Teaching International Relations Through Films

Introduction

For mainstream Political Science and International Relations, ‘popular culture’ is slowly becoming a tool to still not considered worthy of serious investigation. Similarly, the idea of using movies as a pedagogical tool has remained at the margins. Nevertheless, film can be a valuable means of teaching university students about politics and international politics. In an elective at my university, I offer a course titled, Films and International Relations which is open to Bachelors and Masters students. The course focused on the topics of history, conflict, peace and theories of international interactions. The primary goals of the course are to learn about the various topics of international politics portrayed by films and to critically evaluate the films in the context of discourse about international politics.

In this course, we primarily engaged with international politics. The films were selected because they illuminate or comment on important ideas in the international relations discipline and/or on key historical or contemporary events in the international system. At the same time, we kept in mind that feature films are a remarkably poor source of information about international affairs. The film-makers do not unobtrusively or objectively report facts. Rather, he or she often plays a role as social commentator, critic, political activist, or apologist. From the beginning, films have served a political purpose, whether explicitly through propaganda (in both documentaries and feature films) or more subtly through a film’s intended and unintended political bias and influence. That is, films both reflect and attempt to change national and international politics.

I apply an auto-ethnographic lens in this article. I refer to the reading materials for the class, the course manual ² and the responses of the students in the classroom.

As a student in Jawaharlal Nehru University, around 2001, I would attend movie screenings which touched upon the critical topics of the day, including the War on Terror, and the invasion of Iraq. These screenings would see an introduction by a scholar(s) or followed by a discussion about the event that is addressed in the movie. As I pursued my PhD, I encountered references to popular culture while studying international relations through works like Harry Potter and International Relations (Nexon & Neumann, 2006) and even read that the movie Battle of Algiers had become part of the curriculum for young military officers at West Point, to teach them lessons about insurgency.

I felt that something was amiss then and only in the last few years did I realize that students like me, and faculty were engaging about the event from the information that they drew from reading, rather than reading the film.

How to Read a Film

The resource which opens the window for us to critically watch and engage with the movie is the book How to Read a Film: Movies, Media and Beyond by James Monaco (Monaco, 2009) and more specifically Chapter 3 of this book which is titled—The Language of Films: Signs and Syntax. This can be a very useful resource that we can assign to students at the beginning of a course on films and International Relations (IR).

In that chapter, he starts with the thesis that, ‘film is very much like language’. He says, ‘An education in the quasi-language of film opens up greater potential meaning for the observer, so it is useful to use the metaphor of language to describe the phenomenon of film’ (Monaco, 2009, p. 170). He argues that our ability to interpret images, whether still or moving, depends on learning and elaborates on how the physiology of perception and semiotics make a film like language. He specifically argues,

Film does not suggest, in this context, it states. And therein lies its power and the danger it poses to the observer: the reason why it is useful, even vital, to learn to read images well so that the observer can seize some of the power of the medium. The better one reads an image, the more one understands it, the more power one has over it. (Monaco, 2009, p. 177)

He lays out how films communicate meaning through denotation and connotation. Quoting the book Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969), he describes the three orders of cinematic signs: the Icon, the Index and the Symbol. ³ This leads him to argue that,

Cinema is an art and a medium of extensions and indexes, Much of its meaning comes not from what we see (or hear) but from what we don’t see or, more accurately, from an ongoing process of comparison of what we see with what we don’t see. This is ironic, considering that cinema at first glance seems to be an art that is all too evident, one that is often criticized for ‘leaving nothing to imagination’. (Monaco, 2009, p. 189)

The chapter also lays out the core vocabulary of film studies like—frame, shot, scene, sequence, montage (editing/cutting), mis-en-scène and syntax, apart from the technical aspects like sound effects and movement of the camera.

In addition to this text, I rely on YouTube videos prepared by Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou in their channel—Every Frame a Painting ⁴ and Now You See It ⁵ by another media critic. These are complemented by video essays by Kevin B. Lee, a filmmaker, media artist and critic. ⁶

Eric Hobsbawm as an Inspiration

The structure of this course was inspired by the book The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 authored by Eric Hobsbawm (1995). In this book, he argues that

the Short Twentieth Century appears like a sort of triptych or historical sandwich. An Age of Catastrophe from 1914 to the aftermath of the Second World War was followed by some twenty-five or thirty years of extraordinary economic growth and social transformation, which probably changed human society more profoundly than any other period of comparable brevity. In retrospect it can be seen as a sort of Golden Age, and was so seen almost immediately it had come to an end in the early 1970s. The last part of the century was a new era of decomposition, uncertainty and crisis—and indeed, for large parts of the world such as Africa, the former USSR and the formerly socialist parts of Europe, of catastrophe. (Hobsbawm, 1995, p. 6)

This is reflected in the choice of the movies, which cover events in chronological order, albeit the movies were not made chronologically. The list of the movies that were screened focused on the major events of the twentieth century. The course starts with four movies covering the period 1914–1945. These are All Quiet on the Western Front (World War I), The Wind That Shakes the Barley (The Irish Civil War, 1922–1923), The Great Dictator (on Hitler), Saving Private Ryan and Grave of the Fireflies (World War II).

