University Times

Teaching excellence award winner Robert W. Matson is focusing much of his scholarly efforts on a new cross-disciplinary field of instruction that straddles history, communication, film studies and cinematography.

According to James Alexander, professor of political science and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at UPJ, Matson “assesses film, even popular film, as documentary evidence and interpretation of a society’s politico-cultural history. Guiding students in the interpretation of image, still photography and cinema, is a difficult and careful task, in which he blends considerations of technology with the interpretive eye of the photographer, often using archival images.”

By examining visual images — photographs, motion pictures, television, video — as historical documentation, Matson maintains that scholars can tap into a primary source to study the people who made the images in the context of their times.

“We have all this material that essentially are historical artifacts: They were made by humans with a personality in a particular time and place with a particular audience in mind,” Matson says.

Delving into this material, Matson believes, is best achieved through “visual literacy,” that is, penetrating the surface of visual images to see the methods the image-makers used to create impressions, as well as comparing the presentation of the filmmaker, for example, to historical facts and evidence.

“You have to learn first what you can do as a filmmaker, what’s possible technically in the manipulation of images. Then you look at what the director decided to do, the choices of camera placement and movement, film editing, subject matter, and ask what does that say about the director and the times?”

This term, Matson is teaching “Film and History,” a multi-media course, which he refers to as “a laboratory experience” for developing fluency in “visual language.” Matson’s students learn history and film theory in nearly equal doses.

Using lecture, illustrated presentations, film-viewing, small group and general discussion and lab projects, the course moves from the history of film to history on film to film as history, he says.

“If you take, for example, “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939), which is set about 100 years earlier, where Americans are depicted as individualistic, who can share politics and debate openly, who are proud of their patriotism, who honor their war veterans, what does that say about [director] John Ford? What was going on at the time? Well, Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia, and Hitler had power in Germany, World War II was coming — can you make fun of nationalism or soldiers in 1939 America? And to put words in the mouth of no less than Abraham Lincoln has a very powerful effect. The film is metaphorical: It’s about one thing, but saying something else to its audience.”

Matson says the idea for this pursuit came from the juxtaposition of the teaching methods of his history professors, who never used so much as a slide, and his geology profs, who used color slide presentations to convey complex concepts constantly. “One day I just said, ‘I’m going to do this. I’m going to look at images as history.’ It would be incompetent of us [historians] to ignore visual media.”

—Peter Hart