ABSTRACT
The topic of this special issue – questions of taste and value in canonically bad cinema, or marginal cinema that troubles the boundaries of the discipline – is figured differently when films are considered as ‘bad’ teaching and learning objects in a classroom. ‘Badness’ is determined not through genre or industrial principles but by, in part, student responses to viewing material. Without an understanding of disciplinarity or even the canon, students locate ‘badness’ in a way that aligns with their own learning goals and taste preferences. In the case of television studies the issue of preference and discernment becomes more complex. As noted in the Introduction, the increasing number of edited journal issues in film studies and related disciplines that reflect on the teaching of screen texts suggests an intensification of interest in how we teach, what we teach and why we teach it. Invariably they focus on the problems and experiences of teaching ‘difficult films’ – most often pornography, but also exploitation film, racist films or even experimental film. In most of these cases the difficulty is located in how modes of affect are activated in ways that overshadow specific learning objectives, especially aversion, frustration or confusion. Yet if this affect can be harnessed in class, it can also produce the most dramatic and successful examples of learning. In my teaching experience bad (or difficult) teaching objects are actually those that are met with indifference or boredom, not aversion. 1
