Educating Film-makers: Past, Present and Future

By Duncan Petrie and Rod Stoneman

A timely consideration of both the history and the current challenges facing practice-based film training, Educating Film-Makers is the first book to examine the history, impact and significance of film education in Britain, Europe and the United States. Film schools, the authors show, have historically focused on the cultivation of the film-maker as a cultural activist, artist or intellectual – fostering creativity and innovation. But more recently a narrower approach has emerged, placing a new emphasis on technical training for the industry. The authors argue for a more imaginative engagement and understanding of the broader social importance of film and television, suggesting that critical analysis and production should be connected. Examining current concerns facing practice-based film education in the digital era, this book is indispensable for both film teachers and students alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jun 20, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783202706

Book preview

Educating Film-makers

Educating Film-makers

Past, Present and Future

by Duncan Petrie and Rod Stoneman

Intellect Bristol UK / Chicago, USA

First published in the UK in 2014 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2014 by Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This publication was grant-aided by the Publications Fund of the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Production managers: Jelena Stanovnik & Heather Gibson

Cover designer: Holly Rose

Copy editor: Sebastian Manley

Index: Lyn Greenwood

Typesetting: John Teehan

ISBN 978-1-78320-185-3

ePUB ISBN 978-1-78320-270-6

ePDF ISBN 978-1-78320-269-0

Printed and bound by Hobbs the Printers Ltd, UK

Dedication

Duncan Petrie: for Rebecca and Anicë

Rod Stoneman: this is for Sue, Adam, Otto and Finn, as always

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON AUTHORS

INTRODUCTION

DUNCAN PETRIE and ROD STONEMAN

PART ONE: The Development of Film Schools in Europe and North America

DUNCAN PETRIE

Continental Film Schools: A Brief History of the 'National Conservatoire'

American University Film Schools: A Changing Relationship with Hollywood

PART TWO: British Film Schools

DUNCAN PETRIE

The 'Official' State Institution: The National Film and Television School

The Private Institution: The London Film School

The Art School: The Royal College of Art

Beyond London: The Struggle for a Scottish Film School

PART THREE: Provocations

ROD STONEMAN

Prologue

The Culture Industry

The Academic and the Creative

The Ethics of the Sign

The Theories We Need

Digital Examination

Towards a Different Future

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Duncan Petrie would like to thank all of those who generously gave their time to be interviewed for this book: Stephen Bayly, Alan Bernstein, Henning Camre, Roger Crittenden, Brian Dunnigan, Christopher Frayling, Ben Gibson, Keith Griffiths, Mark Herman, Douglas Lowndes, Colin MacLeod, Robin Macpherson, James Mavor, Noe Mendelle, Tim Miller, Clive Myer, Steve Partridge, Nik Powell, Al Rees, Dick Ross, Ian Sellar, Caroline Spry, Howard Thompson, Barry Vince, Brian Winston and Colin Young. Thanks also to those who provided invaluable additional information and assistance at various points: Tom Abrams, Hazel Arthur, Dennis Bartok, Kate Hughes, Frederick Lang, John Mateer, Neil Parkinson, Amy Sargeant, Nick Tannis and Guillaume Vernet. I would also like to acknowledge the support and encouragement provided by various friends and colleagues at various stages of the project, including Ed Braman, Malte Hagener, David Hickman, Andrew Higson, Erik Hedling, John Hill, Mette Hjort, Julian Petley, Heidi Philipsen, Francesco Pitassio and Simon van der Borgh.

Rod Stoneman would like to thank the many who contributed insight and argument, especially those who read a draft of ‘Provocations’ critically at a crucial point: Dennis Bartok, Des Bell, Alan Fountain, Malcolm Le Grice, Igor Korsic, Des O’Rawe, Dan Schiller and Adam Stoneman. I have learnt much from acting as external examiner for many courses over the years – in Coleraine, Edinburgh, Belfast, Dublin, Plymouth, Beaconsfield and Exeter. Thanks are also due to all fellow students, from many years ago at the Film Unit, the Slade School of Fine Art, University College, London, to the present at the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway.

