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Educating for : Ten Tips for Future School Heads

Vinca Wiedemann

Above all, you must have courage. … You must be able to love and you must have a sense of humour. Isak Dinesen, on the prerequisites for being a storyteller.

If you have ever seen the aesthetically supreme celebration of the superman in Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) you will know that cinema is a dangerous tool in the wrong hands. Founded in the decades after World War II, the classical European film schools were the cultural- political response to the post-war recognition that strong and independent art and are an essential foundation for the democratic and humanistic development of . “Would you like to hear the yellow speech or the green speech?” The question was first asked by the traumatized son in Thomas Vinterberg’s Dogme film The Celebration (, 1998) before spilling the secrets of the family patriarch. The artistic opposite of Riefenstahl, with its shaky video images and uncompromising search for the “truth of the moment”, Vinterberg’s film was a worldwide hit. To Danes, it was also a key contribution to our understanding of the power that is brought to bear even in the most intimate relationships. And thanks to our love of dark humour, the question of the two speeches has become a stock joke at Danish family celebrations. I open with these two film examples because I want to stress that it is neither accidental nor to be taken for granted that we even have film production in today. Our remarkable string of fiction , documentaries and TV series, our vibrant film scene, which time and again disproves the claim that “the Celebration is over”, are the direct result of a coherent film , which in the 1960s gave us a Film Act and a . In the 50 years of its existence, our film school has become an essential factor in Danish cinema. The Film School is the foundation for a film working at an exceptionally high level. It has produced the Dogme wave, the internationally acclaimed Danish TV shows and the revitalization of documentary film in recent decades. We are proud of our film school, and the industry nurtures it.

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Around the world, film schools are the vanguard in training filmmakers who can develop and influence the field of cinema over the long term. But for that to succeed, we need to develop our programmes at a pace that can keep up with the development of media, and do it smartly to influence that development.

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Is it even possible to craft forward-looking, long-term film school education at a time when visual culture is evolving so radically? Even the word “film” is outdated. These days, old-style analogue film reels are mainly found in museums. As a genre and a form of , film has all but merged with other outdated forms of presentation, like videotapes, laserdiscs, DVDs and . Everything is digital now. And in the digital world, and media forms converge so quickly that even webisodes, computer games and virtual reality will probably be outdated by the time our current crop of students graduates. The students we are for today will complete their education in 2021. Around 2040, they will be at the peak of their careers. How on earth are we supposed to foresee what skills future filmmakers will need? At our school, we recently gave up up four-year strategies for our purchasing. While our most recent strategy did not even include drones as a future scenario, last year students had already wrecked the first few ones we bought, luckily of the low-budget kind that can be found under the Christmas tree of any teenage film nerd. Ten years from now, drones, too, might be “so 2015.” The basic educational principles of the National Film School of Denmark have been undeniably successful and over the years have inspired many other film schools around the world. In the last few years, we have begun to rethink our programmes with the aim of creating a film school that can serve as the foundation for no less than the next 50 years of media development. To do that, we need to re-examine everything, while also identifying fundamental elements of the tradition that are capable of bridging eras.

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The original film school education was powerfully challenged by two basic conditions of film stock: and the forms of screening. Raw stock was so precious that it

2 used to be quite normal, even for professional , to practice their craft using an unloaded . There was even a phrase for it: “filming mahogany” – that is, filming straight into the wood-lined rear wall of the camera body. For a financially strapped film school, it was next to impossible to do what it was put into the world to do: giving students a chance to practice . Leftover film stock was collected and used by cinematography students for their exercises, students only got to make exercise films of a few minutes and even for graduation films the number of reels was strictly rationed. Editing film was expensive, too. When I was trained as a film editor in the 1980s, I only got to cut a very limited number of exercises. A singular phenomenon had emerged, though, of editing exercises using footage from “real” films. It must have been CILECT that distributed the two classics: a fight scene from the American TV western series Gunsmoke and a dialogue scene from The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981, Karel Reisz). Both are still in frequent use. Creatives turned the scarcity of raw stock into an artistic rule fostering strategic thinking. At film schools, the art of limitation evolved into an educational fulcrum. You not only had to film with a fixed camera before you started panning, you also had to with stills before moving pictures, black and white before colour, scenes without dialogue before were allowed to speak. Voiceovers were banned, of course. Music had to be limited. And so on. A virtue was made of necessity, because even with these scarce resources the film school’s programmes were still among the costliest in the , second only to pilot school. Before VCRs became commonplace in the late 1980s, movies were not readily available. Movies could only be seen when they were shown at cinemas or on the sole channel of the state broadcaster. When I applied to the Film School in 1982, I had to include an editing analysis of a film scene. I chose Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) which happened to be showing at a small cinema, and faithfully attended every screening for a few days. Unfortunately, each time I sat in the dark cinema, I got so wrapped up in the film that I forgot to make notes of the cuts. It was most assuredly not the of my analysis that pushed me through the eye of the Film School’s needle. Because of this inaccessibility, the craft and method of filmmaking were shrouded in mystery, and one of the Film School’s most important tasks was to lift the veil on the workshop of the wizards. From day one, film analysis was a central subject. Films were rented and screened at the school cinema. The instructor would comment

