An Intensive Seminar-Workshop

Athens, Greece, June 1998

Instructor: Despina Kakoudaki

This four day seminar-workshop is designed by Despina Kakoudaki, and offered under the Educational Programs of the Theater Studies Graduates Association. Participants will be expected to attend lectures, do some theoretical reading, watch selected films, and develop their own lesson plans using the methodological approaches introduced by the instructor. Each day will be divided in two sessions: the first session will revolve around a lecture by the instructor, with specific suggestions and demonstrations on some aspect of film studies and its pedagogical implication for the teaching of theater. The second session will be a hands-on workshop for the participants, who will work individually and in groups, select film clips and develop their responses to specific teaching challenges and problems. By the end of the four days, participants will have a sense of the scope of Film Studies as a discipline, an understanding of how to use film in the classroom, and specific methods for relating Film and Theater Studies.

In the course of the seminar we will explore the following main theoretical approaches to teaching cinematic and theatrical texts in conjunction:

1. Intertextuality

We will focus on versions of the same plot through different media or genres, discuss genre as a mode of narration, and work through formal and historically specific readings, in order to propose an understanding of "multimedia." The move from one text/medium/version to another can help in understanding what film is, and how to teach "visual reading" across media.

2. adaptation

We will focus on many versions or adaptations of the same play in film, at different times. Again we will propose a historical understanding of "re-contextualization." We will discuss performance as interpretation, new needs for representation according to new audiences, and how certain plots "mean" differently at different times. We will use Shakespeare's plays as our basic example, in two ways: first we will contrast different adaptations of the same play (Hamlet, for example or Romeo and Juliet); then we will consider the work of specific directors who are interested in adaptations of Shakespeare and have directed or acted in more than one (for example Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli, or Kenneth Branagh). This will situate the study within the work of particular "auteurs."

3. film texts in the theater classroom

We will focus on using experimental films in order to explore specific questions about theater, such as the relation of audience to stage, the physicality of actors' bodies, stage and special effects, mise-en-scene, set design, costume design, and so on. We will also discuss how to use documentary film, and how to imagine "creative projects" for the classroom through animated films, television footage, advertisements, video art.