In 1971, the Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Seta starts the production of the tv-film Diario di un maestro (Diary of a Schoolmaster). The film takes place in a suburban school in Rome. De Seta hires an actor to play the role of the schoolmaster who improvises scenes within a classroom. The students of the school play the role of themselves. Shot on 16mm with synchronous sound, it plays out as a documentary in which the fictions of the actors and the camera are used as a way to actively rethink the potentiality of education as a collective engagement and world disclosing practice (cf. Masschelein and Simons 2013). In this contribution we will consider the educational potential of De Seta’s film document against the background of today’s proliferation of audio-visual media in education. The central question of this contribution is what new subjectivities are constituted through the contemporary proliferation of audiovisual media in and as education, and what possiblilties do audiovisual experiences afford the new generation for world-renewal.  

While the integration of film in the classroom has been limited for a long time, the advent of the digital screen, made the film in and as education ubiquitous. It has been argued that the integration of audio-visual media in education not only has an impact on the learners’ active engagement in education, but that it also resulted in a shift from the learner as being a ‘passive consumer’ to an active co-producer of culture (Hodgson 2010). In this regard, studies have pointed toward a so-called transmutation from a ‘culture of the one’ to a ‘culture of the multiple’ (Tisseron 2010). As a result, at different places, the question raises as to how education should relate itself to these contemporary changes. Especially within the field of cultural and media studies, it has been argued that a critical study of popular film and new screen culture in schools is pivotal in raising awareness about their manipulative power, and the identity issues which they raise (Mills 2011, Jagodzinski 2015, Van Gorp 2017). Instead of advocating, or criticizing the use of audio-visual media for its instrumental value on the one hand, or its manipulative character on the other, through an analysis of De Seta’s film, we will re-assess the 'scholastic' (or school-like) potential of audio-visual media through a radical affirmation of its ‘fictionality’, and reconsider the future of school-making as film-making

Through a critical analysis of De Seta’s film, this paper aims to investigate the educational potentiality of audio-visual fiction and the use of the camera. The reflection, however, will not start from an analysis of the images shown in the film. We approach the analysis through the lens of image making: approaching the camera as a pedagogical tool and a verb. We link the camera and all the inherent (cinematographic) fictions of making film with the inherent fictions of ‘making school’. Outlining the different ways in which the figure of the teacher (as a ‘school-maker’) becomes visible in Diario di un maestro. Not only by describing the representations of the teacher but by researching how Vittorio De Seta handles audio-visual techniques to make the teacher and school actively present. Drawing on these ideas we link the film to contemporary educational challenges where a clear proliferation of digital cameras and audio-visual images is taking place.

This contribution attempts to reconsider the educational affordances of audio-visual media, and claims along the line of De Seta’s project that experimental film-making and fictionalising practices are required to come to an embodied knowledge of what it means to produce, to share and to make available a visual world, rather than enable students to develop a critical position towards new visual conditions.

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