Both authors would like to thank those who participated in the two symposia that preceded this book. ‘Film Schools Symposium’ in York, 16–17 October 2009: Christine Geraghty, Ben Gibson, Andrew Higson, John Hill, Mette Hjort, Igor Korsic, Des O’Rawe and Brian Winston; ‘Film/Making/Thinking’ in Galway, 28–29 May 2010: Don Boyd, June Givanni, Gaston Kaboré, Colin MacCabe, Annabelle Pangborn and Brian Winston.

NOTE ON AUTHORS

Duncan Petrie is Professor in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television at the University of York. He previously worked at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he was head of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies; the University of Exeter, where he set up and directed the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture; and the British Film Institute, where he was research officer. Duncan’s books include Creativity and Constraint in the British Film Industry, The British Cinematographer, Screening Scotland, Contemporary Scottish Fictions, Shot in New Zealand: The Art and Craft of the Kiwi Cinematographer, The Cinema of Small Nations and A Coming of Age: 30 Years of New Zealand Cinema.

Professor Rod Stoneman is the Director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He was Chief Executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann / the Irish Film Board until September 2003 and previously a Deputy Commissioning Editor in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel 4 Television in the United Kingdom. He has made a number of documentaries for television, including Ireland: The Silent Voices, Italy: The Image Business, Between Object and Image, 12,000 Years of Blindness and The Spindle, and has written extensively on film and television. He is the author of Chávez: The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, A Case Study of Politics and the Media and Seeing Is Believing: The Politics of the Visual.

INTRODUCTION

Duncan Petrie and Rod Stoneman

The world's first film school: the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, founded in 1919.

The significance of film schools

Since the middle of the twentieth century, a substantial number of moving image professionals have been educated in film schools, a formation that has important implications for the historical development of film and television as creative and industrial processes. The first such schools were created to provide new recruits for nationalized film industries and therefore were funded and controlled by or in the interests of the state. The story begins in 1919 with the Vserossiyskiy Gosoudarstvenni Institut Kinematographii/All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK), founded in Moscow by the new Bolshevik regime to train cadres of film-makers who would help further the aims of the revolution. But for the next quarter century this remained a small club, with only the addition of the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, established by Mussolini’s Fascist administration in Rome in 1935 with a similar propagandistic aim, and the Institute deshautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), set up in 1943 by a group of independent French cinephiles in German-occupied Paris. But following the end of World War II, film schools began to proliferate rapidly in Europe and elsewhere, gradually replacing the studio-based, on-the-job training that had previously ensured the reproduction of skilled labour for film production. Explicitly national schools became the predominant form of institution in Europe and were based on the conservatoire model operating in the spheres of music, dance and drama. In the United States, meanwhile, moving image education developed primarily within universities, with the first department of cinematography being established in 1932 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Many of the schools founded after 1945 followed the lead of the Soviet and Italian institutions, established as part of a wider policy to rejuvenate or create vibrant national film industries and moving image cultures. This was informed by a direct acknowledgement of both the economic and the cultural value of cinema and was to have major consequences for the development of the medium in Europe, particularly during the astonishing period of innovation that ran from the 1950s to the 1970s. Through the evolution of innovative curricula that combined practical instruction and contextual study, film schools provided the seedbed not only for individual creativity, but also for many of the key film movements of the twentieth century, beginning with the revolutionary Soviet montage cinema of the 1920s and followed by Italian Neo-Realism of the late 1940s, the Eastern European new waves of the 1950s and 1960s, the New Australian cinema of the 1970s, Fifth Generation Chinese Cinema in the 1980s and the Danish Dogme 95 initiative around the turn of the new millennium. In the United States the development of film education took a different path but was ultimately to have a similar impact via successive generations of cine-literate, university-film-school-educated graduates, including the ‘movie brats’ who spearheaded the New Hollywood of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the subsequent cohorts that became the leading lights of independent cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.