The next set of movies showcases the non-violent Indian Independence struggle in Gandhi which is contrasted with the violent uprising in the anti-colonial struggle in Algerian Independence struggle through the Battle of Algiers. The next two movies Thirteen Days and Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb vividly capture the spectre of nuclear Armageddon that humanity faced during the Cold War. The animated movie Persepolis and Charlie Wilson’s War capture the proxy conflicts that defined the Cold War. Rounding up the list, the movie Goodbye Lenin captures the decline of socialism, while Hotel Rwanda documents the horrors of genocide that shook the conscience of the world.

The movies that I screen are a mix of live-action and animated movies and even employ comedy and satire. The live-action in Saving Private Ryan captures intense battle scenes of the Normandy landing during the end of World War II, which provokes the questions, how can films portray war and what techniques do filmmakers use to depict war and the soldiers that fight them? Can film portray war realistically? On the other hand, Grave of the Fireflies and Persepolis leverage the potential of animated films to rely more on the symbolic elements, of Japanese culture and Iranian society after the Islamic revolution, to potent effect.

The choice of these movies highlights the conflictual nature of international relations even though there is intense cooperation among states facilitated through international organizations and international law (Keohane & Nye, 1973). Upon reflection, I found that cooperation among states is not dramatical enough to be captured well on the silver screen. ⁷ One movie which captures the spirit of the European Union could be L’auberge espagnole ⁸ which is centred around the life of Erasmus ⁹ students who are a part of the ambitious European Union’s student exchange programme.

Film Politics

When it comes to the politics of films, James Monaco identifies that,

two paradoxes control the politics of film: on the one hand, the form of film is revolutionary; on the other, the content is most often conservative of traditional values. Second, the politics of film and the politics of ‘real life’ are so closely intertwined that it is generally impossible to determine which is the cause and which is the effect. (Monaco, 2009, p. 292)

He goes on to argue that,

Every film, no matter how minor it may seem, exhibits a political nature on one or more of these three levels:

ontologically, because the medium of film itself tends to deconstruct the traditional values of the culture;

The mass production of films has meant that this form of art is now available to a large number of people on a regular basis and amplified through television in the twentieth century. It now almost has a universal reach through the internet. It also plays a central role mimetically by constructing the ‘reality’ that is considered as valid.

Therefore, we can say that films play an important role in people’s lives and they contribute to the ‘demotic consciousness’ (Kumar & Raghuvanshi, 2022) and ‘cinema as a mode of popular culture is an effective tool in order to understand social cinema from people’s perspective’ (Tripathi & Raghuvanshi, 2020). The role of films as a tool ‘to overcome the rural and urban economic and social disparity’ (Lam, 2019) was actively used in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Monaco concludes that, ‘Like all forms of mass entertainment, film has been powerfully mythopoeic even as it has entertained. Hollywood helped mightily to shape—and often exaggerate—our national myths and therefore our sense of ourselves’ (Monaco, 2009, p. 317). The recent movies produced in India have also taken an overt nationalist tinge as seen in movies like Uri: The Surgical Strike. Chinese movies Wolf Warrior (2015) and Wolf Warrior 2 (2017) have been viewed as examples of a more assertive projection of cultural power by China, leading to the concept of ‘Wolf-warrior diplomacy’. ¹⁰

Outcomes

Practically, I screen the movie in the week before the class. The students are also assigned readings on the topic addressed in the movie. The class discussion focuses on some elements of the movie, each week, and the particular IR theme that I intend to highlight through the movie.

As conflict was the primary theme, we started watching what might be called as ‘war films’. This generated an active debate in the class on whether a movie was pro-war or anti-war. ¹¹ In the first film, we encounter a scene wherein one soldier raises a question:

Tjaden: Well. how do they start a war?

Albert Kropp: Well, one country offends another.

Tjaden: How could one country offend another?

Tjaden: You mean there’s a mountain over in Germany gets mad at a field over in France?

[Everyone laughs]

Albert Kropp: Well, stupid, one people offends another.

