Theory, Practice, and the Significance of Film Schools
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© Scandia 2010 http://www.tidskriftenscandia.se/ Theory, Practice, and the Significance of Film Schools Duncan Petrie I The significance and contribution of film schools to the wider fields of film history and the development of the cinema as a creative and cultural form remain a largely unexplored area in academic research. Yet, after the Second World War these institutions became a major route into a career in film for aspiring practitioners across the world, and consequently have been central to the formation and cultivation of individual film-making talent and the forging of creative relationships. Film schools have had considerable im- pacted on wider stylistic trends, production practices, national cinemas, and film-making movements, yet within most historical accounts of cinema, film- makers’ education has tended to be treated as a minor biographical detail or is simply assumed to be one aspect of on-the-job skills-acquisition. In addition to the general paucity of historical knowledge and under- standing, the lack of a critical and scholarly engagement with film schools has meant that current debates on the education and training of future prac- titioners have been devoid of any deeper contextual understanding. This has allowed free reign to a particular hegemonic policy agenda which, in many places, has been increasingly guided by the rhetoric of the market and neo- liberal economics. The current direction of film education and training in the UK is instructive in that it has been profoundly influenced by the Creative Industries agenda. A characteristic doctrine of New Labour’s “third way” politics, this agenda has entailed a fundamental shift in cultural policy away from the subsidizing of what used to be called “the arts” as something valuable in and of itself, towards a new focus on investment in the creative industries, directed towards supporting entrepreneurial activities and growing sustaina- ble businesses. Thus the language and values of neo-liberalism have come to inform the role of the State within the cultural sphere. With specific regard to film, this has entailed the wholesale reorganization of public funding and Scandia 76:275:1 D uncan Petrie 1 331 © Scandia 2010 http://www.tidskriftenscandia.se/ support, leading to the creation in 2000 of a single, all-powerful agency, the UK Film Council (UKFC), and with it a new emphasis on a more market- responsive British film industry. In 2003 the UKFC, in partnership with Skillset, the UK’s sector skills council for film and television, announced a new national strategy for training and education. Entitled A Bigger Future, the heart of this strategy was a desire to rationalize the wide range of film and media courses offered by universities and colleges – many of which were regarded as being of dubious quality and relevance. The executive summary of A Bigger Future spells out the desired response by making a direct and logical link between an “integrated approach to skills provision which assesses and calibrates demand from the industry for specific skills and which will match that demand through further, higher and postgraduate provision”, the implementation of a process by which “Through Skillset the UK industry will approve relevant training and education provi- sion”, resulting in the creation of “a small network of screen academies recog- nized to provide an agreed mix of creative and commercial skills needed by the industry.”1 Such a network was subsequently created in 2005. This currently comprises the UK’s two long-established and internationally recognized film schools – the National Film and Television School in Beaconsfield and the London Film School in Covent Garden – alongside a number of new institutional entities: the Bournemouth Screen and Media Academy (a collaboration between Bournemouth University and the Bournemouth Institute of Art); the Scottish Screen and Media Academy located at Napier University in Edinburgh; the Screen Academy Wales (bringing together the University of Wales in Newport and the University of Glamorgan); and the Screen Acad- emy at the London College of Communication and the Ealing Institute of Media. The network also includes a new Film Business Academy, begun at the Cass Business School at City University London. In addition, a second network of nineteen media academies focusing on television and interactive media has also been set up, and a range of individual courses in screenwriting, computer games, and animation have also gained official Skillset accredita- tion, completing the picture. Whatever the wider pros and cons of the Skillset-UKFC strategy in the UK, it has created a one-way and instrumental relationship between “the industry”, which is consistently presented as an undifferentiated and unified entity, and “the education sector”, which is now clearly differentiated between those institutions and courses that have the official stamp of approval and those that do not. Moreover, the underlying concept of what constitutes a rel- evant education is encapsulated