3 during the film, and on special occasions the film was even loaded on the editing table, where it could be stopped and wound back and forth slowly, making it possible to scrutinize the visual composition and narrative structure. The exclusivity of film analysis and the scarcity of film stock were basic conditions baked into the film school’s thinking. They are, so to speak, part of the original DNA of film school programmes. Today, it is the other way around. First, everyone has access to making a film, to the point where any kindergartener has already shot more films than I got to during my entire time in film school. Second, films are ubiquitous. We have access to practically every film in the world, anywhere and anytime. We can watch them over and over, run them back and forth and in slow motion. Most films even come with tracks, where the film’s main creative forces discuss their thoughts behind it and elaborate on technical details. Today, anyone can be a film buff. Anyone who wants to can listen in and try to recreate the secrets of the masters. The pedagogy of limitation needs to be reconsidered. Today, it is a fact that there is great accessibility in all areas, and we should try to inspire our students to artistically exploit that condition. I have seen schools where they are still trying to limit the space on a camera’s hard disk and insist that editors begin their training on a 16mm editing table and only in their second year be allowed to approach an editing computer. I doubt that form of teaching works. More likely, students just go their own way. Storage media are so cheap today that you can just bring your own hard disk to a shoot. Schools need to realize that times are changing and that the old pedagogy is being replaced by a new one that takes advantage of the new digital possibilities. Cinematographers can now “get in the miles” on set and editors can use entire films as editing exercises highlighting narrative structure. Editing a feature down to a short film or editing parallel sequences into continuous narratives is good training in sussing out a film’s structure and an excellent exercise for students in other disciplines, as well.

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“I look forward to teaching at the Film School. But I’ll tell you right now, if I was a young aspiring DP today, I don’t think I’d even consider applying to the Film School!” This is what our new cinematography instructor told me. Our conversation triggered a

4 pedagogical reform of the cinematography programme based on asking what aspects of a ’s work today are a must to learn in depth. For the first several decades, as mentioned, thrift and puritanism were basic conditions of the cinematography programme. Students had to make do with very few days of shooting. A moving camera, with its complicated dollies and cranes, was a rare luxury. It was keenly felt how movie photography had grown out of still photography. In those days, students were actually required to have a degree in photography from a to even be considered for the cinematography programme at the Film School. In general, still photography was frequently used as a substitute for raw stock. Up until the present, still-photography exercises of all sorts were the basis of admission tests and lessons in the cinematography programme. Students had to start with the individual, unmoving image. Only when they had a handle on this technique were they allowed the demonic luxury of letting the camera move. With a certain puritanism, the Film School celebrated the photographer Robert Bresson’s lovely maxim that a film is built on whiteness, silence and stillness. Today, the moving camera has evolved in multiple dimensions. The handheld camera has been expanded into a wearable camera, evolving the subjective point-of- view shot. Dollies and cranes, underwater and helicopter shots have been complemented with drones and microscopic that can move around inside blood vessels. I am sure I left something out. Multi-camera shots have become the norm and not the exception (von Trier’s using 100 cameras on a single scene, was pioneering back in 2000 but is now outdated). More recently, virtual reality has added new dimensions to our concept of what a moving picture can be. In turn, the Film School has decided to promote the moving picture to be the new DNA of the cinematography programme and we are in the process of exploring what that entails. Cinematography students used to shoot only a few days each semester. Now, they are expected to have a camera in their hands every day, from day one. The goal is as far as possible to make them one with their camera’s movements, learning and thinking and experiencing through it, so that movement becomes an integral part of the cinematographer’s foundation instead of something that is tacked on later as advanced learning. Moreover, we are working to develop and teach methods that make even quite sophisticated camera movements and multi-camera shots possible, even par for the course, without a big crew. Low-budget film production is a basic condition in the Danish and we need to ensure that our professional specialists know how

5 to adapt, not just to technological challenges but also to different economic conditions. An important challenge in that regard is giving cinematographers more opportunities to work with actors on set. After all, it is in the meeting of the DP’s eye and the ’s glow that those moments are created that we call movie magic. Meanwhile, there is a heritage that is essential to pass on, as well. Above all, storytelling must remain the fulcrum of the programme. Crucially, the training should stimulate the creation of a language between the director and cinematographer about how to develop and resolve the story visually, employing the new means of expression that advances in technology will continue to provide. Taking these steps, we hope to squarely address areas where young filmmakers need systematic learning and development. In years to come, the accessibility of the medium will not be a deciding factor in attending film school. Instead, concrete, practice-based immersion in cinematographic methods and the establishment of a shared language will be the new basic values. Like the efforts I have outlined here to develop the cinematography programme, the Film School as a whole is faced with an unavoidable and acute need to rethink the foundation of its existence, its educational planning and its teaching methods, if it is going to fulfil its purpose of being a driving force in the innovation of Danish cinema. Thankfully, we are not without precedent. We stand on the shoulders of a strong film school tradition that we are proud of. That goes, not least, for our “six-pack” model, which allows us to create strong classes of students working closely together in crews, and our highly specialized training, which makes our graduates strong assets for the industry. Accordingly, our reforms must respect the traditions that made the Film School what it is, so we do not end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater out of sheer zeal. I do not know two film schools that look alike or a single one that looks like ours. That gives us the freedom to take inspiration from the best practice of others without obliging us to copy anyone. In the following, I have tried to collect some of my thoughts about 10 topics that we are currently discussing in connection with our reform efforts. Perhaps they can inspire others, as well. They all involve identifying key areas, where we need to challenge our ingrained habits of thinking, and the qualities that are most important for us to hold onto.

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1. Ramp up the focus on storytelling and cinematic effects

It has always been a hallmark of our film school that cinema is storytelling, and all our training should be viewed accordingly. The objective is enabling all disciplines to be included as creatively competent co-storytellers. Notwithstanding that the cinematic narrative is based on classical dramaturgy, involving the art or craft of narrative composition, film is Gesamtkunst, collaborative. We borrow features from literature, theatre, art and music, and the key positions on a reflect those many aspects. The better they are at contributing their special skills to the film’s story, the richer and more precise the story’s expression will be. Our culture is undergoing a change from a text culture to a visual culture. While people used to read novels, they now watch a film or an episode of a TV series. While people used to read the paper, they now check the breaking news on their iPhones. In the education system, textbooks have been widely replaced by documentaries and factual programming. This trend is unequivocal, whether we like it or not. On the plus side, the development has powerful democratic potential, considering that the population at large takes a more immediate approach to visual media than the written word. On the other hand, we all know that visual media are hard-pressed to communicate the same amount of information and create the same opportunities for immersion and nuances as text-based media. There is a risk that our visual culture will lead to an unfortunate dumbing down. It is crucial to our cultural development that the visual media evolve, allowing society to maintain the dissemination of complex information and reflection and enabling citizens to participate in the societal debate and the existential dialogue on a rich and well-informed basis. With that in mind, we recently launched two new initiatives at our school, aiming to stimulate development of the cinematic language to better enable visual media to convey reflections and issues that used to be communicated through textual media. One area of focus is the programme, which until 2015 was a two-year programme that was not integrated into the Film School’s other programmes. However, a growing need emerged for the Film School to more accurately mirror the sophisticated collaboration between directors, and producers that is a hallmark of the Danish film industry. For years, it was almost only stories from the directors’ reservoir that were made into films. But recent years have seen a new development in the Danish

