989, p. 10).

Hence, there is the inhuman in the system, called “development," "competitiveness," "representative democracy," "market," and "free world," and the inhuman that presents itself as a state of the human soul, established through birth and forced to abandon itself. This second form of inhuman is the passage from non-being to being, from which we are all born and nobody has chosen (Kohan, 2015b). Therefore, considering its relationship with time, we have the first form of inhuman towards productive time: efficiency time- which follows a continuous, extensive, and irreversible line -, a form that denies other forms of being human, which does not happen through time but establish another time to get lost in non-linear paths: a circular time, of endless return, and present. This second form emerges from a condition that follows it: no human chose to be born, and because of that, each human being carries a certain inaugural abandonment, initial - not chosen- of non-being.

The distinction established by Lyotard (1989) makes us deal with childhood from its most urgent need: to affirm the shape of the inhuman who is silenced, denied by the dominant form of inhuman. Following the clues left by the author, we can see childhood as a form of "sensible time." This means that "the capacity to feel pleasure and pain, affectivity, aesthesis, is independent of its possible articulation…. This time before the logos is called infantia” (Lyotard, 2006, p. 109) - here, the term “before” does not mean previous in a chronological line but a first time, initial, inaugural: a condition. Lyotard, thus, invites us to think of childhood as something that affirms itself in us, reminding us of an indeterminate condition. In this sense, “reminding it in writing, in art, in education, constitutes a power, a style, a political form of witnessing” (Kohan, 2015b, p. 224).

CAN CHILDHOOD FIND ITS PLACE IN SCHOOL?

School as pedagogy-form does not welcome the first form of inhuman, that of evaluations, progressive Years preparing childhood for a better future; but a school inhabited by another time dimension: school as schole, freed time, aionic, a school of presence in the present, and not an instantaneous present, a hinge between the past and the future. Nowadays, a school that seems necessary and impossible.

Perhaps school is exactly the place - much or more - of the impossible than the possible. Making this school (in the present) is a tentative gesture. Masschelein and Simons (2014) think this school from a distinction between what is understood as scientific investigation and what they call e-ducation investigation⁴. They defend that the exercise of thinking involved in the practice of an education investigation does not require many resources, and does not demand a rich pedagogy but a poor art, a poor pedagogy, which demands patience and attention regarding what the world has to offer instead of offering forecasts. According to them, it would mean implementing an "art of wait," a movement that implies the "presence in the present" (p. 49).

The exercises of thinking are concerned with the present, but the present is not what simply appears as such and before us (as an object of knowledge); it is what is experienced when we are, so to speak, present in the present (attending the present, taking care of it, being attentive), when 'we' insert ourselves and thus also expose ourselves to what is happening. That is to say that the present exists only in as far as someone recognizes or experiences him/herself not as a knowing subject but as a beginner, as an acting subject, ‘splitting up time in forces that work upon him/her’ but that are, thus, in a way broken or interrupted in him/her (as beginning - where s/he stands).” (Masschelein; Simons, 2014, p. 13, authors’ highlight)⁵.

The idea of the present as a gap - which the authors take from H. Arendt - helps to think, together with practices of (documentary) cinema in schools, a certain relation with reality; that is, the people, the landscapes, and the objects, when filmed through a careful experience (of self), instead of taking shape based on the narratives expected about what is known about this reality, based on (hi)stories and biographies, can trigger a cinematographic event - in the sense given by Deleuze (1992) -, a type of detour that does not reveal things themselves or what is expected from them, but an invitation to the experience of filming. That is, this is what can be understood as a decisive inaugural existence (of the student that films) with the image: “The gap exists when the individual is himself there, being attentive to the present, caring of oneself, concerned with him (what is not the same as knowing him)” (p. 13, author’s highlight). Thinking with these authors, it is an exhibition/exposure of these presents so they can “start to mean something or to say about something again” (p. 21).

This perspective not only places people under the condition of “being able to” -as Rancière (2005) would say, that is, everyone is taken as students, acts in their own name, and targets the other for equality -, but also shapes, through this condition, a certain posture and ethos, called experimental ethos. This is an experience that, we suppose, can re-position not only the perspective of cinema practices in school but also the understanding of what the cinema can do when practiced in these spaces.