by the assertion in the strategy that “there is a clear distinction to be made between academic study and vocational provi- 3232 Film Schools SScandiacandia 76:275:1 © Scandia 2010 http://www.tidskriftenscandia.se/ sion”.2 Given that it is the latter that is actively promoted by Skillset, the par- ticipating educational institutions are effectively being positioned as “training providers”, servicing a British film industry that has itself been rebranded as a creative “hub” within a globalized – in other words, Hollywood-dominated – motion picture business.3 Consequently, what has emerged in the UK is an educational environment in which any serious intellectual dimension in the instruction of film and media practitioners has effectively been eclipsed by the vigorous promotion of a rather reductive concept of skills training. II Contrast this state of affairs with the vision that informed the creation of the world’s first film school in Moscow in 1919, just two years after the Bolshe- vik Revolution. Initially the State College of Cinematography (GTK), the school was subsequently upgraded to a State Institute (GIK) in 1930, and then a Higher State Institute (VGIK) in 1934, giving it status on a par with a university. Moreover, the Moscow school was fundamentally bound up with the wider revolutionary ferment that marked the formative years of the Soviet Union, for as Malte Hagener notes: the avant-garde spirit of the revolutionary country was sure that the educa- tion of a new generation was of paramount importance in the construction of a communist reality. Teaching in the Soviet Union not only began earlier and was undertaken in a more intensive manner than in other countries, it was also the most experimental in form: traditional hierarchies were toppled, conservative teaching methods were discarded and radical forms were put to the test. Teaching methods modelled on project work or workshop situation fit in especially well within avant-garde conceptions of overcoming distinc- tions between theory and practice.4 Its founding director, Vladimir Gardin, effectively used it as a laboratory to develop his theories concerning a new anthropology of acting which, as Mikhail Yamplosky has argued, laid the foundations for the emergence of montage as the central intellectual principle around which both Soviet film making and film theory were subsequently elaborated.5 One of the school’s first teachers, Lev Kuleshov, started his famous workshop in 1920; among his students was the young Vsevolod Pudovkin. Then in 1932, Sergei Ei- senstein was appointed head of the Institute’s directing faculty, providing a forum within which he was to develop his influential and ground-breaking theoretical writings on film, an activity went hand in hand with his teaching practice. The four-year directing curriculum devised by Eisenstein in 1936 Scandia 76:275:1 D uncan Petrie 33 © Scandia 2010 http://www.tidskriftenscandia.se/ provides a wonderful example of his polymathic approach to practice, outlin- ing a rigorous training that, in addition to learning the theory and practice of film-making, also involved the study of philosophy, social theory, and the arts in general.6 Writing in Sight and Sound in 1950, John Francis Lane noted the influence of pedagogic principles derived from the Soviet model in the context of the later development of the French national film school, IDHEC: We have learned from Eisenstein’s writings that the fundamental basis of film study is the absorption of what he terms “montage creation in all cul- tures”. For many whose minds are more practical in their approach to the cinema (and this, strangely enough, describes most of the French students), the idea of learning about Stanislavsky or Shakespeare; of delving into the past wonders of prehistoric art; or of investigating the intricacies of musical form and rhythm, may seem somewhat unnecessary to the study of the craft of a film director. But although everyone cannot be expected to agree with Eisenstein’s conception of cinema as the sublime realisation of all art creation, no one with genuine sympathies for the film will deny that such an education is absolutely essential to the director’s art.7 The central importance of the cultivation of knowledge and understanding of film history at the Moscow State Institute was further enhanced by the founding of its own cinémathèque in 1931, with an initial collection of five hundred Soviet and foreign films, followed three years later by the initiation of formative research under the supervision of film historian Nikolai Lebedev. Consequently, despite being a part of the Soviet system and therefore sub- ject to the diktat of the Communist Party (to say nothing of Stalin’s purges), VGIK gained a considerable international reputation, and was to prove highly influential in the development of film schools in other parts of the world. That history has essentially been dominated by two major types of institu- tion. Following the Soviet model, the first type of school is the conservatoire, often established as a cornerstone of an explicitly national film industry, and funded directly by the state.