Don’t teach: exploring the irreducibilities of film education through Japan’s Children Meet Cinema project in conversation with Etsuko Dohi

Abstract

This article presents a case study of the innovative Japanese film education project Children Meet Cinema, through aspects of an interview with its founder Etsuko Dohi, placed within a wider discussion of the project’s pedagogical approaches. In particular, the article details the innovative manner in which Children Meet Cinema has invited some of Japan’s leading film-makers – among them, Nobuhiro Suwa, Hirokazu Koreeda and Naomi Kawase – to engage with children making films for the first time.

Vernacular cinema, self-concept and the perceptual–conceptual shift: exploring conversations between film education and developmental psychology

“…A further significant feature of visual cognitive development is what is known as the perceptualto-conceptual shift (Smith and Heise, 1992), tending to occur between the ages of 5 and 10, in which younger children (typically those between 5 and 7) are more likely to focus on perceptual (and thus bottom-up) features in their surrounding environment, such as light, colour and texture, rather than on conceptual aspects requiring some degree of semantic (top-down) decoding. In this context, it is interesting to consider how frequently film education programmes (such as those of Alicia Vega [2020] in Chile, Children Meet Cinema in Japan [Chambers, 2023] and Cinéma, cent ans de jeunesse in France), while not excluding older learners, tend to gravitate in particular towards middle childhood (towards the upper end of primary or elementary school). While beyond the bounds of this article, it is interesting to speculate about whether this perceptual-conceptual shift is one reason why learners in middle childhood seem to demonstrate a significant propensity for engaging with film education, as we return to below.…”