7 film industry. For one part, directors have developed a modern variant of the concept of the , where from the beginning of concept development they enter into a close with screenwriters in developing their stories. For another, TV shows have led to a situation where a writer, too, can anchor a film project, under the so-called one- vision strategy. Indeed, with the mushrooming demand for good stories comes a need to develop forms of collaboration that to a much greater extent allow screenwriters to tap into their own reservoir of stories. Cinema is seeing an escalating race between the audience’s ability and desire to absorb an increasingly sophisticated cinematic bombardment and the innovative capabilities of filmmakers expanding the medium’s potential for expression and impact. There is a growing demand for visual media to create more nuanced and multi-facetted spaces and for films to develop their formal vocabulary. That can only happen if the film is able to accelerate that development. Consequently, the Film School has decided to double the length of our screenwriting programme from two to four years and integrate it alongside the other programmes, enabling screenwriting students to work on student productions and to a much greater degree share in the instruction that other students are getting. Moreover, screenwriting students will now get an opportunity to work in the areas of documentaries, and computer games in order to increase synergies with those forms of visual storytelling, as well, and heighten the focus on the different methods that can be used in project development. The screenwriting programme will also seek synergies with other artistic in related areas, most obviously the playwriting programme and Copenhagen’s creative-writing school, Forfatterskolen, along with the acting schools and the Danish School. Finally, there will naturally be a greater emphasis on our with broadcasters and the Danish film scene.

Now, students will not only learn how to develop scripts for fiction, documentary and animated films, TV series, computer games and cross-media productions, they will also go through the learning process of seeing their scripts realized. Accordingly, there will be an increased focus on what happens to the story once the screenwriting process is finished. Only when students see how their scripts work in practice will their process of learning and experience truly be pushed to the point where artistic maturity is gained.

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The expressive territory of the cinematic narrative seems infinite. Even the basic dramatic structures are undergoing radical change thanks to the interactive narratives that today look like a separate discipline but in the future may very well become wedded to the classical cinematic narrative. A big question is whether we will see a total convergence between “being told a story” and personally being able to influence and co-create the story through interaction. I also cannot help wondering whether we will one day be able to make films where the viewer herself sets the pace, in the same way that we now choose to read fast or slow. Here, too, the only limit is our imagination.

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Our second area of focus is production design. For historical reasons, we do not have the possibility of setting up such a programme at the Film School. As a consequence, there has been a regrettable tendency to overlook this area – an unfortunate mechanism, incidentally, and one that I recognize from other professions without institutionalized education, involving an inherent tendency among learning to view our school as a closed loop. We prioritize that which will make our school’s programmes work in themselves, but we forget to consider the industry and scene we are educating graduates for. This, in itself, is a habit of thinking that we all need to address head-on. Production design is a key area of knowledge and one that we should put a much higher priority on going forward. We will keep fighting to house such a programme. Production designers are our film school’s missing link. For now, we have hired an expert in production design. When design students from other schools work on our students’ productions, she is our link, helping to establish a shared language. She is a consultant to students and takes part in critiques of their exercises. She participates in faculty meetings and has an ongoing dialogue with our instructors about setting up training in production design. This includes actual seminars on the subject, of course, but also things like exercises for screenwriting students and directors in the implications of developing a scene by jumping off from a specific space. The language of cinema is only little more than a century old and the cinematic devices we use to tell our stories hold vast, untapped potential. Moreover, technological developments, for instance in camera and digital effects, are always opening up new,

9 previously unknown means of story creation. The challenge for any storyteller in film is to make all the cinematic effects combine with each other alchemically by the personal spark that is the source of all artistic matter. Hence, it is essential for each discipline to develop its work with cinematic devices according to its own specialization, increasing the knowledge and experience of the interplay in which those devices are part. The ability to produce far more sophisticated visuals even under low-budget conditions will lay the foundation on which Danish cinema can develop cinematic stories that work with a refined and engaging formal vocabulary, despite modest financial means. Here, too, we are aided by technological advancements dramatically lowering the cost of computer-generated effects and raising general user accessibility.

2. Explore new roles and forms of collaboration

As more cinematic forms of storytelling have emerged, the forms of collaboration have also grown more plentiful and today often give rise to Babylonian confusion and epic domain battles over who the principal owner of a finished work is. While this applies mainly to fiction film production, the trend is also seen in other formats and genres. In TV series production alone, today there are many different models for when to bring in a director. In some places, the director is involved, in the classical, comprehensive role, throughout the development and production. In other cases, the head writer, together with the , makes decisions about production design, cast, crew, locations, etc., while the director is involved only in the actual filming and editing. Generally, television has assigned much more central roles to the producer and the writer than in classical productions, introducing the showrunner as the person in overall creative control of a series’ development over several episodes or sometimes seasons. In general, there is a clear trend of new forms of media incorporating much more complex and dynamic project-development methods than has been the custom in the film industry. Consequently, a producer, writer or director on a project can no longer automatically expect others to share the same view of role distribution. Often, the first long period of development is marked by a lack of clarity and sluggish creative processes, because no mutual clarification of expectations has been carried out. Film schools perform an important function here in demonstrating that different methods exist, which can be selected or rejected as need be, and in investigating and