CINEMA (DOCUMENTARY), A DEVICE TO TRIGGER A MEETING BETWEEN THE SCHOOL AND THE WORLD

The paths delineated by philosophy take us less to safe answers than to new questions: Starting from equality as a power to all and every inhabitant, is this presence of a philosophizing cinema in school desirable/bearable? If it is, we can take school as a place in which cinema starts to speak again, to make new questions, and to create conditions to show other experiences with image and sound so that new decisive experiences, as Bergala (2008) proposes, are effectively inaugurated; or so that the experiences of (documentary) cinema can effectively bring to light other relationships with reality. In a question: Can (documentary) cinema be a powerful partner, a meaningful intercessor of the philosophizing experience in school?

Equality is, at the same time, a condition and a limit to a way of practicing the philosophy of education: on the one hand, it is what, under Rancière’s perspective, allows one to think philosophically about education, but it is also what without which one cannot think education as such. Equality is the axiom of thought, its background, the non-philosophical that opens space for philosophy. The paradox of equality (Kohan, 2003, p. 226).

In this context, something meaningful stands out. The pedagogical and philosophical perspectives presented here highlight the approximations with the thought of a particular cinema genre: the documentary - more precisely one focused on the interaction between the documentary filmmaker and the work field. Or, to use a more current way of thinking this genre: a cinema in tension with reality⁶. In Brazil, a strong expression of this strand can be seen in the work of filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho (1933-2014), an important reference in the field of cinema and with whom one of the authors of this text had the pleasure to work in some movies.

According to Consuelo Lins (2004), a teacher and researcher of Coutinho’s work and also his collaborator, the filming devices he created are ethical and aesthetic guidelines that do not necessarily shape the film "but impose certain lines to capture the material”. Coutinho does not use scripts or programs; "he films from the ‘devices’- filming procedures that he creates every time he gets close to a social universe” (p. 12).

Everything I film is based on capturing the instant. […] we are always filming encounters. The immanence of this moment is fundamental. […] Suddenly, in this interaction, in this dialogue, in this encounter is produced an experience that only makes sense to me if I feel it has never happened before and will never happen after (Figueiroa; Bezerra; Fechine, 2003, p. 216, 219).

Capturing the present is a form of attention. It is turning the instant into a gap. This attention requires an opening to chance and unpredictability. Thinking about attention as a presence in the present, such as suspension, a gap between the past and the future, presupposes recognizing people as subjects of action; experiencing oneself as a beginner, as someone that, between past and future, is inserted in time, splitting it, to let oneself be affected by a present and childishly affirm a beginning.

Coutinho, in particular, knows as few others how to work within this premise to compose a scenario of empathy and inclusion supported in a philosophy of meeting that is not difficult to formulate in theory but whose implementation is rare. It demands a compelling opening to dialogue (that is not enough to program) (Xavier, 2004, p. 181, author’s highlight).

Returning to the school’s film, it is not an exaggeration to say that the experience produced by that meeting triggered a type of attentive attitude (or ethos) in the school group to deal with the stories offered by those people; something that suspended the current social order so that they could hear Larissa: a young women, almost as young as the students, who told them, in a type of glimpse of familiarity (or equality) what it means to give birth to a child violently fathered by her own father. Would not that be a school experience (or class) about human rights that overflows didactic and technological resources, teachers’ experience, access to books, studies, films, lectures etc.? Do these thinking experiences not allow the emergence (through cinema) with other relationships with reality? Would this school group (and interviewed group) not be experiencing something as if it were the first time? As Deleuze and Guattari (1993) would say, what remains from all this is “the thing or the work of art, it is a block of sensations, that is, a compound of perceptions and affections” (p. 213). The experience of meeting is able to promote such knowledge when created based on this relation - among them, as Rancière (2005) would say -we can unmistakably call "emancipating" knowledge. Would this emancipating knowledge not be philosophy itself that, in a school context, becomes a powerful partner, a meaningful meditator for experiential cinema?

Coutinho bases himself on what Xavier (2004) calls the "philosophy of meeting” to film the conversations with people. We take their clues to film, from school, meetings not only with people but also between school and the world; among school inhabitants and images, sounds, objects, questions, concepts, dreams, architectural spaces, and other elements, so as to affirm not a philosophy of meeting” but a philosophy of multiple meetings. In this direction, an “e-ducation investigation” affirms itself (together with the cinema made in school), as proposed by Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2014): an exercise based on philosophy as education, in which (documentary) cinema appears as a protocol, a “device” focuses on triggering multiple effects that emerge from the meeting between school and the world.

