Universities Need to Embrace Film

Why not peer review films? Let students submit videos made on their phones?

A bonkers, AI-generated version of Gunther Kress’s UEFA sign. I’d use the actual photo he took if I wasn’t afraid that Routledge would sue me, but if you imagine driving past this you’ll get the picture.

During the 2008 UEFA championships, the late social semiotician Gunther Kress spotted a sandwich board propped up alongside a busy road in Salzburg. In his introduction to Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, he translated it into English:

During UEFA 2008 the official times for bus lanes will be changed as follows. From 7 June to 29 June 2008, the normally applicable times for the bus lanes in the Griessgasse, Rudolfskai, Imbergerstrasse, Giselakai and Schwarzstrasse will be extended until 2 a.m. of the following day. On days when games are being played, that is, 10.06, 14.06 and 18.06 2008, the no-stopping rule in the bus lane in Griessgasse will come into force earlier, from 10 a.m.

Really? You’re really meant to read and digest these complex instructions with your feet on the accelerator and eyes on the road?

The sign was clearly, laughably ineffective. A more competent approach, Kress suggested, might be to employ a combination of images, colours and symbols to get the message across.

If we’re being kind, we could easily put the existence of such a sign down to innocent oversight, a well-intentioned but ultimately unsuccessful attempt at communication. Local councils, after all, seem to have earned a reputation for bureaucratic ineptitude, for enforcing petty bylaws, for reading the standing orders, reading and understanding them. Kress has another take.

In his view, it doesn’t matter that a driver couldn’t possibly read the complex, temporary regulations before their light turns green. An unwitting offender can still be ‘left to the law’. ‘Communication isn’t really the issue’, he concluded, ‘power is’.

Closely related to power, of course, is tradition – another motivation that, in Kress’s estimation, trumps that of effective communication. Officialdom has always used writing as its main instrument of business and is not likely to change because better tools become available.

Why academics from all disciplines should use film

Like faceless government bodies, many of academia’s disciplines cultivate an unmindful written tradition. Let’s take history, since that’s my discipline, but I suspect the same can be applied to other subjects.

It’s our custom to pore over archives, notebooks, old manuals, spending time interpreting the written word and comparing our own interpretations with one another’s. Historical texts are plentiful and, for the most part, textual approaches work for us. But not in every instance.

What if you’re studying a museum object or a material? A performance or a historical craft practice? Yes, the tradition is to write about these things, but since they include time and space amongst their dimensions, wouldn’t it make more sense to make films about them?

I might be almost alone in thinking this way because, en masse, historians seem to see no need to change. The majority of our journals, currently, emphatically do not support scholarship in any medium other than writing. Could the reason for this, like the reason a complex block of text appeared alongside a German road, be ‘tradition’?

Possibly. Text undoubtedly is an effective medium for many, even most scholarly applications (as, incidentally, it is for local government). But as with our local-councillor counterparts, this is not always the case, and like them we will insist on using writing whether or not that is the best medium for the job.

The case is different elsewhere in the academic world. In the 1990s, Lucien Taylor called for anthropology to be more ‘filmic’, drawing attention to the possibilities film had for researchers beyond simply telling the story of a piece of work otherwise done in writing. Since then, anthropology has opened up to accommodate new media and modes of expression. The journal Visual Anthropology first embraced image and has since evolved to encompass other modes, changing its name to Multimodal Anthropologies on account of an ever-increasing number of media.

Similarly, if a scholar in the arts were to suggest that researchers were always writers, they would be rightly ridiculed for holding a view that suggests only a select few, trained in textual methods, can ever do research.

History, on the other hand, is an unapologetically literary subject. Even though we have access to work that convincingly argues the limitations of the written word, we have yet to overcome what I’m convinced is nothing more than a prejudice against knowledge expressed in any mode that isn’t text.

Do I think we should get rid of writing in universities altogether?

I got this question quite a lot in my postdoc, when I tried to convince historians it would be better to make films about re-enactments, say, than to write up their impressions. The answer is: no, obviously, we shouldn’t get rid of writing altogether.

Writing is an important tool for historians, and I’m not suggesting we dispense with it. Anthropologists still write, as do researchers in the arts. The difference is that, even though historians now regularly focus on historical objects and activities, and even use practices of making, re-enactment, and reworking as investigatory tools, we seem only to peer review written research output. And I think this is wrong.

If we, like Gunther Kress, believe that people think and express themselves in non-written modes, how much longer should we resist validifying research and student submissions presented in non-written media? If we can think and express our work in film, we should publish in it.

I’ve had so many objections to this idea over the years. They range from ‘that would mean anyone could do academic work’ to 'you can’t expect everyone to know how to edit video’. The only serious objection I’ve come across is that we don’t have the tools to do this in history just yet, but that’s more of a reason to develop them.

In conclusion! We should try to be less like the councillors of Salzburg and more like our colleagues in anthropology, the arts, and elsewhere, and open up options to publish and peer-review in a variety of modes and media.