Thirteen Quotes
James R. Elkins
1. A "Lawyers and Film" Course? You Must Be Joking
"Teaching
Film at Harvard Law School,"
Alan A. Stone, Harvard Law School, 24 Legal Stud. F. 573 (1999)
"Many of my colleagues are barely able to suppress their 'why
are you teaching that at Harvard Law School' guffaws when they learn
that I have been teaching a seminar 'on film' at this august institution.
Incredulity and derision are by no means confined to Harvard Law School
professors.
. . . .
Students are able to see the connections between their own moral adventure
in life and that depicted in the films we watch and discuss. They make
the link between the moral ambitions that brought them to law school
and the narratives about law, psychology, and morality found in the
film. They can then do exactly what I suggested typical legal education
may prevent them from doing, reengage their moral passions by way of
dialogue, debate and defend their own sense of justice. In the jargon
of 1960's psychology, the student can experience self-actualization
that confirms his individual identity within a larger community. This
I take to be the best argument for the seminar; it engages students
who have become alienated from the law school classroom. As a psychological-moral
problem, this alienation is, in my experience, the greatest failing
of my own law school and of legal education. The film seminar is one
of many possible solutions to that alienation."
2. Lawyers For All the World To See
"The
Cinematic Lawyer: The Magic Mirror and the Silver Screen,"
Rennard Strickland, 22 Okla. City U. L. Rev. 13 (1997) [online text]
"Lawyers have a great many varied images of themselves and of
their enterprise, and like the blind man and the elephant, the image
of the profession depends upon whether you are grasping the trunk or
the tail. Lawyers live and work in a world of law, courtrooms, conferences
and libraries, but the vast majority of America's non-lawyers do not
learn about the law in the bright light of a line-up, from the jury
box, or even standing before a judge. The average American's most continuous
association with legal institutions is in the world of television and
film. Most Americans know Perry Mason; fewer recognize the name of William
Rehnquist.
If we are to comprehend the public view of the legal profession in our
society, American film must be seen as more than a pleasant or even
challenging diversion. Ours is a visual culture, and the image of law
and lawyers--indeed even the behavior of lawyers themselves--has been
influenced significantly by the magic of the great stereopticon, by
the larger-than-life figures on the silver screen."
3. The Search for Discipline Blindspots
"What Legal
Films Can Tell Us About Legal Method's Dirty Secrets," Rebecca Johnson & Ruth Buchanan, 20 Windsor Y.B.
Access Just. 87, 88 (2001) [online text]
"[R]ather than dismissing movies about law for their lack of technical
veracity (e.g.: the 'hearsay rule' did not work that way; a cross examining
lawyer would never ask a question to which she didn't know the answer),
we may look to films . . . for the insights they provide into our own
disciplinary blindspots."
4. Getting Beyond What They Teach You in Law School
"Visual
Literacy and the Legal Culture: Reading Film as Text,"
Philip N. Meyer, Vermont Law School,
17 Legal Stud. F. 73 (1993) [online text]
"Law students must effectively identify legal issues and correctly
synthesize and articulate the legal rules necessary to resolve these
issues. Students must learn to systematically apply these rules ("the
law") to "the legally significant facts." Unfortunately, the legally
significant facts embodied in law school hypotheticals, legal writing
problems and examination fact patterns are simplified, desiccated
and decontextualized; they are merely excuses for students to state
and apply legal rules. The appellate opinions studied in law school
are based on re-examinations of law; they accept the facts of the case
as fixed at trial.
After graduation, however, most lawyers operate as storytellers, subjective
and passionate voices advocating client stories in a predominantly narrative
oral culture. Trial lawyers, for example, are "imagistic" storytellers
operating in a factually indeterminate and interpretivist world far
removed from the legally indeterminate world of the appellate court
and the law school classroom."
5. The Carefully Guarded Entrance to the Law
"Teaching
Film at Harvard Law School,"
Alan A. Stone, Harvard Law School, 24 Legal Stud. F. 573 (1999)
"It is an intellectually intriguing version of Law, one that challenges
our settled notions of justice, that brings so many students to law
school. But, as in Kafka’s famous fable in The Trial, the entrance
to Law is carefully guarded. In modern legal curricula, the guards are
theorists armed with an array of powerful methodologies . . . . Before
the neophyte gains entry to the “Temple of Law” she must learn a set
of new languages. Among those who become most fluent, there is sometimes
a question about whether they are still working with the idea of justice
at all. Many law students never fully master a meta-legal discourse
and, as a consequence, like Kafka’s peasant, never reach Law’s inner
sanctum. Rarely in their law school classes do students discuss in non-technical
language the intriguing vision of law and justice that brought them
to law school."