The international roll-call of talent produced by film schools includes such luminaries as Sergei Eisenstein, Michelangelo Antonioni, Andrzej Wajda, Andrei Tarkovsky, Louis Malle, Alain Resnais, Roman Polanski, Miloš Foreman, Krzysztof Kieslowski, Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Zhang Yimou, Ridley Scott, Mike Leigh, Michael Mann, Gillian Armstrong, Wim Wenders, Haile Gerima, Lars von Trier, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Ang Lee, Claire Denis, Jane Campion, Terence Davies, Tim Burton, Kathryn Bigelow and John Lassiter – to pick out just a handful.¹ But the success and reputation of film schools have also depended heavily on the expertise and talent of the administrators and teachers who set up and developed these institutions (and their pedagogic philosophies and curricula), most of whom remain largely unrecognized figures in the history of cinema. Schools have also traditionally relied on established filmmakers – many of them alumni – passing on their skills, knowledge and insights to the up-and-coming generation as visiting tutors. Not only has this ensured continuity and tradition, within and beyond specific national cinemas, but it has also created star teachers from the ranks of professional film-makers.

Beyond their primary role in training creative practitioners, film schools have also provided a fertile environment for wider research and study of the moving image. Some institutions – notably those in Moscow, Rome and Paris – amassed substantial libraries of film prints, books and other relevant materials, ensuring that their educational remit contributed to the wider growth in knowledge and critical understanding of cinema. Film schools have also regularly employed teaching staff who are primarily historians or critics, providing a secure basis from which they could research, write and disseminate their ideas – sometimes in journals and other publications supported by the institution. Thus, prior to the development of film as a legitimate academic subject within universities from the late 1960s onwards, certain schools made almost as important a contribution to the development and wider promotion of the history, theory and criticism of the ‘seventh art’ as they did to the training of practitioners. The significance of such intellectual activity also helped to ensure that, within the film school environment, theory and practice were frequently interdependent and mutually reinforcing facets of the educational process.

Moving image education and the (changing) frame of history

The historical development of film schools is closely bound up with wider economic, political and social change and can be charted in relation to three distinct phases. The first of these occurred during the turbulence of the interwar period, when prototype institutions emerged within the totalitarian regimes of Soviet Russia and Fascist Italy. Lenin and Mussolini clearly shared a recognition of the power of the moving image to propagate state ideology and consolidate political power through cultural means. But significantly, both VGIK and the Centro Sperimentale also provided a space within which the aesthetic and social potential of cinema could be explored through a combination of practical and intellectual activity. As noted above, this was to feed directly into the achievements of Soviet montage cinema and Italian Neo-Realism that for a period placed each of these respective national cinemas at the forefront of international developments in film art.

The second phase was much more substantial and unfolded over a more protracted period following the end of World War II, one marked by the Cold War and, particularly in the United States and Western Europe, the rise of material affluence and enhanced individualism. These developments thus provided a context for the emergence of film schools as institutional agents in a world now marked by the confrontation between two antagonistic economic systems and political ideologies. While one might expect this to have created a pressure for film schools, as part of wider national film industries, to function primarily to propagate the virtues of capitalism or communism, something very different happened. The founding in 1955 of the Centre International de Liaison desécoles de Cinéma et de Télévision (CILECT) in Cannes created a space for co-operation and discussion across the divide. Establishing a pattern of alternating meetings hosted by schools in both East and West, CILECT facilitated dialogue and exchange underpinned by shared assumptions and a common investment in the aesthetic and humanist values of what we would now understand as art-house cinema. Notably, this embraced the various ‘new waves’ that emerged in Europe and America from the 1950s to the 1970s, movements which tended to be underpinned by a valorization of the creative vision of the individual film-maker and a progressive engagement with contemporary society.

