By Dean J. Scott Miller
FIFTY YEARS AGO, German professor Joseph Baker started a College program of international film screenings and lectures that became International Cinema, one of the few programs of its kind in the world. This issue of Humanities celebrates that semicentenary. International Cinema screens films created out of love for the craft itself, or passion for a story, or curiosity about an idea—all ennobling and elevating motives. By viewing some of the world’s best cinema, we can develop a capacity to enjoy films at a very liberating level. We may even improve our foreign language skills!
During the summer of my sophomore year, I was doing a kind of proto-internship in Tokyo. Famed director Akira Kurosawa came out with a new film, Kagemusha (Japan, 1980), and, having already enjoyed some foreign films at BYU, I decided to attend one of the premiere screenings in suburban Tokyo. When I went to the theater and took my place among the Japanese audience, the lights dimmed, and I remember my initial surprise that there were no subtitles—of course, this was Japan! I was then amazed as my brain and heart, following the lead of my thirst to understand, made sufficient sense of the nearly three-hour film to leave me, along with others in the audience, softly weeping at its poignant and tragic ending. I walked out of the theater into the noisy, crowded streets emotionally exhausted but fully immersed in thought. I was struck by the movie’s theme of identity—a thief, who serves as a double for a Japanese warlord, plays the role so well he nearly “becomes” the warlord after the leader dies—and saw parallels with my own brief, stolen identity as a film viewer embedded within the Japanese audience that afternoon. Although my limited Japanese ability prevented me from watching and reacting as seamlessly as a native speaker might, my craving to understand made me more fully engaged, perhaps, than some in the audience for whom the experience may have been less satisfying, or even routine. With my own, admittedly idiosyncratic, intellect and observations, the film became more than mere entertainment, substantively enriching the experience and my life.
Four years later, I found myself again in a foreign movie viewing context, this time in New Delhi when, during the heat of summer, I attended a Bollywood screening at another suburban theater. This time there were subtitles—fortunately, since I don’t speak Hindi—and, during the long, melodramatic screening, I observed the audience shouting out comments, cheering, and booing, and then engaging in sometimes loud discussions during the intermission, while vendors moved up and down the aisles, selling fried snacks and other treats. Again, by the end I was thoroughly caught up in the illusory world of the film, perhaps more so because of the community of watchers to which I temporarily belonged and the sensory experience that, despite our differences, we collectively shared. These were moments of truly international cinema that offered parallels to the BYU tradition: a dose of culture shock, the ritual space that brings audience sensibilities to the fore, and ultimately the realization that art can speak to us across linguistic and cultural divides.
Movies, like other (particularly narrative) art forms, trigger responses in viewers that are predictable at many levels. To the extent they thrill, frighten, amuse, horrify, comfort, or inspire, they target ideal viewers (which, for Hollywood films, seems to be a nineteen-year-old white American male) who have been “trained” by their life experiences and prior film viewing to respond accordingly. When we watch films created for audiences unlike ourselves, however, we have a limited capacity to respond as expected, and are thus more likely both to misinterpret them but also to scrutinize them carefully, rather than having them merely play us. If we seek to understand where filmmakers are coming from, try to catch the nuances of their stories, we can become active participants in the kind of creative thinking that tries to make sense of human experience. It is, actually, an amazing—even miraculous—experience to really understand what someone else is trying to tell us, in any medium or language. Such transcendent understanding takes us out of our own familiar world and plunges us into another, where we stand to gain so much in return for our temporary discomfort.
A humanities education can liberate us from increasingly sophisticated forms of manipulation designed to get us to act in ways that are against our best interests as children of God, sent here to learn to love others and discern truth. Bad movies, mean-spirited social media, and fraudulent news can dull and confuse that discerning sensibility. Humanities education gives us touchstones of truth, beauty, and light to help us discern their counterfeits throughout the rest of our lives. It also invites us to seek after and discover, wherever it may be found, the rewarding achievements of human creativity that are “virtuous, lovely, of good report, or praiseworthy.” May we all find ourselves consumed by such a quest as we consume good and bad media alike in our efforts to understand the humanity, and divinity, of others.