Using Pictures to Learn

By Kate Rix

When Seryna Thai came to U.C. Berkeley two years ago she already knew how to make still pictures and use video equipment. It wasn’t until she took a documentary film class in the Film Studies department though that she made her first film — an avant-garde documentary of her father’s traditional funeral in Vietnam.

Her studies at Berkeley, she says, gave her the motivation and the understanding of film theory to make the film and to pursue filmmaking as a learning tool. Thai was recently selected as a Haas Scholar for 2008-2009 based on her proposal to travel to Vietnam and make another film there.

“Theory and production are equal,” says Thai, an enthusiastic returning student who came to Berkeley from a community college in Southern California. “Without theory you wouldn’t think as much about human values, about what’s important in society, and your point of view.”

Thai completed the short film using digital images shot at her father’s funeral service. She chose to focus on a ritual where members of her family touched her father’s face for the last time, before laying his coffin in the ground.

“I’ve been to several funerals here and everything is so distant between the dead and the living,” she says. “There is no touching at all. I’m trying to understand my culture again, what my country is all about.”

Thai is one of a growing number of students on campus who use video technology to extend their research. In an increasingly visual culture, the moving image means more to students as they read, write, and discuss the ideas they are studying. Instructors, particularly of foreign languages, use film as a teaching tool (see sidebar "Film in Language Classes"), and for students across disciplines, getting behind the camera and then into an editing bay can offer a chance to head out into the world, collect original material, and create a unique and powerful research project.

Berkeley’s Film Studies program, housed within the Rhetoric Department, offers students a strong grounding in film analysis and theory. Integrating the role of production into such a program is an exciting challenge that deepens student’s understanding of the film theory and history they are studying, says Jeffrey Skoller, a professor helping to develop the program’s production element.

“For the younger generation, image-making as an element of their scholarly research is a very natural way of learning.” he says. “Making films forces you out into the world to experience new places by joining with other people to talk and investigate ideas. In this sense, film as a form is inherently interdisciplinary. You begin to collaborate with experts, actors, writers and musicians. Used curricularly, film and video can open pathways between departments.”

Skoller teaches a graduate production seminar that attracts anthropology students who want to make films of their fieldwork. One of those students is planning a trip to Brazil to study the favelas, or shantytowns. Another of Skoller’s documentary students made a film as part of her research into women and girls who play computer games. Another is researching changing ideas about free speech, and has made a film about Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement.

Several departments offer video design or production courses, each with their own particular focus. The Berkeley Center for New Media treats video as an emerging technology that helps influence how we perceive the world. Anthropology offers a course in ethnographic film that requires students to prepare a final film. Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies (TDPS) offers courses in video production both for and of performance.

“In some ways, video design for performance has become its own design   field within the theater, akin to lighting, set, sound, and costume design,” says Shannon Jackson, chair of TDPS. This month, for example, the Berkeley Dance Project featured the choreography of Jesse Curtis with the video design of lecturer Kwame Braun. Meanwhile, performers also train students in video in order to capture the ephemeral form of performance, both for posterity and for use as a teaching tool, Jackson says.

With video production on the rise in various departments across campus, there ought to be a centralized production ”lab,” Jeffrey Skoller says, where students could have access to both the training and the equipment to make their own video projects.

“We don’t want to become a vocational program,” he says, “but I don’t think you can have a modern university without students learning these skills.”