I admit to being a little disturbed by the turn the conversation has taken
regarding the film MINDWALK. The original posting, as I remember it
(someone will check this I'm sure) extolled the value of the film as a way
of approaching some of the ideas regarding holism and complexity. It was
not a "film review" suggesting the entertainment value of an investment in
a Saturday night ticket at the movies.
It's really hard to make an engrossing movie about conversation. There
used to be more conversation in movies (roughly 1930-1970) when the
narrative traditions of the theater and the novel were more deeply
embedded in the film vocabulary. In an era of MTV non-sequiturs and
effects by Industrial Light and Magic, conversation seems increasingly
irrelevant to filmakers. Still, the genre persists, and even occasionally
films that are all about a singly ongoing conversation. Repsondents here
have mentioned My Dinner with Andre. Perhaps even more interesting is the
recent film The Quarrel, based on a story by Chaim Grade.
...but what has all this to do with *learning* through films? Having
devoted (wasted?) more than 30 years of my life to the creation of
"teaching films" and "propaganda films" and "training videos", I have been
unable to get past something I learned sometime around '68 or '69 - that
all of the learning takes place in conversations among those who have
viewed the film. And what's more, the set and setting make a great
contribution to what is learned.
I'm not surprised to read Art's description of the scene where he viewed
MINDWALK. I would suggest that the scene itself impacted the experience
that he and all the other people there had.
Many of the readers of this list are trainers and/or OD practitioners. If
I say that the value of a simulation or an "experiential exercise" lies in
the debrief, I'm confident that most, if not all, will nod their heads in
agreement. Mediated experiences (films, videos, etc.) share the same
characteristic. All the learning is in the debrief. The difference is
that mediated experiences, unlike structured training experiences, do not
seem to be artificial - even though they obviously are more artificial -
and I believe this is because most people in our culture are exposed to
media in everyday life from an early age, and believe that they represent
"reality". Consequently, videos are perceived to be real, even when they
are obviously and consciously placed in an artificial context.
Furthermore, we are educated to debrief mediated experience for ourselves,
as Melissa did, and usually in aesthetic terms rather than as information.
Let me apologize for the authoritative tone I have adopted for the remarks
above. I like to believe that lurking somewhere in the sea of ignorance
which fills my brain there is some actual knowledge, and this is it...
BTW, I fully agree that if you want to persuade people to believe what you
TELL them in a film, it would be better if it contained proven elements of
entertainment...
-- jack@his.com Tell me, what street compares with Mott Street in July? Jack Hirschfeld ----- Host's Note: BTW = "By the way" -----