In this way, the (film) practice does not seek to reveal something or offer knowledge about the “educational present" but establishes itself as an "exercise of thinking" that practices a "public gesture” and invites everyone to ask and think, “putting to test" all of us. In the terms of this article and the theoretical lines presented here, thinking the practice of cinema in school is, above all, entering schools to "make the school," that is, to recreate a childlike time that suspends the dominant hegemonic devices and, from an invitation to experience an aionic time allows us to question the pedagogical normality, opening up possibilities for the suspension and profanation of the world - something around which we can call a “ pedagogy philosophically childlike (or infant) of question” (Kohan, 2021, 2022).

WHAT CAN CINEMA (THOUGHT OF AS CHILDHOOD) DO WHEN INHABITING A SCHOOL SPACE?

The premise that school should have clear bonds with the world as it is experienced by the young person is on the base of the accusations that deal it as an "island that does nothing", that is, an environment able to alienate youngsters from themselves and their social surroundings. As Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons (2017), there is a thought more focused on the ideals of functionality⁷, which nowadays would be expressed in the understanding of school as a locus that produces a certain proposal that stimulates learning, develops talents, restores learning based on enactment, mastery of abilities, the development of competencies, the transmission of values, etc. Such proposals demand and introduce qualification structures to compose the school organization, which is verified by the production of results. It is a process of production that converts power into competence. We refer to a school model equipped with the logic and the organization of the market and corporations.

What is at stake by the Belgian pedagogues and that helps, to a certain measure, with this article is that the functionality logic removes from school and teachers the possibility of questioning the world, of trying new things, and the power of starting a school within the school itself. The defense of Masschelein and Simons (2017) consists of what work methods are experienced and tested, implying that teachers, students, and goals established are part of the experiments. However, it is not related to testing the prototypes of the relationship "resource-objective" because, in this path, the definition of what is sought is already established. This method would only be used to confirm what was previously decided as a target. The aim is to dare to bring oneself to the condition of not knowing what to do and how to do it, so as not to know exactly what is sought, thus, opening oneself up to the unexpected, the power of the beginning, and an errant journey (Kohan, 2022). Hence, trying other possibilities and dealing in a different way with the elements at play (Masschelein; Simons, 2017).

In this sense, asking what the cinema can do when inhabiting (childlike and philosophically) a school space means not only asking about childhood in the cinema itself or about the childhood of thinking cinema but, above all, asking (or problematizing) - through cinema and school - the school, the cinema, and the world themselves. As seen, the idea of childhood is related to the lack and language condition (Agamben, 2005), as a form of sensible time (Lyotard, 1989), or even as an “intensive temporality” (Kohan, 2004). To Bergala (2008), meeting the childhood of cinema means practicing cinema as a “decisive inaugural experience”, something that demands from the act of filming the sacredness that a child lends to each action they enact as if it were “the first time”.

Although it is not exactly possible to answer the question posed, we seek to feed the “curiosity” it provokes, describing some clues found about this and, perhaps, inspire practical experiences of formation for education, philosophy, and cinema (practiced in schools).

First, we highlight the clues found in the systematization of the so-called “pedagogy of devices”: filming procedures that have been broadly diffused in cinema and education workshops in the last years⁸. The proposal consists of the implementation of simple protocols, whose main characteristic focuses on the idea that teaching cinema and audiovisuals in schools can occur democratically, necessarily dismissing equipment and previous knowledge about audiovisual techniques or language. The use of (cinematographic) devices is a pedagogy-form that, instead of attending to the predictabilities imposed by the scripts, produces images that emerge from events: they are images-events. The notion of device can be understood as:

a productive, active, creative procedure - of realities, images, worlds, sensations, perceptions that did not pre-exist it. […] It is absolutely not something that occurs in every film in a similar way, which structures cinema as a whole, but created in each work, immanent, contingent to the filming circumstances, and submitted to the pressures of reality (Lins, 2007).