The third phase of film school development arose out of the triumph of neoliberalism – confirmed by the end of the Cold War in 1989/90 and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union – and the emergence of the market as the dominant form of human relations. While globalization may have created new kinds of transnational connection and accessibility, it has also positioned economics as the central source of affirmation or legitimacy governing all forms of activity – including cultural production and education. Consequently, the rationale for many film schools has been refocused towards serving an industrial or market-driven logic. The transformation of the moving image industries over the last 30 years has consolidated power in the hands of a smaller number of international conglomerates – dubbed ‘Global Hollywood’ by Toby Miller et al.² This has brought with it a new focus on cinema as primarily the product of the entertainment industry rather than an art form or a cultural phenomenon. All aspects of the industry have been affected by this shift in perspective – including the rationale for and function of the education and training of new practitioners. Hence in many established schools there has been a shift away from an emphasis on cinema as a potent form of auteur-driven, socially-relevant cultural expression, and towards a new focus on the moving image as a market-oriented, global entertainment business whose products depend on a complex array of high-level skills and craft specializations. Thus where many institutions were once geared towards the formation of all-round film-makers, over time a greater emphasis was placed on a more structured process of differentiation, with distinct programmes for directors, screenwriters, producers, cinematographers, editors, production designers, sound designers and visual effects specialists. This provided schools with more direct control over the reproduction of specific skills and therefore of the profiles of graduates, and so brought about a much closer alignment between educational institutions and the prevailing labour market. Rather than being primarily a site for innovation and new thinking, film schools gradually began to adopt a more overtly professional role, dictated by the needs of industry, which has served to reproduce commercial forms and arguably discourage genuine originality.

These latter developments also served to drive a wedge between the spheres of practical instruction and theoretical study. For if the purpose of film school was now primarily to provide an appropriate pool of skilled labour, clearly defined in relation to particular roles within the production process, then the wider terrain of film history and aesthetics became at best marginal and at worse an irrelevance. However, the division between theory and practice was also an unintended consequence of the flourishing of screen studies as a subject within universities. The first major wave of serious intellectual engagement with film occurred during the 1920s and 1930s and was dominated by individuals who were simultaneously pushing the boundaries of film-making as practitioners. Their number included Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin in the Soviet Union; Jean Epstein, Germaine Dulac and Marcel L’Herbier in France; John Grierson and Paul Rotha in Britain; and Béla Balázs in Hungary. Significantly, some of these individuals – notably Eisenstein, L’Herbier and Balázs – also played a key role in the development of film schools in their respective countries. A similar productive cross-fertilization continued after World War II, with serious study of film during the 1950s and 1960s being led by forms of interpretive criticism that acknowledged – or, in the case of auteurism, valorized – the creative agency of film-makers as a primary source of value and meaning. This ensured a productive dialogue between critics and practitioners and facilitated the movement from one activity to the other, most notably in the case of the French nouvelle vague, whose principal figures had all started their careers writing for Cahiers du Cinéma.

But the subsequent professionalization of film within the academy from the 1970s onwards coincided with a new interest in the wider social, psychological and political significance of the moving image, which was pursued through an engagement with the theoretical discourses of semiotics, psychoanalysis and Marxism. While this may have energized intellectual film culture, it moved the focus away from the central concerns of many practitioners – particularly those operating outside the realm of avant-garde and political film-making. Therefore within universities and other higher education institutions (notably in the United States and Britain), a clear division appeared between departments and programmes that were primarily oriented towards teaching practice and those engaged in theoretically and textually oriented film, media or screen studies. This division subsequently became deeply entrenched in the culture of educational institutions, creating an environment that systematically undermined the mutually enriching benefits offered by a productive engagement between critical thinking and creative practice. The consequences of this bifurcation are described by Brian Winston, a distinguished practitioner and scholar who has taught at both the United Kingdom’s National Film School and the School of Arts at New York University:

The practitioners pour scorn on the scholars and hold their analyses to be incomprehensible irrelevances. The academy barely tolerates practitioners and thinks their more abstract musings are inadequate inanities. Students, ‘great artists’ in the making – are in the middle.³

