ABSTRACT
Where is there a place for film, a major contemporary narrative art, on the curriculum? ‘Narrative’ suggests its affinities with literature, but ‘contemporary’ adverts us to the difficulty of locating film in a traditional syllabus, whose emphasis is on perceived continuities within established disciplines. My argument necessitates a digressive reflection on ‘English’: the difficulty of assimilating film, it seems to me, co-exists with the difficulty of assimilating the best of international contemporary literature. Therefore I propose a policy of greater openness, of inclusion rather than exclusion, focused on the concept of Narrative Arts, rather than the national tradition. In conclusion I offer outline readings of two commercial American films of the 1980s; these readings suggest that various kinds of background knowledge can be as necessary to an understanding of popular contemporary films as to established ‘great’ works in any of the arts, and that a prerequisite for an educated response to film art is an education in its traditions-significant periods, movements, conventions, styles, directors-its continuity with other narrative arts, and its presence in and impact on contemporary culture.