6. The Familiar and Beyond.
Ray Carney, The Films of John Cassavetes: Pragmatism, Modernism,
and the Movies 2 (England: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
"Cassavetes understood that his films offered new forms of experience.
When we watch them, we are asked to participate in new intellectual
and emotional structures of understanding. At least for the time of
the viewing experience (and to the extent we yield ourselves to it rather
than defending ourselves against it), our consciousnesses are altered.
Our nervous systems are reprogrammed. Our range of sensitivities is
subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) shifted. We are made to notice
and feel things we wouldn’t otherwise. But one doesn’t get
to a new place without leaving old positions behind, and, as the anecdote
takes for granted, the process of being exposed to new ways of knowing
can present a bit of shock to the system. The films can only teach us
new understandings by forcibly denying us old ones, and that can be
bewildering. They can only freshen and quicken our responses by altering
our habitual modes of perception, and that can be disorienting. Their
stylistic defamiliarizations and assaults are their way of doing this,
and it is only to be expected that they should make us more than a little
uncomfortable at moments."
7. It's All About Stories and The Characters We Find in Them.
"Conflicts
of Law and the Character of Men: Writing Reversal of Fortune and Judgment at Nuremberg," Suzanne Shale, 30 U.S.F. L. Rev. 991 (1996)
"Hollywood movies are stories about 'character' and how character
determines the outcome of life events. 'Character' is the sum of a human
being's personhood: biography, memory, virtues and vice, reactions,
capabilities, potentiality, and weakness. In movies, we learn about
such character when it is expressed in the actions which emerge from
human conflict: conflicts between people, conflicts within a person,
and conflicts between persons and their environments. Human lives and,
perhaps even more so, movie lives, are littered with incompatible goals
and incommensurate values. In the movies, it is the task of 'character' to resolve the human conflicts that our goals and values create. It
is always a character who takes steps, a character who makes choices,
a character's responses that drive the story forward or spin it around
in new directions. It is a character who overcomes, a character who
changes or learns.
It is the film's protagonist whose life lies at the epicenter of the
narrative. His or her character and experiences power the narrative
forward, and his or her observable beliefs and value judgements make
manifest the meaning of the story. But for the protagonist to be a truly
interesting character, there must be a demanding foe. Where the film's
core conflict is a conflict between persons, it will be another character--the
opposing antagonist--who will properly test the protagonist's mettle
and provide the measure of his or her worth."
8. Lawyers are Storytellers; They Tells Stories the
Way Films Tell Stories.
"Visual
Literacy and the Legal Culture: Reading Film as Text,"
Philip N. Meyer,
17 Legal Stud. F. 73 (1993) [online text]
"Trial storytelling . . . is a deeply mythic enterprise: "stock"
trial lawyer stories are obvious compilations and transliterations of
popular mythology. Fact-finders identify with and respond to these collective
aural story-structures as the mechanisms for organizing complex stories
into coherent meanings.
. . . .
Lawyers tell imagistic narratives constructed upon aesthetic principles
that are closely akin to the structural principles that control the
for- mulation of plot-structure in commercial cinema. We tell stories
with hard driving plot-lines and clear themes that are readily distilled.
We shoot our films from the fixed perspective of protagonist-clients.
We are simple realists who construct our stories to hook the sympathy
and capture the imagination of audiences who think in pictures. We sequence
shots on imaginal storyboards until we establish the patterns that ultimately
suit our purposes. We speak and think filmically, We have much to learn
from visual storytellers working the same popular cultural turf."