The legacy of this state of affairs can also be clearly seen in the development of moving image education in Britain over the last decade. In 2003 a new national training strategy for the moving image was announced by Skillset⁴ – the sector skills council for the creative industries – and the UK Film Council, the leading public agency for film and television. The UKFC had been established three years earlier with the objective of creating a sustainable British film industry, and the clearly stated objective of the new training strategy, entitled A Bigger Future, was ‘to ensure that the UK industry is able to compete successfully in the European and global marketplace on the basis of world beating skills’.⁵ The role of the formal education sector in advancing the new skills agenda was essentially posed in terms of a problem: while the expansion of post-school education may have created a wide array of film and media courses in universities and colleges, ‘only a few of these courses deliver the right mix of vocational skills which equip students to enter the industry’.⁶ The solution to this lack of vocational relevance therefore required a greater responsiveness on the part of higher and further education to the needs and demands of the film and television industries. It was proposed that this be achieved via the introduction of a comprehensive system of industry accreditation comprising, on the one hand, a course approvals system to ‘identify a select number of practice-based higher education film courses throughout the UK that provide the skills, knowledge and experience needed for individuals to confidently enter the industry direct from education’,⁷ and, on the other hand, the creation of a limited number of recognized centres of excellence to provide appropriate, high quality and relevant training. In order to become a ‘Skillset Academy’, institutions would have to ‘demonstrate the right mix of creative encouragement and vocational education that is needed to prepare students to succeed in the film industry’.⁸

Given the long and distinguished history of film schools noted above, what was striking in both the Skillset strategy document and the subsequent implementation of a comprehensive policy for training new media professionals was the total lack of any acknowledgement, let alone discussion, of the potential of education and training beyond the narrow and instrumental acquisition of skills to serve industry – the fashioning of pegs to fit neatly into predetermined holes. Yet this was hardly surprising given that the vision guiding A Bigger Future was fundamentally informed by the UKFC’s primary objective. Moreover, the kind of British film industry being promoted by the Council was articulated in 2002 by its founding chairman, the film-maker Alan Parker, in terms of the need to:

abandon forever the ‘little England’ vision of a UK industry comprised of small British film companies delivering parochial British films in favour of a strategy that ‘embraces the international market’ built on the reinvention of the British film industry as a creative hub or core that would be ‘a natural destination for international investment... a natural supplier of skills and services to the global film market.⁹

For Parker, the necessary components to deliver this vision were a new focus on distribution rather than production as the leading element, a state-of-the-art infrastructure (essentially to service the production of ‘international’ – i.e. Hollywood – films), and on skills – to create a highly skilled and flexible workforce. Now, while this may have been a clear and coherent vision in which the Skillset training strategy was designed to play a key role, it also depended on a very singular, highly contestable and ultimately reductive vision of film and its wider purpose and role in society – a perfect illustration of the creative industries logic where cultural pluralism loses out to the powerful monopoly of corporate interests. Just as Parker rhetorically consigned to his dustbin of ‘parochial British films’ anything that didn’t fit the industrial/Hollywood model, so A Bigger Future completely ignored the need to nurture those qualities of social engagement, intellectual curiosity, and personal expression that had underpinned film as a formally innovative and culturally relevant popular art form. This training strategy was only concerned with reproducing skilled technicians – noting bluntly that ‘there is a clear distinction to be made between academic study and vocational provision’.¹⁰

Conspicuously absent was any recognition of the possibility – let alone the value – of moving image practitioners as curious and critical thinkers, or of how the cultivation of ideas could serve the successful propagation of creative, vibrant and socially relevant film and television industries. Yet such understandings had always been central to the mission of the major European and American film schools. What A Bigger Future posited instead was an unambiguously one-way relationship between ‘the industry’, consistently presented as a unified entity, and its ‘training providers’, now clearly differentiated between officially approved institutions and courses and ‘the rest’. In this way the reductive instrumentalism of skills training, and behind it a similarly impoverished vision of the value of the moving image, becomes all too clear.

