Educating for Innovation: Ten Tips for Future Film School Heads Vinca
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Educating for Innovation: Ten Tips for Future Film 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 culture are an essential foundation for the democratic and humanistic development of society. “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 (Festen, 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 Denmark today. Our remarkable string of fiction films, 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 policy, which in the 1960s gave us a Film Act and a Film School. 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 industry 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. 1 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 education programmes at a pace that can keep up with the development of media, and do it smartly to influence that development. * * * 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 distribution, film has all but merged with other outdated forms of presentation, like videotapes, laserdiscs, DVDs and television. Everything is digital now. And in the digital world, technologies 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 advertising 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 drawing up four-year strategies for our technology purchasing. While our most recent strategy did not even include drones as a future scenario, last year cinematography 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. * * * The original film school education was powerfully challenged by two basic conditions of film stock: economy and the forms of screening. Raw stock was so precious that it 2 used to be quite normal, even for professional cinematographers, to practice their craft using an unloaded camera. 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 filmmaking. 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 work with stills before moving pictures, black and white before colour, scenes without dialogue before actors 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 nation, 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 monopoly 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 quality 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 audio commentary 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.