10 describing the standard forms of collaboration. But just as important, students, through practice, acquire the skills necessary for clarifying expectations and distributing roles in a way that draws the greatest possible synergies out of the creative team. The fact that the ultimate creative decision-making power in professional productions is distributed differently depending on the type of cinematic narrative in question increases the focus on what the director’s competencies really are, beyond holding the overall vision. Here, the direction of actors and mise-en-scène emerge as the director’s domain, the foundation of craft on which the director will stand. This might seem like a banal and obvious truth. But to the European auteur, the that the director should no longer just be a “specialist in everything” is a new way of thinking, which makes it necessary to rethink what training to prioritize for directors. At the Film School, we continue to structure our training around the basic principle that the director is the film’s main creative force and that everyone else on the crew is a co-creative and co-storytelling force. This is a conscious choice and helps give the programmes direction and focus. It is sometimes mistakenly thought to imply that the directing programme is “finer” or more prestigious than the others, and it remains a challenge to communicate the distinction we make between the fact that, on a film, the director’s vision takes precedence, while, at a film school, all positions rank equally in the complex interplay between the programmes. The close collaboration between director, producer and will only grow more important in the future, if the range of stories and production forms is to be successfully expanded. Going forward, we will aim our training at giving students the strategic scope to develop concepts for the individual project that match the singularity of the crew, the financing and the story, while giving them experience in planning processes and collaborations in which competencies and roles are clarified and challenged in a stimulating creative process. Finally, let us not forget that lone wolves, too, will benefit from the media development. In the future, a lot more individuals will want to use the camera as a pen and will have much better technological opportunities to carry out projects on their own. The documentary method of “one person, one camera” already rules the day, and I believe we will see a huge blossoming of film essays, like we are now seeing with podcasts, and that counter movements will emerge rejecting the idea that film crews always have to constitute a small army. This is a trend that film schools should rejoice

11 at and that, in the context of exercises, can help individual students explore their eye and voice.

3. Break down genres but keep specializations

Does it still make sense to distinguish between the genres of animation, fiction and documentary? That was the first question I had when I took over as head of the National Film School of Denmark, where students are trained in documentary, fiction or animated films, with separate directing programmes for each. Genres today steal from each other hand over fist. Developments in digital effects make it impossible to maintain a distinction between live action footage and animation. Likewise, you might say that, while mockumentaries, reality shows and other staged documentarism approach the magic mirror from one side, the widespread use of reality in what we usually call fiction approaches the mirror from the opposite side. For the audience, it is often impossible to tell the difference. In terms of working methods, however, these are still fundamentally different areas of craft, involving different ways of working from real life. While a teller of fiction, like a novelist, ruthlessly twists and turns her material according to the whims of her imagination, the documentarian has to reckon with the truth when she sets out to investigate stories that relate to the lives of real people. Accordingly, ethical concerns are a dominant element in teaching documentary filmmaking, while fiction relates to a different kind of authenticity, for example in acting performances and styles of production design, which impacts the content of the training. Finally, in animation, the cinematic space itself has to be established through a process of creation so painstaking and technically complex that the sequence of the creative processes is often reversed from that of live . The difference becomes clear when we look at the filmmaking process from the perspective of editing: an animated film is, so to speak, edited in advance. In fiction films, the basic structure of the story is developed in pre-production, where the script is divided into scenes and sequences that are produced in shots with openness and ambiguity in the footage (for instance, through the use of multiple camera angles and takes of scenes), on which rhythm and structure are subsequently imposed. In documentaries, the story is sometimes “written in the editing” to such an extent that the editor ought to be credited as co-director of the story.

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The relationship between development, production and postproduction involves such different methods that specialization is necessary. Breaking down genre inherently requires a well-defined genre to break down and, in turn, that there are professional specialists who know the technical subtleties of the genres. Considering the huge explosion in the volume of cinematic stories, there is reason to assume that the diversity of narrative forms will continue to increase, not decrease. The answer, then, is not to eliminate specialization. On the contrary, the potential for development lies in allowing the training to be fertilized by methods from different genres. For instance, fiction-film training can be inspired by documentary methods of script development, and documentary training can be inspired by animation’s total dissolution of the space of real life. The breaking down of genre is a fact in all forms of art and culture, and so there is a natural need to become acquainted with methods that diverge from the traditional views of individual genres.

4. Strengthen craft fundamentals and let others deal with the tech

Was the scourge of amateurism and the auteur mindset that most members of a film crew used to be reduced to technicians instead of being seen as creative teammates? Film schools in themselves were a reckoning with that idea, though they remained torn on the subject. When I was at the Film School in the 1980s, instruction in techniques and technology was a dominant part of the cinematography and sound programmes. We were lucky to even have a sound programme. In most other countries at the time, sound was exclusively considered a technical phenomenon that was best served by attending school. This practice peaked in the early years of Danish television, when smiths were hired to operate the cameras (what was a camera but a heap of iron?) and seamstresses to “stitch” the film together. The technical processes were complicated, of course. Camera, film-stock and laboratory technologies were essential fields of knowledge for cinematographers, as were the complexities of lighting, with untold numbers of lamps and filters used in conjunction with film stocks, light metres and measuring tapes to create the right combinations of light and dark, contrast and sharpness. Framing was a discipline in its own right, a skill that was honed in practice and that no one really sat down to think about.