What saves these images as a film, as an image-film, is not exactly the device or simply what it produces but a certain attraction that is dedicated to the images when they, by themselves, less pressured by the statements, tell us something unpredictable. The devices themselves do not always work. The risk is always its power: "They are fragile forms, which do not guarantee the existence of a film nor its quality, but it is a start, the only possible one” (Lins, 2004, p. 102).

As can be seen, the idea of start is immanent to the idea of the (filmic) device. The device is a trigger, a trigger of worlds. In the device, there is an "intensive temporality," an aionic perspective (disconnected from chronos), something able to bring a "decisive inaugural" power to the experience with cinema, a childlike force, a start. The practice with devices brings for the form-pedagogic itself a disquiet and philosophical perspective that questions the world instead of printing answers or ideas about what is known or wants from it. In this sense, the films produced by devices do not carry messages previously prepared about life and the world; preexisting objects of the whole do not return to the world but open themselves up to what they can offer as inventions. Device is becoming.

As Deleuze (1992), we see history as a succession of effects produced by an experience or an event that has a place outside history. The event in itself, the creation, is not history, but discontinuity, becoming, detour: becoming, under this perspective, is aion, a temporality that interrupts history and revolutionizes it, creating a new history, a new beginning.

By removing the predictability and the scripts, the use of (filmic) “devices” enacts the “live fact”: what can be seen in the image is the past, what has happened, but it is also a present - that cannot be reproduced, as it does not follow a program. This means understanding the event filmed as something that does not offer explanations about the past and the future (Migliorin, 2005). As Migliorin (2005), we are led to recognize the “device” as an exercise of triggering the present. Or, if so, we prefer the “presence of the present” - as we have already said.

Another clue that can help to think about the idea of new starts (or childhoods) in the experience of cinema in school finds itself in the study conducted by Virgínia Kastrup (2004) when describing the character of “aesthetic surprise”. According to the author, the “aesthetic surprise” is a state of suspension that interrupts the “habitual cognitive flow” through a special event (p. 8).

The aesthetic event has the property of creating an unanticipated experience, a surprise, which deactivates the recognitive attitude and establishes a state of exception. The suspension can be understood as interrupting a cognitive flow and the suspension of time. […] Based on the aesthetic experience, we can then say that the relationship with the artwork establishes a relationship with oneself, already marked by the suspension of the recognitive tendency (Kastrup, 2004, p. 11).

Returning to the school film, we could say that the surprise aspect crosses a documentary due to the relations of difference and equality present in certain filming procedures - relationships to which the participants (interviewers and interviewees) are inevitably exposed. Therefore, the relationships of difference are always more evident, as, in general, documents seek to approximate different worlds. In the process we followed, it was possible to affirm that the participants were exposed to relations of difference and equality. Equality is a device that seems to work precisely as a trigger of surprises.

In general, the opposite occurs: they go to these people (filmed or filmable) supported by a set of valid knowledge about them, which frequently affirms the horror of their lives as unhappy people who are void of knowledge or intelligence. On the contrary, Coutinho affirms the device of equality. Though he repeated countless times that the equality he refers to is utopic or temporary, it (equality), when tried, exercised - as it is a possible utopia to be undertaken -assumes the shape of the device itself that suspends the habitual cognitive flow, opening space for what Kastrup (2004) calls aesthetic surprise: the world speaking for itself and making a new start public.

In the documentary, one needs to get rid of oneself […] when referring to get rid of oneself, I mean that we should go to these meetings as empty as possible of ideologies and your own past, so that we can really know the reasons of the other, as mine do not interest any longer. Certainly, this emptiness is never complete because we can never reach the absolute of things. In any case, this disposition of being empty, of putting oneself in parenthesis, is an essential point […] In any way, there is no manual that explains this; it is a difficult process (Coutinho; Xavier; Furtado, 2005, p. 119, 131-132).