This is where a fuller consideration of the historical achievements and enduring legacy of film schools can provide a crucial reminder of the wider significance and value of more open and enlightened critical understanding. Moreover, it immediately takes us beyond the stunted idea of institutions as mere training providers to environments in which the cultivation of moving image professionals has been informed by a range of conceptions of the film-maker as cultural activist, creative artist or even public intellectual, as well a skilled craftsman or technician or entertainment producer. Such pluralist conceptions have, in the past, sustained the development of curricula designed to foster creativity and innovation informed by and relevant to particular material, technological and industrial circumstances. They have also sought to encourage and promote the broader social importance of film and television in relation to critical and imaginative engagement, communication and education. While some may attack this as a nostalgic yearning for a vanished past, irrelevant to the needs and realities of the present moving image industries, it is important to remember that in addition to providing a comprehensive practical, creative and intellectual education, the best film schools were also diligent in ensuring that their students received current and appropriate practical instruction and training – indeed, their mandate to serve the national industry (and interest) helped to ensure this.

Yet despite the general trend towards film education supporting the hegemony of the Hollywood-centred global entertainment industry, there are some significant countervailing tendencies. Specific national and local traditions have continued to be influential and have helped to preserve a semblance of pluralism. This has been particularly notable in certain small nations like Denmark – where the promotion of an alternative low-budget aesthetic through the Dogme 95 manifesto can be linked to certain pedagogical approaches adopted by the National Film School – and in the developing nations of Latin America, Asia and Africa, where the moving image continues to be guided by needs and imperatives other than the profit motive of the global entertainment industry.

Organization of contents

The motivation behind this book is a desire to redress the general lack of appreciation and understanding of the significance and contribution of film schools alluded to above. We hope that it can play a part in helping to locate these institutions, the individuals involved with them, and general trends in the development of moving image education and training within the larger picture of the history of cinema and other related popular media. This insight also offers a critical perspective on current and future developments in film education and training, helping to illuminate both the challenges and the opportunities faced by educational institutions, their students and the industries that they are primarily engaged with. Above all, it is vital that the current trend towards the narrowing of the formation of new practitioners, prompted by a fetishization of instrumental skills at the expense of ideas, free-thinking and an open engagement with the world, is challenged. In fact, a crucial starting point is the detailed appreciation of how the moving image industries currently operate, and the need for a differentiated curriculum designed to promote specialization and collaborative working. But a progressive and innovative film school also needs to embrace the wider potential of the medium, using this to inform a pedagogy and an environment geared towards the formation of graduates who not only have the requisite skills for gainful employment but also have a much wider sense of the possibilities for their art and its social role.

This book comprises three parts. The first provides an overview of the historical development of film schools by way of two detailed surveys, one focused on institutions in continental Europe and the other on those in the United States. Despite their obvious differences – the more rapid development of specifically national films schools in Europe and the slower emergence of schools or departments based in American universities – there are many points of convergence and similarity, particularly in the shift away from a broadly artistic orientation towards a more industrial imperative. The second part of the book examines specific developments in the United Kingdom through a small number of detailed case studies of particularly important institutions, including the National Film and Television School (founded in 1970 and thus one of the last of the European national conservatoires), the London Film School, the School of Film and Television at the Royal College of Art, and the Screen Academy Scotland – a collaborative venture between Napier University and the Edinburgh College of Art. This range also highlights different types of institution operating within a single national frame. The third part of the book takes a very different approach. Entitled ‘Provocations’, this comprises a series of chapters foregrounding key issues emerging out of the legacies of film schools in the light of current developments in education and training. These chapters adopt a more overtly polemical stance in order to highlight and explore the shortcomings inherent in the current formation of film schools and moving image education more broadly and to provide an appropriate starting point for debate. They also suggest ways in which the problems can be addressed, drawing in part on the lessons of the past in order to confront the challenges and opportunities of the present and the needs of the future.

The movement from an account of the historical to a contemplation of future challenges and possibilities necessarily entails a shift from the intricacies of actual institutional records, policies and practices towards more speculative propositions – what we hope the future can be. Moreover, the formation of moving image practitioners now takes place within a variety of contexts and agendas, and consequently the types and combinations of courses are growing rapidly. Moving image education today is already much wider than the traditional institutional models of film school depicted in the first two sections of this volume suggest. And it is indisputable that the picture painted by these sections is of a sector and institutions that are exclusively Western and – with the odd exception – dominated by white males. But this hegemony is slowly being challenged, with some of the most innovative and potentially far-reaching developments in the last 20 years being centred on the rapid expansion of new schools and courses in the South, as the developing world has elaborated new versions of cultivating the film-maker. Thus the former dichotomy between East and West that preoccupied the film schools organization CILECT from the 1950s to the 1980s has shifted to a new dynamic between North and South.¹¹ This is the changing context for a book which aims to provoke critical thinking about the different possibilities that can take place in the juncture between education and industry, with the intention of transforming both.