9. It's All About Fiction & Reality, Reality & Fiction.
"Get
Off the Screen,"
Lisa Scottoline,
24 Nova L. Rev. 653 (2000) [online text]
"What is happening? Well, in my view, the line between the reality
of lawyering and its fictional representation on television and in books
has gone well beyond blurred. It isn't really a question anymore of
how lawyers and law are portrayed on television and in books, because
that depiction is merging daily with reality. It's a symbiotic relationship
at this point between fiction and reality, not a separate relationship
that can be compared and contrasted, like a law school exam. At this
point, the wall between fiction and reality is as thin and porous as
a cell membrane, with reality passing through it to fiction and fiction
flowing backwards to reality, in constant flux."
10. Kinds of Reading: Literal and Beyond.
Film
Interpretation Revisited
David Bordwell revisits his arguments and observations
in David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of
Cinema (1989)
"[S]ome beliefs or talk about a film postulates something concretely
there--say, the characters represented, the action of the story, and
the dramatic point or significance of it all. Comprehension grasps the
meanings denoted by the text and its world. . . . Interpretation, by
contrast, ascribes abstract and nonliteral meanings to the film
and its world. It ascribes a broader significance, going beyond the
denoted world and any denoted message to posit implicit or symptomatic
meanings at work in the text.
. . . .
What the critic brings to this engagement [with the film]
is human perceptual equipment, cultural experience and values, tacit
norms of comprehension, and a repertory of knowledge structures and
critical procedures for building an interpretation out of cues which
she or he discriminates in the film. We don't just see meanings, literal
or interpretive; the critic constructs meaning through a complex
process of assumption, testing, projection, inferential trial and error,
and comparable activities. Both comprehension and interpretation are
inferential activities. Meaning is made, not found.
. . . [I]t might seem that the critic can only see what
s/he is primed and prepared to see. But to say that people perceive
and understand through mental constructs--categories, assumptions, and
the like--is not to say that they don't expand their cognitive repertoire
through encounter with the world. Our cognitive resources are not cookie
cutters, and the world is not soft dough; we do not stamp out the same
shape in every transaction with reality. When we learn anything, on
this account, we start with rough and approximate constructs. We increase
them in number or expand their scope or refine them in delicacy as we
find that they do not discriminate sufficiently among the data we encounter.
Thus the critic confronts . . . 'recalcitrant data,' which forces her
or him to adjust or revise or reject overly simple frames of reference.
The institution of criticism, by insisting on nuance and comprehensiveness
as criteria of good criticism, likewise exercises some pressure not
to treat films too reductively.
. . . Film undeniably provoke us to create new interpretations
. . . ."
11. When the Guide Gets in the Way
Film as Text, Jo Flack, 1997 [website no longer online]
"There are lots of ways of approaching the teaching of film, most
of you will have experienced some of the worst ways at university. You
know what I mean. The 'lets do it to death and then kick over the corpse
for a bit' method of film study. The perpetrator of such a film study
crime usually 'knows' a great deal (always more than us) and lets this
knowledge either drip out water torture style or engulfs us in a tidal
wave of Freudian, Marxist, feminist semiotic mumbo jumbo. At the end
of such 'learning' we know a lot about a particular film but usually
do not feel empowered to apply this knowledge to our Sunday night viewing
of The Fearless Vampire Killers. We remain pretty much clueless."
12. The Means of that Power (and Our Reticence to Come to Grips
With It).
Strange
Encounters: Exploring Law and Film in the Affective Register
Ruth Buchanan & Rebecca Johnson, Austin Sarat (ed.), Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 33-60 (2009)(vol.46)
"[O]ur experience of being film viewers is that movies
do much more than tell stories, however powerful those stories
are. We have been drawn to work at the intersection of law and film
in large measure because of films that have disturbed, irritated, or
intrigued us. And yet, we have remained uncomfortably conscious of the
lack of (legal) vocabulary to talk about these affects. Law-and-Film
scholarship appears to be uncharacteristically tongue-tied about the
fact that, as viewers, many are profoundly moved by film, as well as
about the related questions of how film does this to us, and
how one might write about it."
13. What Do Movies Do?
"The mistake is to look to movies for any answers at all. All
movies can really do is point out problems, pose questions, set us tasks
to do. They can remind us that we need to work on our lives. They can
ask us to open our consciousness to new ways of knowing and feeling.
They can inspire us to try harder. But they can’t give us answers. They
can’t do the work for us. We have to do it all. Nothing can lift that
burden from our shoulders. And that takes time and work and thought.
It’s not quick and painless."
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