"These are incredibly influential filmmakers," Brownlee said. "There’s so much you can learn and gain from watching their films, but right beside that you need to highlight the crimes and abuses."
It has been hundreds of years since Chaucer has been actively working, but in recent years many influential public figures have been implicated in crimes or accused of inappropriate behavior.
Fall 2019 marks the second anniversary of the #MeToo movement. After revelations of misconduct, it can be difficult to determine the implications of consuming work by such creators — especially in the classroom.
Hilary Edwards Lithgow, a professor and undergraduate adviser for the English and Comparative Literature Department, said separating the artist from the art can be difficult because many artists create personas. She said texts with controversial content are not necessarily identical to the artist’s beliefs.
Lithgow said she once questioned whether to teach a text by Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher who was a public supporter of the Nazi party in the 1930s.
Lithgow decided to teach the work, she said, because it is an extremely important work of art and necessary for understanding the history of Western thought.
“In that case, I went for it, but I did provide the context,” Lithgow said. “For me, it’s more of an issue of if the text really reflects those views. There’s definitely a spectrum, but there have been times when I've taught people whose politics that I think are really abhorrent because I think the benefits outweigh the costs.”
When teaching sensitive texts, trigger or content warnings can be extremely beneficial, said Lithgow. At the beginning of a semester, she will tell the class about the texts she is teaching and give students the opportunity to drop if they are uncomfortable discussing problematic artists or themes such as sexual assault, racism and other abuses.
Rick Warner, director of Film Studies in the department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC, said the debate of separating the art from the artist has been a prevalent and often heated discussion between film scholars over the past two years. Warner described two types of perspectives he has observed in the debate.
“There are two extremes that I’ve seen play out,” Warner said. “On the one hand, there’s a kind of ‘old guard’ of traditional cinephiles. They want to preserve all of film history, and make the case that there might be a good educational reason to teach a film even if it has a problematic figure associated with it. On the other hand, there’s the ‘cancelation culture’ idea — the attitude that if a film is tarnished in any way, then it has to go.”
Warner said many who work in Hollywood have noted a positive change in the culture since the rise of #MeToo, with industry workers being more conscious of gender disparity and discrimination.
But the film community hasn't seen much change in representation yet, he said.
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This past year, the Cannes Film Festival only showed four films by female directors in the 19-film competition. Venice Film Festival only had two female directors in a 21-film lineup that included a film directed by convicted sex offender Roman Polanski. The lineup caused controversy, as the film festival had signed a charter for gender parity and inclusion one year earlier.
Brownlee said he believes that because art is such a personal, expressive media, it gets tricky to separate the art from the artist, but critically analyzing art is an important skill. People can still teach works by implicated artists, he said, as long as the professor provides context.
“You owe it to your students and to the people you’re educating to show the artist as they truly were,” Brownlee said. “Not as some glorified version of themselves who are hailed as this amazing artist and only that. To put artists on a pedestal and forgive their past crimes is the same thing as pretending it never happened.”
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