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The training of soundmen was likewise dominated by acoustics, audio technology and microphone types, along with the tape recorder, the mixing console and optical sound. Conversely, film school conservatism prevented students from working with stereo sound for years after it had become a normal part of film production. And concepts like and elements of sound artistry were frowned upon by the sound instructor as late as the turn of the millennium. Digitization has turned all of that upside down: the technology is now so advanced that a specialist is included when you rent a professional camera (only very few production companies these days buy their own cameras, which become outdated more quickly than you can get a return on investment). Moreover, the development has entailed that most professional equipment now has a relatively simple user interface. Among our faculty, there is general agreement that the technical training should be ramped down accordingly. A cinematographer should explore how a camera can be used more than how it is constructed. The same is also very much true for the sound area, where instruction in methods has taken the place of instruction in technologies. Likewise, editing – where the first digital editing suites were a nightmare for analogue film editors – today is so simple that a large part of the editing process can easily be done on equipment that even amateurs can use. The instruction time gained is quickly put to other use. The craft of filmmaking has become no less complex over time. Everybody may be able to make films, but very few know how to make good films. That takes talent and immersion and time. The moving camera, as previously described, has created the need for a much greater focus on the art of framing. Sound design, too, has a radically different role, because audiences today expect visuals and sound at the highest level of aesthetics and storytelling. At our school, the overarching focus on story means that students of cinematography, sound design and editing continually deal with the narrative aspects of their discipline as they explore and develop their own formal vocabularies. Moreover, all disciplines face a growing challenge when it comes to skills. If there is more than one on a set, the DOP should be able to articulate clear guidelines. Because sound mixing is done continually over the course of postproduction, the sound designer should know how to communicate his to both the director and the sound crew. The list goes on.

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Developing this power of articulation, and often being required to exercise it in writing, is complicated by the fact that many filmmakers are dyslexic and instinctively avoid writing – perhaps a touch of dyslexia was even the reason why they developed their filmmaking skills in the first place? Here, film schools have a special mission in helping students develop their language communication skills in the practice of their discipline.

5. Keep the learning space closed – but open it up within

A fundamental dogma of our film school has been to create a confidential and intimate space, where students can test themselves out without being exposed to harsh and uncompromising public judgment. In short, students need a chance to find their legs and make mistakes in peace. I always supported that principle, but recently my attitude has been seriously challenged. With the arrival of social media, humanity has plunged into a never-before-seen openness about matters that used to be considered undeniably private. This openness has become a creative engine for many people and one that young people are familiar with when they begin their education. To many of them, the school’s closedness seems outdated and incomprehensible. They accuse the school of being self- contradictory in encouraging students to establish open creative processes and reach out to their audiences while simultaneously preventing them from drawing in the surrounding world. I think they have a point. The Film School celebrates that students relate to their audience – that a story only comes alive when it finds its audience, that film also is a mass medium and that our cultural-political legitimacy is predicated on society’s desire for quality in this mass medium. Social media not only means that young people are used to making everything they do public. It also entails that sharing for many has become an integral part of project development. That is where the story starts. While crowdfunding and audience are concepts whose potential has yet to be fully unfolded, they are nonetheless a reality. There are times when I think that insisting on a closed learning space is just as conservative as denying the existence of stereo sound and that it may ultimately entail that young people who genuinely want to reach out to the world with their stories will pass up the Film School. Like the student who wrote to me about the Film School’s habit “of only looking at film as art and craft. What about film as a spiritual, humanistic, poetic and

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/or political weapon in a society that, like all , needs powerful stories to understand and mirror itself in? Is it possible to imagine a film school that closed in on itself less and focused more on making collaboration with the outside world a beneficial and integral part of its students’ development?” But greater openness is -infested waters. Should students be forced to put out a film they are not happy with, risking negative reviews by a merciless public that loves to pass judgment? Or, even worse, what if they are celebrated and hailed as geniuses? We know that overwhelming success can make it next to impossible for the success- ridden artist to not try to recreate her own success. Wouldn’t publication put far too great a weight on playing it safe or going for something that could function as a calling card to the industry? Would students be too fixated on reviews instead of the process? At our school, we say that we don’t put out films but graduates. An interesting mistake is more valuable than a film that risks nothing. Can we maintain that point of view in a world where visibility is all dominant? Won’t students’ solidarity be lost in mutual to attract the world’s attention? Another student writes: “As a starting point, it seems almost utopian to imagine that a place where you are constantly being critiqued by instructors and consultants, judged by your fellow students and, not least, yourself and always have to make creatively daring decisions, could serve as a safe setting, but I actually think that’s what the Film School can do, at its best. When the Film School is at its best, you can feel the cohesion in your class. For me, that means that everyone’s experiences (good and bad) are lessons for all. We are, as the saying goes, in the same boat. This creates a collective consciousness that I find very valuable and that I believe requires great skills in working together across disciplines and class years, both in and out of the Film School. Therefore, I think it’s important to keep the Film School as a safe setting where competiveness will not be allowed to gain a negative foothold.”

As the above shows, this dilemma occupies everyone at the school. We are experimenting with introducing greater openness about our processes in the media and showing students’ works to a wider circle internally, whether to an invited industry audience or the school’s students and staff. As part of the curriculum, we are also working with readings, audience tests and presentations of projects to representatives of the industry. Plus, our documentary directors go to the Middle East and make films in an exchange programme with local documentary filmmakers.

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All the same, we have decided to continue to keep our screenings of student works closed to an “uncontrolled public.” That will come soon enough, anyway, with graduation films and the rest of their work. It may be old-fashioned, but it is a hallmark of the Film School that we offer our students an opportunity to gestate, setting our youthful students’ development essentially apart from that of filmmakers who have to develop on the industry’s and the public’s terms.