When studying attention in the experience with art and inventive cognition, Kastrup (2004) also offers an important clue that, as previously, does not objectively answer the question posed but feeds the curiosity it provokes from what the author proposes as a "change in the quality of attention” (p. 7). Under this perspective, the attention sought (through information or models known of cinema and education), normally turned towards the outside, is redirected to within and “changed into an attention that finds” (something that comes from ourselves) (Kastrup, 2004, p. 11). With this gesture, attention "does not access representations" but reveals a dimension of "self virtuality," that is, diverts from the attention the records of I (memories, thoughts, or concerns) and establishes, in its place, an opening to encounters, void of "intentionality and focus” (p. 10-11). They are processes that suspend the "habitual cognitive flow" and, through a very particular exercise of "wait," provoke a relationship of the subject with itself, deactivating the "recognitive attitude” (p. 8, 10). Thus, redirecting attention is a movement of leaving oneself. It is an expanded notion of cognition that goes beyond the process of problem-solving - which, in the school context, for example, focuses attention as a condition to the learning process, in the sense of “problem-solving and task performance” (p. 8, 11). In this sense, we can talk about “invention” in the scope of attention practices. In this process, it is also revealed that invention would be accessible to all, instead of restricted to the particular privilege of artists. Under this perspective, the pedagogy of devices seems to offer effective clues about childhood when it inhabits school. Capturing the present is a form of attention. It is thinking of attention as suspension. As seen in the previous section, the practice of attention is also required by Masschelein and Simons (2014)to exercise an e-ducative investigation, to exercise a way of inhabiting the world and make school within school, restoring in it the “free time” or schole. Exercising attention is testing oneself and renouncing the comfort of a position. It is to be in a void, to leave oneself, dislodge the subject, and open up for change and unpredictability.

Following one last clue, we can think with Deleuze (1999) that meeting childhood in the cinema in the current hegemonic school requires, inevitably, the perception of creating the work of art as an "act of resistance." According to this author, the act of creation does not happen through pleasure, but by sheer need. Finally, such statement guides us to the following questions: Is it possible (or necessary) to create in school? In other words: To which school (or form-pedagogy) belongs creation as a need? Or even, in other terms, can cinema be taught in school without this teaching fostering a relationship of invention with cinematographic making?

THE CHARACTER OF (CINEMATOGRAPHIC) FORMATION: WHEN THE WORLD STARTS TO SPEAK AGAIN

The idea of philosophy as education consists of a work that makes us think. This occurs precisely because something of the world becomes public because the mundane materialities are again experienced and transformed into real questions, common questions (or public), questions that inhabit the present. Summing up, the work of philosophy as education or education as philosophy seems to offer the possibility to everyone and anyone to talk in a new way about the materialities of the world from cohabitation in school. When affirming this thought in the school context, Masschelein and Simons (2017) suggest a careful distinction between the ideas of formation and learning to effectively think (in school), which means a new way of thinking, problematizing, and naming the materialities of the world. As they write, “Learning involves the strengthening or expanding of the existing I, for example, through the accumulation of skills or the expanding of one’s knowledge base. (p. 49, authors’ highlight). It relates to expanding an existing world, adding something to it. Differently, “formation” involves the exit or the constant transcendence of oneself, through the practice of this displacement and study.

The I does not add to previously acquired knowledge here, and this is precisely because the I actually is in the process of being formed. The I of the student is thus being suspended, decoupled: it is a bracketed or profane I and one that The I does not add to previously acquired knowledge here, and this is precisely because the I actually is in the process of being formed. The I of the student is thus being suspended, decoupled: it is a bracketed or profane I and one that (Masschelein; Simons, 2017, p. 49).

Therefore, the formation perspective is related to a school that opens the world to the students - not a previously defined world in its way of understanding and use but an open world, sharable and potentially interesting to be studied: a world open to receive questions from philosophy and other images from the cinema. Attention - and not so much motivation - is crucially important in this openness. School - as these authors consider - "The school makes one attentive and ensures that things - detached from private uses and positions - become ‘real’.” (Masschelein; Simons, 2017, p. 51). They highlight this school gesture as a “magic moment”, that is, a moment in which something outside people invite them to think; a moment in which the element world, this something open to students “suddenly stops being a tool or a resource and becomes a real thing,” (Masschelein; Simons, 2017, p. 51).

The distinction made by these authors between formation and learning refers to the problem pointed out in the first paragraph of this article when pointing out the refusal of the so-called predominance of the learning paradigm as an important movement for the interface cinema-philosophy-childhood-education. Something that gives shape to what we are calling “a philosophically childlike or infant pedagogy of question”

The distinction made by these authors between formation and learning relates to the problem pointed out in the first paragraph of this article, when we pointed out the refusal of the so-called predominance of the learning paradigm as an important movement for the interface cinema-philosophy-childhood-education. Something that shapes what we call "a philosophically childlike or infant pedagogy of question” (Kohan, 2021, 2022).