Tjaden: Oh, well, if that’s it, I shouldn’t be here at all. I don’t feel offended. ¹²

This scene can be used purposefully to discuss the origins of conflict and even engage with the democratic peace theory, the role of the military-industrial complex and symbolic politics that give rise to conflicts. A resource that can complement the discussion is the documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 ¹³ made by Michael Moore which addresses the more contemporaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As we progress, Thirteen Days and Dr. Strangelove, capture the dynamics of the Cold War struggle straddling the ideological divide between the United States and the USSR. Their efforts to carve out spheres of influence giving rise to the Cuban missile crisis reveal the ramifications of the nuclear arms’ race and the threat of nuclear weapons to humanity. The Cuban missile crisis is analysed by referring to the classic work of Graham T. Allison—Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here he shows how fundamental assumptions and categories employed by decision-makers in government lead to outcomes which are the result of compromise, coalition, competition and confusion among government officials. The fortuitous resolution of the Cuban missile crisis is mimetically captured in these movies.

One movie that was really viewed with a crucial lens is Gandhi (1982) ¹⁴ by Richard Attenborough. As we know, this movie is screened on Doordarshan every year on October 2 and all students in the class remember watching it, but the collective experience of watching this movie together with their peers in a dark theatre has transformed how they read this film now. They point out how their exposure to a wider and critical literature on political science at the undergraduate level has transformed their reading of the narrative presented in Gandhi which is focused centrally on Mahatma Gandhi, when in fact the Indian independence struggle was a wider individual and collective effort.

They could also see the nuances of how Ben Kingsley’s portrayal of Gandhi sees a physical transformation from an erect posture to a hunched walk as the movie progresses.

The role of sound in movies was discerned by students who paid a critical outlook to the soundscapes of Gandhi which had the sitar and the cawing of the crows identifying the Indian countryside. This contrasted with the musical image that Gillo Pontecorvo created by drawing on the ethnic roots of the local music from Algeria and composing a memorable soundtrack. ¹⁵

The Battle of Algiers stands out for its effective use of documentary newsreel style which makes it an example of cinéma verité ‘that showed people in everyday situations with authentic dialogue and naturalness of action’. It was so effective that when it was screened in theatres in the United States, they made a disclaimer that ‘not a foot of this film is newsreel footage’.

Great Dictator and Dr. Strangelove through comedy exaggerate yet convey through the device of comedy the fallacies of great power ambitions of Hitler or seeking nuclear supremacy by the United States and USSR leading to a situation of mutually assured destruction.

The students could notice the differences in the style of filmmaking based on whether the movies, we watched in class, were made contemporaneously or nearer to the events portrayed in the films, or, if they were made at a later time, removed from the events and gained a historical context.

Pedagogy

In the first two weeks, I raise the following questions. What are some of the icons, symbols and indexes used in the film? What did the student notice about—balance, shape, form, growth, space, light, colour, movement, tension and expression? Did they discern any codes in the film? And, what did they notice about the shots in the films and what effect did they convey to them as a viewer?

These questions and the discussion become the basis for the first short assignment where I ask the students to write a 500-word essay on a single element of film technique—editing, sound, mis-en-scene, cinematography and lighting from the movie All Quiet on the Western Front. The article should describe and make an argument about the filmmaker’s use of the film technique.

When I have offered this course, I found that students face quite a challenge during the first assignment. This happens as students are introduced to a completely new vocabulary about films like icons, codes, symbols and so on. They are able to engage with these new concepts by the time they do their second assignment and start reading the films.

The students are required to write two more critical analyses of films of their choice, where they propose and defend a thesis about the films of their choice. These 600-to-800-word papers should move beyond pure description to a critical interpretation of the film. The thesis must address an international political theme of the film and the ways in which the medium of film is used to explore this theme. They are also required to address any of the following questions: What is the film-maker trying to say? What is the film’s intended purpose and audience? How does the film-maker use formal elements to reinforce his or her intended themes? How successful is the film in these terms?

The final assignment for the class is a lengthier critical analysis where I require the students to read the film in its historical context and address the following questions: To what extent does the film represent or reject existing political ideologies, institutions, norms and events? Does the film-maker have a political message or intent? To what extent does the film seek to influence or is influenced by the international political context? How does the film-maker use formal elements to reinforce his or her intended themes? How successful is the film in these terms?

In lieu of a conclusion, I think that other topics which could be addressed using films could be climate change, artificial intelligence and apocalyptic challenges, which could be addressed through movies like The Day After Tomorrow, Her and The Wandering Earth, respectively.