6. Reinvent film school pedagogy

Most classical film schools harbour an intuitive aversion to the term “pedagogy.” It has too much of a ring of kindergarten circle time and school lessons with good behaviour and right and wrong answers, contrasted with the ideal of an artistic process of creation that is essentially irrational, unpredictable, personal and uncompromising. This aversion is probably part of the reason why many art educations are not conscious about their choice of pedagogy. That is certainly the case with our film school. It may be related to the fact that the tradition of film schools is so short that many instructors never went to film school themselves. Nevertheless, consciously or repressed, the methods and attitudes we employ have a great impact on the quality of the instruction and the education, and on the directions students later strike out in. We have had to realize that, despite the ideal of the anti-authoritarian, innovative artist, the reality of the Film School is often marked by a surprisingly authoritarian pedagogy, which even promotes a conventional narrative form. If we take a critical look at how the assignments we give our students are phrased, they tend to have convention baked in. When it comes to student productions, it is standard to state specific guidelines for the number of shooting days, actor days, editing days, locations, type of equipment, etc., plus, of course, deadlines and running times of individual films. There is a good reason for it all. It is a basic principle that every student should learn something from the productions and the school regulates to prevent certain disciplines from being favoured over others. But we seem to forget our basic knowledge that the nature of the process affects the cinematic result and that a process that is so standardized inevitably leads to uniform films. Moreover, it is disempowering to students – though, naturally (and thankfully), there will always be those who don’t give a damn about the rules and make their films any way they want.

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What would happen, I wonder, if we loosened everything up a bit and made the students themselves responsible for the planning? Critiques are usually done by students showing their exercises to the class and the instructors. The instructors then get the floor, giving their responses in turn. They strive for open and healthy dialogue but often, to their frustration, find that students go into a defensive crouch. From the outside, it looks like the instructors are trying to talk their students to death. What would happen if the instructors refrained from making their own observations and instead spent their facilitating students to reflect on and debate their own experiences and choices of methods with each other? During lectures at the school, it is frustrating to count the number of students checking their email or even taking a nap while the instructor exerts herself on the podium. Couldn’t we include students much more, for instance, by letting them provide examples of films to illustrate various points of the lecture? Or should we simply drop the idea of lectures altogether, now that research has shown that they rank among the forms of teaching that students learn the least from, and instead let the instruction be based on concrete exercises and assignments that activate students? In general, we would like to test our courses more systematically to tell if they actually meet our pedagogical goals of experiment, a personal voice, innovation and . We are trying to include students more in preparing lesson plans. We are testing out new forms of critiquing, and we are experimenting with giving students more responsibility and freedom in the production processes. The aim is to get away from a pedagogy that, intentionally or not, becomes a prescription and move towards a more “scaffolding” pedagogy, where students, more dynamically and in interaction with each other, are allowed to develop more freely and unpredictably, and so acquire better fundamentals for innovative work. On a more down-to-earth level, our experiences show that students become far more engaged in the instruction and critiques when they are included more, and that they get a much-needed reality shock on productions when it dawns on them that the responsibility for realizing the productions actually rests with them. This reminds me of my own first-year exercise, where we cancelled our outdoor shoot because of rain, naively thinking that the school would “replace” that day of shooting. When that failed to happen, we were left with half a film but also a lesson I never forgot.

7. Insist on developing the Film School without academizing the teaching

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Our film school is so young that we are still in direct touch with its pioneers. Henning Camre, who was in the first class at the Film School, later became the school’s first film school-educated head.1 I myself am the first head who is both film schooled and had a head who was film schooled.

Building an educational tradition from the ground up takes time. The pioneers had the freedom to try out different things. The Film School was a playground and a laboratory, which produced its unique foundation: a small number of students with an equal number in each discipline, enabling them to make up film crews together. Practice-based learning structured around film productions simulating professional conditions as closely as possible, training artistic dialogue, craft and collaboration skills. Hands-on exercises confronting students with central methodical, aesthetic and narrative issues. Add to that teaching in film analysis, film and general humanities. Finally, spending time together continuously throughout their education is a factor in students’ artistic maturation and in creating a shared language, which is one of the reasons why Danish filmmakers are renowned for our ability to articulate what we want to achieve in our work of making films. The National Film School of Denmark 1.0 has been refined over the years, but it has maintained its basic structure and singularity. Meanwhile, the world of education policy around us has changed, rising internationalization leading to a common European decision to create standardized structures enabling students to piece together their education from several different institutions of learning, with the to switch schools along the way by studying abroad for a period or permanently. In that regard, the concepts of knowledge, skills and abilities have been set down as the common foundation for all education. Here, ours and many other countries’ classical film schools are a poor fit, primarily because our training does not operate with classical teaching modules but long-term courses and is generally based on students spending all their school years together. Moreover, the school’s working language is Danish. The big question is whether the National Film School of Denmark 2.0 should aspire to become more like other educations, offering our students the benefits of

1 And later director of the National Film and Television School in England, director of the Danish Film Institute and now a consultant, e.g., for the Norwegian Film School. 19 mobility, or whether we should maintain the Film School’s singular structure and the unique qualities produced by building long-term relationships? In the establishment of a European qualifications framework, the term “artistic research” has gained prominence, based on the idea that it is possible to develop actual artistic research. But is it even desirable to establish an actual research concept in the field, when art can be defined as exploration on its own unique terms and conditions? All artistic work is based on exploration, experiment and reflection. In the field of cinema, like Truffaut’s Hitchcock on Hitchcock and Tarkovsky’s Sculpting in Time deserve their status as classics, because filmmakers otherwise rarely take the time to collect and articulate their reflections. Film schools can play an important role going forward in making more filmmakers share their reflections on their work. And film schools should, of course, be at the centre of the efforts to systematize and communicate the knowledge that arises when artistic experience is collected, articulated and put in perspective. However, as I see it, with the concept of research comes an unfortunate tendency to try to academize artistic work in a way that alienates those who actually work in cinema. There is a real risk that the process will sideline actual filmmakers. Instead of strengthening cinema and film schools, you risk disqualifying what today is one of the most important resources of knowledge for film schools: their instructors’ own professional work as filmmakers. Roughly half of ’s film schools have begun the process of reshaping themselves around the international standards. For many, it is a challenge that the process is so resource-intensive and wraps them so tightly in academic lingo and systems thinking that the values provided by filmmakers’ own artistic and methodical experiences are suffocated. A river of lesson plans and quality-control systems are being generated and knowledge foundations documented. New teachers with the right diplomas are being hired. Everything looks formal and fine on the outside. But, as one disillusioned film school head confided in me, there is just one problem: the actual teaching is getting worse and the quality of students’ graduation films is at a lower level than before. Should you nevertheless choose to undertake this process, you must be prepared to arm up and defend the basic and unique qualities that ultimately legitimize film schools. In that respect, one of the biggest challenges is to ensure that the resistance to