This study wants to think what a real experience with cinema in a school would be opening the world to its inhabitants. It is an initial situation. Or even, considering specifically cinema (as something of the world), we want to think what type of opening can be given to this materiality so that it - “separated from private uses and positions” - becomes a real experience (in school); and incorporating elements already presented of Paulo Freire, to what measure this real experience would also be a problematizing and transforming experience of the world.

The school is not a training ground for apprentices, but the place where something - such as a text, an engine, a particular carpentry method - actually becomes separated from its proper use and thus also becomes separated from the function and meaning linking that something to the household or to society. It is this bringing into play, this turning something into subject matter, that is needed in order to delve into something as an object of practice and study […] turning something into play, that is, detaching something from its appropriate use, is precisely the precondition for understanding the school as initial situation […] Study and practice are activities that do not serve (a means to) an end or a final purpose, but that enable possible connections precisely because they are removed from them. This situation, in which each thing is separated from its supposed purpose is considered open to new connections, is, in other words, the initial situation we discussed previously (Masschelein; Simons, 2017, p. 43, 70, original highlights).

To a certain measure, we could say that the practical exercise of “suspension” (interrupting the adequate or habitual use of something) is connected to a given ethical position (an ethos) - specifically referring to the ways they shape a "way to be determined." In this case, ethics is connected to the "care of self", a concept developed by Michel Foucault (1994) in his study about the practices of self in a classic time, which the Belgian pedagogues use and update to create this distinction between formation and learning. Hence, the school would be a space to practice certain ethics of the care of self.

Foucault (1994) distinguishes “care of self” and “knowledge of self” and denounces the overshadowing of the former by the latter:

First, there has been a profound transformation in the moral principles of Western society. We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give more care to ourselves than to anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was, paradoxically, a means of self-renunciation. (Foucault, 1994).

When drafting a story about the different ways through which the subjects create knowledge about themselves, Foucault shows specific techniques subjects use to understand these types of knowledge in themselves. Among these techniques, those of domination and the technologies of the Self (Les Techniques de soi) stand out. The meeting of the domination played over others and the techniques of self is what he calls "governmentality." The French author's idea is not to take those techniques as unquestionable knowledge but to analyze them as "games of truth" that interact between them. In this sense, the Belgian authors update the Foucauldian idea of "care of self": the point is not to understand actions and words based on correct or (externally) valid knowledge but to expose oneself - and participate in - certain games of truth, to reach existential and ethical conditions.

Fabiana Marcello and Rosa Fischer (2014) highlight some relevant echoes of this debate in the education field when showing the relation between the care of self and self-knowledge with the problem of the subject (the subject of knowledge and the knowledge of the subject).

[The relationship between knowledge and self-knowledge] tensions and allows us to think differently from the idea according to which […] it is only by accessing knowledge that the subject changes itself. Because it allows us to discuss the notion of knowledge that is common nowadays among us: knowledge as "matter," as an object of exchange (given or received), and not knowledge as a way to transform oneself. About this, it is widely known the extreme hardship experienced in the routine of schools and universities, still now, when parents, teachers, and students are disturbed by practices and knowledge, proposed to students, whose values of use and "concrete" application are not fully visible, almost palpable. More than that: one of these applications is exactly the "possession of knowledge" as an exchange currency, as the access to a more elevated level of study, or even a position or a job, and so on (Marcello; Fischer, 2014, p. 166).

Under the presented context, knowledge defines itself not as knowledge to access truth but as the "knowledge of a domain of objects" so that, as Foucault (2006) suggests, it would be possible to say that “the notion of knowledge of the object is substituted for the notion of access to the truth. (p. 236). What changes, as a way of being, is that the knowledge of self starts to define itself completely by "knowledge," submitting itself to the ideals grounded in scientificity. Thus, the term scientific qualifies such products as valid knowledge every time certain internal and external conditions in their production are fulfilled. This moves to the formation of pedagogues armed with scientific knowledge for education practice so that they can confidently speak about certain realities. The other tradition developed at the margins of the one we just described, now and then, erupting history.