Notes

1. While practically all of these individuals are directors, film schools have also graduated similarly impressive roll calls of other types of specialists, including producers, writers, cinematographers, editors, production designers, composers, sound designers and animators.

2. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Ting Wang and Richard Maxwell, Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI, 2008).

3. Brian Winston, ‘Theory for Practice: Ceci n’est pas L’épistémologie’, in Clive Myer (ed.), Critical Cinema: Beyond the Theory of Practice (London: Wallflower, 2012), p. 196.

4. In April 2012 the organisation changed its name to Creative Skillset.

5. UK Film Council, A Bigger Future (London: Skillset, 2003), p. 9.

6. Ibid. p. 17.

7. Ibid. p. 18.

8. Ibid. p. 10.

9. Alan Parker, Building a Sustainable Film Industry (London: UK Film Council, 2002), pp. 8–9.

10. A Bigger Future, p. 17.

11. While this volume does not touch on the speedy development of schools in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Rod Stoneman has been engaged with this sector through participation in several series of peripatetic workshops held in Asia, West Africa, the Maghreb and the Middle East: The Hanoi Academy of Theatre and Cinema, Vietnam 2005; a script workshop at Imagine, Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso 2005; Med Film Development, Marrakech, Morocco 2006-2008; FESPACO newsreel workshops Ouagadougou 2009, 2011, and 2013; Beyond Borders, Djerba, Tunisia 2010; Med Film Factory, Amman, Jordan 2011-2014. These are discussed in ‘Global Interchange: The Same, but Different’, in Mette Hjort (ed.), The Education of the Film-Maker in Africa, the Middle East and the Americas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).

PART ONE

The Development of Film Schools in Europe and North America

Continental Film Schools

A Brief History of the 'National Conservatoire'

The Polish National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre, Lodz.

Introduction

The predominant model of the film school that emerged in continental Europe was the ‘national conservatoire’, a publicly funded institution providing high-level professional training in a specific field of cultural activity beneficial to the state. Similar institutions had long been in existence in various European countries for training practitioners of prestigious art forms such as music, dance and drama. Consequently, the extension to film also suggests an affirmation of the latter’s incorporation into the pantheon as leseptieme art. But while the traditional arts had largely been understood as the preserve of the cultural elite, cinema’s status as a popular form of mass entertainment had important consequences for the role and purpose of film schools as national institutions.

Many European film schools were also established as part of a wider revitalization of national industries and moving-image cultures through the creation of new organizations and agencies and the provision of state support for film production. Such developments also tended to coincide with key moments of wider upheaval and transformation: the consequence of war, revolution and other kinds of major political and social change or reform. Thus, the history of film schools in Europe can be set out in relation to three periods of turbulence during the twentieth century: the interwar hiatus that saw the rise of totalitarian regimes of both the right and the left; the aftermath of World War II, marked by the reconstruction and political division of Europe into Capitalist West and Communist East; and the 1960s, with its own distinctive wave of social and cultural revolution. While each conjuncture had its own specific determinants and characteristics, a common theme across all three is the widespread recognition of the importance of cinema as a form of mass communication and expression. In some instances this was informed by a view of the moving image as a channel of state propaganda and political control, while in others the underlying dynamic was more democratic and pluralist, with film feeding into a ‘national conversation’ about identity that could be critical as well as celebratory. But whether serving the interests of dictatorship or social democracy, cinema required an appropriately skilled workforce, and this is where schools came in: providing the necessary training to ensure the production of films of sufficient quality that would engage audiences, impress critics and contribute to the nation’s cultural and artistic health.