20 this purported academization does not halt the development of the film school’s educational thinking and shut out outside knowledge. We can, indeed we must, make quantum leaps in coming years to continue to evolve at the required pace. Here, we can learn a lot from academia, in terms of pedagogy, didactics and educational planning. Moreover, as film schools, we can become pioneers in including knowledge from the methods of new media forms in terms of teamwork, agile processes and close contact to markets and audiences, not only in our educational programmes but also in our production of films. Two conditions will be crucial: 1) Film schools must make it a point that their ultimate task going forward is to educate for an awareness of methods. A story can be developed and executed in countless ways. Each student must find and develop her own methods but should also be challenged by being confronted with other people’s methods. 2) The way we teach methods must reflect that artistic creation is always rooted in individual, uncompromising perceptions of desire and idiosyncrasy. In other words, testing and practice-based reflection are key. Plus, the concept of inspiration remains fundamental: creating an inspiring space both for personal acquisition of methods and for exploding those methods. The Film School must remain in the intersection of craft, methodical abilities and competencies, which is how professional skills are developed, while remaining insistent that art will always be an interaction with life, and life is no profession.

8. the gap by graduating entrepreneurs

Most film schools aspire to have the perfect educational programme, and when students blossom, it invariably feels like the goal has been met. Upon commencement, however, graduates face the challenge of starting their professional work, and for this their education has only very poorly prepared them. That especially goes for those who have to create their own job by developing an idea and pitching it, whereas graduates in other disciplines who seek employment have an easier time getting their foot in the door. At our school, a big part of the final semester is set aside for “bridging classes,” with a mandatory tour of production companies, the Film Institute and the broadcasters, advice on setting up a corporation, applying for a VAT number, etc., plus a lecture or two on entrepreneurship. We strengthen students’ ties to the industry on other fronts, as well. By including industry representatives on our admissions committee, we build basic

21 legitimacy for students – the industry helps pick the best. And by bringing in a large contingent of guest instructors and mentors from the industry, alongside regular internships and field trips, we give students first-hand knowledge of important industry actors that they will meet again later on. These initiatives are important in their own right, but, in my opinion, they are not a sufficiently qualified answer to the challenges that graduates face. The way the media industries are evolving today, none of our graduates can hang their career on sitting around and waiting for someone to offer them a job. They have to be ready to create their own job opportunities, ideally by taking innovative steps. Here, too, we have a good tradition to build on. An important factor in the development of Danish cinema over the years has been that students continue to work closely together after they graduate. Many of Denmark’s most innovative production companies originated in that way, Zentropa2 being the most legendary example. In terms of content, Dogme 95 was an initiative that grew directly out of the film school tradition. Numerous collectives of writers and directors have been established over the years as fertile gathering points for of creatives. In recent years, Rokoko Film3 has attracted international attention with their newly developed animation concept Animotion, a sensor-based motion-capture technology. The company is a shining example of graduates taking the wheel in developing and expanding their area of expertise. Trained as a producer, Jakob Balslev has succeeded in stepping out of the traditional view of a producer by taking an innovative view of himself as an entrepreneur. In the future, it is crucial that we succeed in directing our education towards entrepreneurship. Accordingly, we must design our whole of education to stimulate independence, initiative and innovative thinking in students, building on the qualities already provided by the Film School’s priority on teamwork.

9. Remember that the instructors are filmmakers, not professional teachers

Our film school is an elite school, in the qualitative sense of the word, which implicitly means that the school has the best instructors. What, then, is a good film school

2 Zentropa, founded in 1992 by Lars von Trier and Peter Aalbæk Jensen, today is one of Scandinavia’s biggest production companies with a number of production departments across Europe. 3 Jacob Balslev, a Danish entrepreneur and , founded the art/tech start-up Rokoko in 2014. 22 instructor? Being a film star is certainly no qualification in itself, though talent and merit are important requirements for having the necessary awareness of the workings of the and the state of the art. Accordingly, we aim for most of our instructors to be working filmmakers alongside their teaching. Most instructors prefer to establish a kind of collegial relationship with their students, sharing their experience and supervising in practical courses. Conversely, most instructors get acute performance anxiety at the thought of actual teaching. Most new instructors tell me that they would like to take part in “thinking” teaching and supervising students, but “actual teaching” they would rather leave to someone else. Indeed, it is an intimidating experience for most to go from telling case stories about films they have worked on to having to discuss subjects like “scenes,” “dialogue”, and “framing.” You quickly run out of words and realize that being good at your job is light- years away from knowing how to extrapolate general concepts. The master-and apprentice-model has its challenges, too. Over the long run, very few students care to hear stories from the old days and very few find it stimulating to be given heavy-handed directions for dealing with professional challenges, turning a deaf ear or failing to translate the directions into personal expressions. Even so, I am convinced that the personal encounter between teacher and student, also in the future, will be at the core of our film school as a prerequisite for taking craft and artistic method to the highest level. An art school will always be completely dependent on the ability of its instructors to clarify the artistic dimensions in every aspect of the training, while students in their instructors should encounter an inspiring sounding board for their need to express themselves. Instructors need to have a sense of the individual student’s artistic singularity and the ability to create challenging teaching that strikes the spark of inspiration. It is essential to realize that every instructor brings his or her personal experience and unique skill set. This is what makes them special and, for teaching to be a personal encounter, they must maintain that approach. A screenwriter who has also worked as an actor obviously has a completely different set of experiences than someone who originally wanted to be a novelist – to mention an obvious example – which they should be able to utilize in their work as an instructor. Moreover, the uniqueness of the instructors is key to the spirit that vitalizes the school’s existence. In turn, one of the biggest challenges involves