The other tradition is not only on the sidelines but is also disqualified as non-scientific, non-university, as a knowledge that does not follow the internal and external conditions of pedagogical knowledge production. Therefore, our typification of this other "tradition" is, above all, fragmented and tentative; it tends more to the creation of a breathing space, and maybe it is the precursor of a future figure, rescuing a past from dust and discussing it. Summing up, it is a tradition we cannot ensure is current (Masschelein; Simons, 2014, p. 61).

Therefore, in the scope of the pedagogical relationship in the second tradition, the task of transmitting valid and true knowledge to others is not considered a task: it starts from a practical world in which pedagogues (students and educators) wish to test themselves, reaffirming education as a practice in which we cannot care for the other if not first caring for oneself: “To act correctly we have to access truth, but truth also should have access to the I, reach it, and transform it” (Masschelein; Simons, 2014, p. 69). This means being present in the present as pedagogues; It means being open to the confrontation between what is thought and what is said with what is done and what is; it means saying that the pedagogical work is a continuous work that happens to oneself, and that does not refer only or necessarily to the creation of new knowledge, but an exercise in which the I enter in the game, as a rule, to transform itself. Such a perspective does not dismiss the importance of knowledge, but it should be incorporated to a certain mastery of self instead of applied to the bodies. What enters this game as a rule, following the clues described above, is not the defense of a pedagogical practice that would access the purest truth in a given reality but coincidence, faced to the reality accesses, between thoughts and actions, transforming who films, teaches, or researchers and those filmed, taught, or researched.

In the process of making the movie we followed, the encounter with the reality experienced by the people living in the street seems to have made coincide thoughts and actions, displacing, in some measure, the truth ensured by scientific knowledge. Following the clues mentioned by the Belgian pedagogues (Masschelein; Simons, 2014, 2017), besides the studies of Michel Foucault (2006, 1994) and researchers Fabiana Marcello and Rosa Fischer (2014), we dare say that the meeting between the school group and the people living e in streets of Rio de Janeiro was able to create a state of incorporation of truth and also inspiration.

There certainly is a valid accumulated knowledge about the social groups as the one interviewed by the school group; there are academic studies in the social and economic area focused specifically on studying these social groups, with quantitative and qualitative data, audiovisual records, documents, etc. Therefore, a vast amount of knowledge can be accessed to prepare a class on human rights and the lives of those in street situations. If that was the choice, such knowledge could have been organized and transmitted to the young students at school instead of the real encounter that occurred when making the film. This alternative would grant a certain knowledge about the life of these social groups; the school group would access one truth about these people, supported by this set of knowledge scientifically validated as true. Implementing another possibility, the education-investigation, which was effectively used by the school group (making the movie), does not necessarily dismiss - and probably did not - the knowledge accumulated and scientifically validated about the school group’s object of interest. As far as we know, the idea of the film emerged from a school activity based on knowledge about human rights. One practice does not necessarily dismiss the other. They are complementary.

In this way, on the one hand, there is the importance of curatorship made by the teacher or the school about what will be on the study table (in this case, the theme of human rights), and, on the other hand, the importance of placing in suspension the intentionalities that the materiality of this curatorship might suggest, so that it would be possible to profane it (study it). As Rancière (2005) would say, the point is learning without the need for a master explainer (but without the need of a master). In this sense, we highlight that we are not interested in thinking about which practice would access more or less the external truth of the subject but in thinking about the effects of the experience in oneself that a childhood in cinema could provoke in the subjects that inhabit school.

Besides this, we should highlight that this study does not want to state if, in fact, there was or was not a coincidence between thoughts and actions or the incorporation of truths among participants (students and characters) of the film. We are interested in thinking about the effects of a certain experience of self, the exercise of another order of attention, one not guided to external forms but the care to oneself; one that first shows our own discourses and practices to ourselves so to, only then, encourage us towards the world and what it has to say. In the case of the movie, it is highly probable that there had not been a (conscious) preparation, in the sense of exercises focused on the care of self among the participants of the school group. We dare say that, faced by the force of the encounter held - the power of that reality -the triggering of the care of self became essential, even in the sense of an ethical exercise (or ethos) demanded by the reality accessed.

