World Cinema is Our Campus

For many of us, the International Cinema (IC) program at BYU was a defining part of our BYU experience as students. It opened our eyes and hearts to the world. The program has its roots in the university’s historic international engagement and the lively campus film culture of the late ’50s and early ’60s, when the Varsity Theater and University Cinema were showing films on campus. In the midst of this, foreign language departments such as French, German, and Spanish would screen films several times a semester in their respective languages. In 1968—just a year after the formal organization of the College of Humanities—Dr. Joseph Baker in the German department started a regular foreign film series, with showings in the old Joseph Smith Building (JSB) Auditorium, that he initially called the “International Film Festival,” including weekly faculty lectures to introduce the films. In 1975, Don Marshall of the humanities program took over as the director and ambitiously expanded the programming to include more films and more showings. In 1982, IC moved to its specially designed room in the new Spencer W. Kimball Tower (KMBL), and by the mid-1980s, attendance reached more than 45,000 cinemagoers per year.

My codirector, Chip Oscarson, and I had both been regulars at the IC when we were students, I in the 1980s and Chip in the late 1990s, and now our children are experiencing classic films by Bergman, Lang, Lloyd, and Fellini, as well as hidden gems from the best contemporary world cinema—Sweet Bean (Kawase, Japan, 2015), Mustang (Ergüven, Russia, 2015), and Faces Places (Varda, USA, 2017). Fifty years after its inception, the IC program is as vibrant as ever, serving thousands of students each semester with around 80 films per year and close to 200 screenings per semester. It has adapted to changes in film spectatorship, campus editing policies, the film industry, technologies, and curricula in order to continue supporting the secular and spiritual education of students across the university. IC offerings enlighten the intellect and afford an instant connection to global varieties of social and reli- gious experience. They strengthen spirituality by building a Christlike compassion borne of encounters with radically different peoples and places. They probe questions of faith, ritual, and belief. By proxy, they situate us for a brief moment—as good art can—outside of ourselves.

To provide examples from our recent programing, the social and the religious confront each other in Moolaadé (Sembène, France, 2004) and Sand Storm (Zexer, Israel, 2016), which condemn hypocritical limitations on women. Or consider The Women’s Balcony (Ben-Shimon, Israel, 2016), which explores the dilemmas posed to and by women in their Jewish communities; or again, consider the challenge a non- believing nurse faces while assisting Catholic nuns whose convent is assaulted at the end of World War II in The Innocents (Fontaine, France, 2016). What price is to be paid for maintaining or abandoning faith, as explored in the story of seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan, in Silence (Scorsese, USA, 2016)? How do we forgive, as addressed by Rams (Hákonarson, Iceland, 2015)? Finally, Our Little Sister (Kore-eda, Japan, 2015) considers what families look like, while Tangerines (Urushadze, Estonia, 2013) grapples with caring for the vulnerable—the orphan, the fatherless, the childless, and the stranger. Not all films are conspicuous candidates for strengthening spirituality—rarely do they speak directly of Jesus Christ or of obvious religious experience. Yet, one of the most striking features of these films is their inherent capacity to reposition the perspective from which we view the world, to lead us toward empathy through aesthetic experiences. Pioneering film director Sergei Eisenstein said film “synchronizes” the senses; cinema engages the frailties and joys of embodied existence—memory and forgetting, love and hate, misdeeds and repentance, and more.1 We select films for IC that inquire about all aspects of lived experience: How do we relate to children of God whose alterity seems radically other (Sami Blood, Kernell, Sweden, 2016)? How are we stewards of God’s creations (Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki, Japan, 1997)? How are justice and mercy to be properly balanced in the face of extreme violence (In a Better World, Bier, Denmark, 2010)?

International Cinema As Experiential Learning

For years, BYU has been refining what we call “experiential learning,” which comprises field studies, study abroad programs, internships, and more, and which often have an international travel component. Such opportunities are essential to professional and personal development and come with rich cultural discovery and linguistic improvement. IC has always complemented the study of languages, cultures, and peoples—that is one of its core raisons d’être. The stone marker at the entrance to campus says, “The World is Our Campus.” Inspired by this call to go forth, IC promises travel without motion; it invites us to leave, to explore, to travel, to know firsthand while remaining still.

Admittedly, IC is no substitute for travel. Rather, it’s a complement to it, an invitation au voyage just as it is a memory catalyst for rediscovering missions and other travel experiences. I was privileged to see Cyrano de Bergerac (Rappeneau, 1990) and Jean de Florette (Berri, 1987) in France when those films came out. It was because I’d seen the films before that I saw them again on campus, at IC, where they revived sounds, phrases, and gestures and reactivated my passion for learning.

Film scholar Dudley Andrew claims that although studying world cinema should not function as a ticket to foreign nations, one of the virtues of world cinema comes from feeling out of place, in confronting the foreign. “Displacement, not coverage, matters most; let us travel where we will, so long as every local cinema is examined with an eye to its complex ecology.”2 Seeing films on BYU campus is not the same as being in a foreign country, where fellow cinemagoers might experience their own language and culture on the screen. But what we get when we settle into our seats in 250 KMBL—introductory lectures that provide context, in-class language study, and a cohort of peers who are also focused on learning—can open our eyes and understanding of the world.

IC not only enhances the strengths of the College of Humanities but plays a vital role in the university by providing students outside the college a concentrated dose of the global they don’t always get in their primary fields. As an institution, IC provides a clear path toward achieving the Humanities+/+Humanities initiative—the college’s effort to help both humanities majors engage in experiential learning outside the classroom and non-humanities majors complement their major with humanities study. For language learners inside and outside the college, IC supports language learning professional competency. Instructors craft assignments around IC films to facilitate concrete gains in basic and advanced communicative practices, from simple phonetic aspects (regional dialects, everyday pronunciation) to complex patterns of discourse: telling stories, asking questions, hypothesizing, and abstract and imaginative language uses. It’s not only a fun way to solidify language learning, it also introduces students to languages from all over the globe. In addition to the usual Asian, Indo-European, Latin American, and Middle Eastern languages, we’ve had films in Basque, Tamil, Yolngu and more. We’ve even shown The Linguists