23 navigating the intersection between the school’s overall pedagogical and academic objectives and the individual instructor’s personal resources and potentials. Our instructors are not professionally educated teachers and very few have any particular pedagogical background, excepting bad experiences from their own school days. Furthermore, many filmmakers’ strengths in filmmaking are offset by weaknesses in reading and writing, and it varies greatly how much academic knowledge they have acquired in their field. Consequently, it is the ’s obligation to do the grunt work of articulating, reflecting on and developing forms of teaching, extracting the best from other education programmes and adapting it to the unique conditions of cinema. Filmmaking can be taught, as Mogens Rukov liked to say.4 It is possible to collect, accumulate and redevelop knowledge and experience in film school teaching. Film schools hardly have the same educational traditions as art academies, theatre schools or music conservatories, but we do share the same basic understanding that artistic and artisanal practice is at the core of our education. Our form of production is unique and must develop its own form of teaching. Instructors are welcome to join in that journey of development, but the essential thing is their day-to-day work of putting plans and basic thoughts into practice from their personal perspectives. It is, of course, easier said than done to plan teaching in a way that accommodates the needs of the individual subjects, while conceiving and structuring common exercises and productions that give all disciplines the greatest possible benefit, account for each student’s singularity and, finally, provide the freedom to allow the individual instructor to utilize her own personal skills and qualities. It has been almost 20 years since the Norwegian Film School published Training the Trainer, Dick Ross’s5 succinct breakdown of the specific day-to-day challenges of a film school instructor. As far as I know, this is the only ever written specifically for film school instructors. The Nordic film schools have now teamed up to develop the basic ideas of Ross’s book in an actual programme for the continuing education of film school instructors, titled From Artist to Teacher. The aim is to develop small, highly practical and specific modules. Moreover, internally at our school, we recently, with

4 Mogens Rukov (1943-2016), writer, founder of the National Film School of Denmark’s screenwriting programme and co-writer of Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration. 5 Professor Richard Ross, /UK, BBC journalist and documentary producer, former head of the Tisch School of Arts, , visiting professor and freelance lecturer at many film schools worldwide. 24 great success, introduced our instructors to a course of basic pedagogical issues adapted to the unique conditions of film school instructors.

10. Incorporating students’ resources

For film to evolve in earnest as a medium and an art form, we, the established filmmakers, must abandon our view that it is us who will create the new. Students obviously do not have our experience, but they were born with the medium in a whole other way than us and are much better used to understanding its development. New media also entail new ways of acquiring knowledge. The is overflowing with TED Talks, director commentary tracks, YouTube tutorials and so on. We should realize that students are not empty vessels for us to fill but a resource to facilitate. The wonderful thing is, once we realize that, it becomes much more inspiring to be a teacher and an institution of learning. At my school, we have student representatives on the admissions committees. They have a good eye for talent and, just as important, they know how to spot those who merely have a talent for saying the things that an admissions committee wants to hear. Developing our new strategy, we naturally included students in the working group. The result is a strategy where students will be playing a central role in the school’s external communications. When we were looking for a new communications officer recently, it only seemed natural to include a student representative on the hiring committee to give students influence on who their future sparring partner in communications was going to be. Flexible evaluation systems, allowing students to continually evaluate the teaching and in dialogue with their instructors, is another constructive way of incorporating students. We are currently experimenting with an online evaluation system, where students on an ongoing basis reflect on the classes they are taking. The instructor reads the messages and comments, and the reflections become part of the close dialogue between student and teacher. Film is a collective art form, and collaboration is an essential part of film education. We train for top positions and in the coming years instruction in management skills will be an increasingly central part of the training in all disciplines. Greater knowledge about their own management role and its challenges will much better

25 prepare students to constructively enter into collaborative processes. Having students work together, across and within disciplines, is another way to create equal dialogue and shared reflection. At schools, we often talk about how important it is to have good teachers, and I could not agree more. When I think back on my own film school days, I, too, had teachers that were invaluable to me, of course. But most important was meeting the other students. The discussions we had and the community we grew were essential to my later professional life, and they still are. To sum up the importance of the Film School, it is the opportunity to create , establish partnerships and develop a shared language that is the cornerstone of our graduates’ continued success in building Danish cinema.

PS As I write these words, Brussels was recently hit by a terror attack, reminding us once again how easily our civilization and culture can be put under pressure. In Europe, we are lucky to have a strong and independent tradition of film schools. In other parts of the world, people are struggling to establish education programmes in filmmaking and production. Our film schools exist thanks to foresighted politicians who appreciated the importance of supporting the nurturing the talent of individual artists and cinematic storytellers to enrich the citizens of our with precise and rich stories about our existence and reality. To meet that obligation, we must strive for a greater diversity of stories in films in terms of reflecting our basic social ideals of liberty, equality and community. In our part of the world, there is a glut of stories reflecting the conditions of the white, male middle class. It is also primarily this population group that is found in front of and behind the camera in our film industry. This social, ethnic and gender bias denotes a paucity in our cinema. The reason is not only that way too many film schools charge tuition fees, which restricts them to the wealthy. The same bias is found in countries with publicly paid education – often even in the submitted applications. The challenge is not just ensuring equal opportunity in admissions. Steps need to be taken at a much earlier stage. This is a crucial reason why film schools in the future must become much more visible in the “growth layer.” The growth layer today is composed not just of talented young people, who are considering an education in the arts, but also of all the media-happy children and teens

26 who make films on their smartphones in school and on every street corner. Who better than film schools to show that films are for everyone and that they can be so much more than bland and stereotypical images?

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