This subjective transformation, arising from an experience of self, which establishes another attention and care of self, inaugurates through making movies in school as in the example studied here; it goes beyond school because it merges the thoughts and the lives of those that inhabit it, be them students, teachers, or workers. The lives of the figures mentioned here, such as Paulo Freire, are examples of the transformative power of this ethic of attention and care (Kohan, 2019). Hence, inspired by ideas from the Pernambuco master already presented here, we affirm that, in the childlike and philosophical practice of cinema in school, the problematization and the transformation of ways to inhabit the world are inseparable from the transformation of those participating in these practices. Therefore, another way opens up the way to think about and practice the role of cinema in an "emancipating education."

Thus, to end, the distinction between formation and learning is precisely in the place and meaning each one has, what has been called “access to truth”. In the context of making a movie in a school, the choice for the production of images and sounds (in tension with reality), a key element for documentaries, seems to be the fundamental locus to displace or at least affect, in a childlike state, the knowledge validated by the dominant research tradition, provoking a rupture of the habitual cognitive flow, as stated by Virginia Kastrup (2004). This device of image and sound production makes emerge, with a certain power, another order of truth - one that the dominant tradition could not make us reach. In this way, the documentary would welcome and affirm a childhood for cinema in school; it would be a partner of childhood in school and of disruptive and transformative forces that can be potentialized and disseminated by its presence, in how we inhabit it and also in our ways of inhabiting and creating the world.

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• 1
  Article published with funding from theConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico- CNPq/Brazil for editing, layout and XML conversion services.
• 2
  Movie available at: https://youtu.be/_gW7wBqcun0.
• 3
  We do not understand fiction as something opposed to documentary but as a practice with typical elements of creation, such as the scripting of scenes. We would say that, in fiction, the whole movie is thought of in pre-production (before recording), while in documentary, it comes into existence in the production (in filming) or even in post-production (montage).
• 4
  Summing up, the e-ducation investigation is marked by three main points: the researcher involves him/herself in the research so that him/herself transforms, that is, the research is placed in question; education is, in a way, the theme or the problem being researched, so that educational questions can be problematized and clarified; and, at last, the educational research refers to making something public to anyone, that is, makes publically available a perception about the world that was not perceptible (Kohan, 2017).
• 5
  The authors cite: Arendt, Hannah. Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Though. New York: Penguin, 1983/1968. p. 11.
• 6
  Documentary is a cinema genre that welcomes a variety of methods to approach reality. In this research in particular, we are interested in thinking of it from a contemporary perspective, under which Jean-Louis Comolli warns: "the representations we make of the world stop considering it as finished or completely tamed and disciplined by us. In its modest ways, the documentary film, when giving space to reality, which provokes and inhabits us, can only be built through friction with the world, that is, it needs to recognize the inevitable restrictions and orders, consider (even if to combat them) the powers and lies, finally, to accept being an interested part in the rules of the social game. Servitude, privileges. An engaged cinema, I would say, engaged in the world” (Comolli, 2008, p. 173).
• 7
  “The school, and maximising employability […] into reformulating its goals and curriculum into terms of competencies/qualification. The concept of ‘employable competence’ thus fuses the sociological terms of reproduction, integration and legitimacy […] It seems that policymakers have become sociologists; they compress the functional relationship between education and society into a ‘learning-competency-qualification-employability’ bond” […] form of politicisation of the school boils down to a radicalisation of the socialisation function of education, which is problematic in several respects.” (Masschelein; Simons, 2017, p. 112-113, authors’ highlights).
• 8
  This pedagogy was systematized and proposed by the program Inventar com a Diferença - cinema, educação e direitos humanos, started in 2013 by the Laboratório Kumã, of Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF), in partnership with Secretaria de Direitos Humanos da Presidência da República and contributions from other research groups, such as CINEAD/LECAV, from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). To know more about the Pedagogy of Devices, see Cadernos do Inventar (free material available for schools): https://mostracinemaedireitoshumanos.mdh.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/cadernos_do_inventar.pdf.

FUNDING

• 21
  The authors acknowledge the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development - CNPq/ processes 150999/2023-2, 310553/2023-7and 420760/2023-7 and the Foundation of Support of Research of the State of Rio de Janeiro - FAPERJ/Nº: SEI-260003/014892/2023and SEI-260003/003627/2022 for funding.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 Mar 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  06 Dec 2023
• Preprint posted on
  04 Aug 2023
  10.1590/SciELOPreprints.6526
• Accepted
  07 Oct 2024