Andrew Pike talks about film education
5 October 2010
After recently viewing many short films by local filmmakers, I was rather shocked by the large number that involved extreme violence, graphically depicted on screen. Many hours of tender loving care have been devoted to the right texture of blood, the right amount of splatter, the right sound effects for shootings, stabbings and bone-breaking, and the right prosthetics for the un-dead. It's as though the only way to resolve any dramatic situation is through extreme violence.
Maybe the violence comes from our paranoid political climate – the fear of violence being done to us by terrorists, a fear carefully nurtured by politicians through our news broadcasts and our popular culture. Maybe it also comes from what we are feeding our young filmmakers in cultural terms. If they only see Tarantino and his imitators and successors, these films will give them their cinematic language. After all, young filmmakers are really only giving back to us what we have given to them. If the dominant culture at the multiplexes and in video games is violent, then that is what they will aspire to imitate.
Film societies and community cinemas clearly have an important social function in terms of bringing people together for shared experiences and social interaction. But I believe they also have an essential educative function. Our screenings of "classic" movies can provide an alternative view of the potential of cinema, a cinema literacy that can only help young and emerging filmmakers to see new possibilities in film language, new forms of narrative, new ways of stirring emotions.
In music, it is generally accepted that a "classical" education is of benefit no matter what sort of music a musician might want to play, be it jazz or rock or hip-hop: a knowledge of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and Prokofiev can enrich the musician's musical vocabulary. But in film, there is no such acceptance of the importance of a "classical" education: film history tends to be segmented off into a few marginal units in our film schools, almost as some sort of half-hearted after-thought.
Our film heritage is also too often tagged as "nostalgia", yet one never hears a music-lover describing Prokofiev or Shostakovich as nostalgia. We need to re-consider our attitude to the past and see lasting value and contemporary relevance in it all.
In our film society and community cinema programming, we love showing the great "classics" of the cinema but the average age of our audience tends to be, well, mature. I think it is important that young people, especially young filmmakers, be exposed to these films. How we get them into the screenings is another matter – free tickets create a culture of wanting free tickets, but whatever the solution, it is our job to find a way, to pass on "our" culture to the next generation.
I would argue that every empty seat at Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS is a young person not being reached. Surely part of our 'mission', as film elders in our society, should be finding ways to present the history of film to the young in a way that has relevance and meaning to them, given that it is very hard for us even to begin to imagine what they see through their eyes.
One way could be to challenge them, through incentives like festivals or competitions, to make films for audiences other than their own peer group – films for seniors, or films for children. In other words, we can encourage young people to think about different audiences and different messages. We could also perhaps encourage them to explore the "classics" by setting a frame-work for a competition that involves them responding to a film by, say, Ford or Kurosawa. We need to brainstorm these ideas and involve young filmmakers in the brainstorming, to find a way through this rather huge generation gap. In other words, we need to ask those who see through different eyes what they do actually see and how we might tap in to that view.
If we can help new filmmakers to enrich their emotional lives and their inspiration with the films we value most highly, then we will have achieved a great deal. It's a bit like succession planning in business, except that here we're talking about passing on culture.