Faces vs. words: Interdisciplinary possibilities in the "ghosts" of Sunset Boulevard (1950)

In the liberal arts, as in other disciplines, higher education has increasingly put emphasis on interdisciplinarity as a response towards the requirement of training generalists and not specialists for the workplace today. While a lot of people will regard the liberal arts as by nature interdisciplinary, how do we actually go about delivering the interdisciplinary learning and teaching experience in the classroom? This paper is a proposal of classroom teaching in an interdisciplinary approach, using the film Sunset Boulevard (1950) as the main text and the core material, in the setting of higher education. The choice of the material is strategic. The film is a dramatization of people caught up in one of the major turning points of cinematic history - the appearance of sound movies - and thus is situated in an interesting context of struggles between opposites. The paper is suggesting that with careful selection of material, an interesting learning and teaching experience could be created for students who do not have specific disciplinary background, and offers an insight into film studies, cultural studies, creative writing, and language studies.