State involvement in European film industries has historically also been informed by the perceived need to protect national cinemas against the economic and cultural threat posed by Hollywood – the dominant force in international cinema from the 1910s. Film schools evolved therefore as part of a package of measures to nurture and promote national cinemas able to compete with the popularity and high production values of imported American films and thus preserve both cultural specificity and prestige. This generated two very different types of response from European producers: competition through emulation, which could only be guaranteed by inculcating Hollywood’s high standards of professionalism and technical skill; and differentiation through a greater focus on the artistic, social and cultural potential of the medium. This fundamental distinction between discourses of professionalism/craft and intellectualism/art was to have major implications for the subsequent development of film school pedagogy and curricula in Europe. But the cultural arguments proved particularly important to conceptions of the value of educating creative practitioners, and so the European film schools were to play a key role in the propagation of the wider idea of cinema as an innovative and vital art form, auteur-driven but also comprising nationally-located movements or ‘new waves’. But while the flourishing of film schools and art cinema in Europe was a striking feature of developments after World War II, the model of the national conservatoire had been established three decades earlier.

In 1919 in Moscow the new revolutionary Bolshevik regime founded what would become the Vserossiyskiy Gosoudarstvenni Institut Kinematographii (All-Union State Institute of Cinematography), more commonly known as VGIK, thus creating the world’s first bona fide national film school. But conditions in the Soviet Union remained unique, and it was a further 16 years before another similar institution appeared: the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, established in Rome as part of a raft of measures by Mussolini’s Fascist regime to promote Italian cinema. Then in 1943 this highly exclusive club was joined by the Institute des hautes études cinématographiques (IDHEC), the creation of a group of independent French cinephiles in a Paris still under German occupation. Collectively, these three institutions provided the inspirational prototype for subsequent developments after 1945. Following the model of VGIK, the Communist states of Eastern Europe proved particularly active in establishing film schools as part of a wider nationalization of their respective cinema industries, beginning with the Hungarian Academy of Dramatic and Film Art in Budapest in 1945 and followed by the Czechoslovak Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in 1946, the Polish National Higher School of Film, Television and Theatre in 1948 – the same year in which the Bulgarian National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts and the Yugoslavian School for Film Acting and Directing (merged two years later into the Academy of Theatre Arts) were also established, the Romanian Institute of Cinematographic Arts in Bucharest in 1950, and finally the East German Film Academy – subsequently renamed after filmmaker Konrad Wolf – established in Babelsberg, home of the famous Ufa studios, outside Berlin in 1954.

In Western Europe institutions set up in this period included the Spanish Instituto de Investigaciones y Experiencias Cinematograficas in 1947, the Greek Hellenic Film School in 1948 and the Vienna Film Academy in Austria in 1951. But the major spread of film schools in the West actually constitutes a third wave of development, beginning in the low countries with the establishment of the Dutch Film and Television Academy in Amsterdam in 1958, followed by the Belgian Institute national supérieur des arts du spectacle et des techniques de diffusion (INSAS) in Brussels in 1962. Scandinavia was next to join the club, with the Swedish Film School in Stockholm in 1964 and the National Film School of Denmark in Copenhagen in 1966. Around the same time in federal West Germany film schools started to appear in the various Länder, beginning in 1966 with the Deutsche Film-und Fernseh-Akademie Berlin (DFFB) and followed in 1967 by the Institutfür Film und Fernsehen (HFF) in Munich. Finally, in keeping with its semi-detached relationship to the continent, Britain was to be the last major European film-production nation to join the club when it finally established a National Film School in 1970.¹

Formations: ‘A new art for a new society’

While film schools were deemed necessary for the creation and promotion of sustainable and relevant national film industries in Europe, what is striking now is how serious their engagement with the cultural or intellectual value of cinema was to be. The inter-war period witnessed a proliferation of an intellectual film culture in Europe, manifest in experimental and avant-garde moving image production, specialist film clubs and societies, and the outpouring of theoretical and critical writings. And it was this fertile environment that the first film schools were to draw inspiration from and contribute to. As this was also a period marked by political, economic and social turmoil, it could be argued that these new institutions were established with the lofty aim of creating ‘a new art for a new society’.

This was certainly