It's Not Kansas Anymore: It's Cinematic Thinking
A Q&A with Gardner Campbell
As an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and a widely recognized thought leader in education technology, Gardner Campbell has, for three decades, sought to understand and describe the qualities that comprise the ability to communicate effectively though various media and ultimately, to lead students in acquiring those attributes. Here, he explores what he's dubbed "cinematic thinking" and the processes and pathways that lead to it.
"You become a thinker of opportunities to see new connections or reveal those that might not have been apparent before." —Gardner Campbell
Mary Grush: Recently you've talked about "cinematic thinking." Could you explain a little about that? How did the term originate?
Gardner Campbell: The fact is, I may have made it up! I didn't consciously derive it from any particular thing I've read. I came up with the concept to help me understand and talk about a place where several paths in my experience seem to have met. It's what I might call a "heuristic."
Grush: Ah, so might we also call it a "Campbellism"?
Campbell: I guess so. [laughs]
Grush: That makes me want to hear about it even more. You describe cinematic thinking as a place you've come to. What were some of those paths you mentioned that have taken you there?
Campbell: One of the paths is that, like a lot of people — many of them philosophers — I've been fascinated by the relationship between reason and the imagination. Cinematic thinking in some respects comes from that lifelong fascination. What is it that happens in the process of insight or intuition or artistic creativity that's related to logic or reason or thinking your way through any problem?
What is it that happens in the process of insight or intuition or artistic creativity that's related to logic or reason?
Creativity and logic, on the surface, don't seem to have very much to do with each other, and yet both of them are approaches to what you might call problem solving or even just the joy of learning.
Grush: So how does all that feed into the idea of cinematic thinking?
Campbell: I've often told my students that I try to make a little movie in my mind of each of my courses, thinking about them not simply in terms of creative presentation — though that's part of it — and not just in terms of logic, though I certainly hope it's logical. In this mental movie, both creativity and logic, the odd couple, are right there, together. Grasping both at the same time, end-to-end throughout the experience — the movie — that's a big part of cinematic thinking.
Grush: Is cinematic thinking the same as making a narrative?
Campbell: A good narrative always offers more than a series of facts, and it has a form that substantially exposes the reasons why the story is unfolding as it is. But what I'm getting at with cinematic thinking is even more than that, so narrative is another path I'd like to try to talk about here.
A good narrative always offers more than a series of facts, and it has a form that substantially exposes the reasons why the story is unfolding as it is. But what I’m getting at with cinematic thinking is even more than that.
I'll give you an example from student blogging in my course: a journal of the experience of three or four months of their lives. There's a certain shape to the blogging experience. Students check in every week, writing in a very public manner about the story of their learning. Then, at the end of the semester they can look back on the series of blogs to see their progress and make connections among all the elements that contributed to it.
So, students are doing more than exploring the meaning and reasoning behind the narrative. They are discovering connections among elements that are usually larger than their own stories, the way everyone makes different connections when they watch the same movie. That's why it's so valuable for students to read each other's blogs.
Blogs are like a screenplay to a mental movie the student has made. It's a kind of narrative, but in a way that's more associative, the way film can be. And that's how students go down a path that may eventually arrive at cinematic thinking.
Blogs are like a screenplay to a mental movie the student has made. It's a kind of narrative, but in a way that's more associative, the way film can be.
Grush: What about your recorded online class sessions? Do they present another path to cinematic thinking?
Campbell: Yes! A couple years ago I started describing what I did with online learning as making movies on location. That referred to the way that I really wanted each of our class meetings to be: a kind of experience, not just for students to be here as I'm lecturing, though I may be doing that, but an experience that's similar to a live television show. Or almost like a live recording session. Of course, we're making something that is recorded on video, and you can go back and look at it to get the flow of the experience of our time together: the way in which that story exists through time.
Grush: So for you, the recorded online sessions tend to become little movies?
Campbell: Sure.
Grush: Let's talk for a minute about your film class. I'd guess that you could more easily find elements of cinematic thinking in that environment, and maybe that would help you define it.
Campbell: Yes, certainly. I've taught an introduction to film class every year for most of my teaching career. I've been continuing that tradition at VCU, and I keep thinking about this: What is it that we gain when we learn how to pay attention to a movie — as we begin to know about mise en scene and cinematography and editing and sound?
What is it that we gain when we learn how to pay attention to a movie — as we begin to know about mise en scene and cinematography and editing and sound?
How might that learning be generalizable to the way we think about writing and other endeavors, or analogous to constructing your writing to be reason-based but not just information or a transaction?
When we understand all that, we know and can act with cinematic thinking.
Grush: So that's really the basis for cinematic thinking.
Campbell: Yes, you could say that.
Grush: What else can you draw on from your film class that helps you arrive at cinematic thinking?
Campbell: I'd pick from one of the books that we use, Making Movies, by Sidney Lumet, a very famous and accomplished film director.
It's a lovely book, very approachable and very much an account of Lumet's own experience as a director. But even more than that, Lumet uncovers the creative process, which includes thinking, deliberate planning, and really cold, hard logic: You have to coordinate with other people. There has to be some kind of a plan. There is a carefully controlled schedule. So much is involved in the process of making a movie.
Grush: That seems to echo what you mentioned earlier about creativity and logic.
Campbell: Indeed it does…
Anyway, I've been using this book for about 15 years, but this time around, this semester, how Lumet wrote about editing really caught my eye in a way that it hadn't before.
Lumet talked about how for him, editing a movie is something that happens after the whole movie's been shot; everybody's gone home. There's no more cast, no more crew. It's just the director and the editor, typically, in a room watching all of the different pieces of the movie that they've shot, sometimes wildly out of order over the course of production, and deciding what goes where — how long should that shot last, which shot is going to be best before a subsequent shot, which might be better afterwards. It doesn't always have to do simply with the linear flow of the narrative. But it usually does have to do with what Lumet refers to as juxtapositioning and tempo.
And it just struck me this semester that these are interesting ways of thinking about thinking, and particularly thinking about the act of writing. But it generalizes even beyond that. The idea is that you're always putting things side by side. Why are you doing that? Why this thing, then this thing? "Tempo," then, becomes a question of how you pace the experience for your audience. And how do you make that juxtapositioning and that tempo enhance the effectiveness and the expressiveness of what you're doing? There should be an element of discovery, and an element of expression.
If you remain aware of all that, you're always going to be alert for any insights about how things now connect that maybe didn't connect before and how you can make that experience accessible for the viewer — or in the case of writing, for the reader. You become a thinker of opportunities to see new connections or reveal those that might not have been apparent before.
You're always going to be alert for any insights about how things now connect.
Grush: …And this thinking that you're doing is cinematic thinking.
Campbell: Of course.
Grush: Many of these concepts — like juxtapositioning, tempo, and other relevant ones — are part of film theory, but may not be stated in terms of a more generalized cinematic thinking… Is that right?
Campbell: Yes, and there is a rich history and theory of film. You can find discussions of juxtapositioning and tempo, for example, all the way back in very, very early writing about film, from people like Eisenstein and Pudovkin and some of the great Russian film theorists. They recognized there was something unique about what you could do with these bits of plastic or nitrate as you put them together as an expressive medium.
Grush: Thank you for telling us about your fascination with all of this and your own paths to cinematic thinking. Maybe, for some of the rest of us, there is a yellow brick road to that place!