CAN FILMMAKING BE TAUGHT?
My experience as a teacher in graduate film school.
Sadie Palmer: Photo by Nick Palmer
My grandfather used to advise, gruff and guttural in his Paddington patois, “Yer go’’uh ge’ uhn edificayeeshun!” How though (always assuming Grandad had a point), does the aspiring filmmaker get their “edificayeeshun”—sorry…education. From teachers? What kind of teachers? From classes? What kind of classes? Do they consult filmmaking friends? Head for social media? Books? “Masterclasses?” Workshops? Do they learn by watching—movie upon movie? Do they watch and simply allow the chops of the filmmakers to seep lazily in or do they attempt to put themselves in their heads, mining the riches of process beneath the contours of the finished movie? Or do they simply step out, and jumping in at the deep end pray for flotation and go ahead and just do it? The school of hard knocks, so to speak, some concussive perhaps. Or does ability have to be there from the get-go, undeniable, irrepressible, nothing to be added? Talent—you either have it or you don't. It can't be taught, can't be learned.
I never went to film school so I can't speak from the student’s perspective. I can from my own though, from the teacher’s side of the equation, so that's what I'm going to attempt here, hoping to cast light without, in the process, justifying too much my own position.
I've stood on location directing stuntmen dropping on parachutes, explosions blasting one after the other in the deep background. I’ve directed tanks, planes, I've directed a three-year old child, capricious even at their most accommodating, worked with a dog or two, with a bird, jabbing of beak, independent of (bird) brain. I've directed above water and I've directed under water, on land and in the sky. There's little more terrifying to my mind though than facing a class of hungry, brilliant young filmmakers. Like the dream you wish you weren't having that offers no escape. To see their looks as they anticipate pearls of wisdom from their teacher, and to consider the responsibility one has for their development—all too aware of one's shortcomings and the dearth of the sage omniscience they expect—is petrifying. What if I can't come up with the goods? What if what I have to say is wrong? What if it’s banal? What if they already know it? Can I even think of anything? How to begin? How to continue? What’s the destination of this session and does it amount to anything worthwhile? The doubts would creep insidiously in. Do my colleagues feel like this, I’d wonder? Do they doubt what they know or are they certain of it? I’d once read that the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, his Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations pillars of 20th century thought, would barf generously before each of the classes he taught because he felt he didn't know anything. I would remind myself of this, the notion being that I was in good company. On the other hand, I’d reflect, if Ludwig felt so challenged, what hope was there for Peter?
It took a while to understand that this was not a problem at all. To the contrary, it was a gift. No matter how conscientiously I’d prepared—and prepare I did, meticulously—I found that insecurity and doubt could give me something: the foundation no less, for a path of exploration shared with my students. Not that I was planning a free for all. No, it wasn't as though I was resorting to chaos but to a Socratic approach, founded in questions, in searching for the ones to ask while inviting others from the students, ones I myself hadn't considered or had papered over as being too simplistic, too inconvenient and consequently too demanding... I realized that teaching is no mere matter of doling out answers or rules. I shouldn't be presenting tablets of wisdom, which anyway I'd left behind long ago, if I’d ever had them, but offering a mutual process of exploration and discovery. This could be dangerous—it entails an embrace of uncertainty because often the questions would lead to answers that might prove contradictory, might reveal a paradox—and why should any student pay good money for that?
I wasn't dealing—at least on the whole—with the processes of pre-production, physical production, set procedure, the functions and structure of the crew, with the stages of post-production, with “workflow”, with the hardware, the software, with business, financing, or distribution, and I wasn’t providing career advice. There are tablets of certainty that come in handy on these fronts, which at some point it becomes necessary to be familiar with, but that is what I call “the conveyor belt”. It’s not “the candy”, and it’s the candy that has always interested me, the arena that excites. For me it’s story and storytelling, the domains of dramatic narrative—character, conflict, tension, stakes, structure, theme, tone, emotion—and staging, camera, editing, the language of the moving image and its auditory companion—that motivate, compel, and captivate me. In short, it’s the art.
“You can't teach creativity,” I recently saw stated in social media, in comments on the question as to whether film school is worth the cost. The artist not so much enfant terrible as enfant savant. Not auto-didact so much as no didact at all. Scorsese didn’t need to watch every film he could feast his eyes on then? PT Anderson didn’t benefit from having Turner Classic Movies playing in every room in his home. Ari Aster didn’t thrive on being the most film literate student of the 450 or so I taught (read: worked with) at AFI Conservatory? Creativity cannot be taught perhaps, but it has to be developed. The tabula rasa of the mewling babe is rasa, blank, and not a screen replete with images and stories. The mind of the growing child, youth, young adult can, however, be assisted, facilitated, encouraged, enabled in its striving for cinematic prowess.
Where then to do the enabling? At film school?
There are notable filmmakers who went to film school just as there are those who didn't. These institutions of varying pedagogies and merits didn't exist until 1929, when the program at USC was initiated, and it wasn't until 1947 that UCLA’s School of Film and Television opened. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts opened in 1965, AFI’s program a few years after that, although with few students (I’m lucky to have known Gil Dennis and Tom Rickman, contemporaries of Lynch, Schrader, and Malick in an early intake). By the time of the inception of USC’s program, the history of cinema was already sated with masterpieces, with many good films, together with a whole host of the indifferent, the mediocre, the execrable (as ever). So, with no filmmaking pedagogues how did early directors learn their craft? How did they garner their skills when the first moving image hadn’t been captured until 1888 (the Roundhay Garden Scene)? Did they, in the years around the turn of the century, simply block the scene, set up the camera and shoot—pretty much what the neophyte armed with no more than an iPhone might do today? Maybe they did and maybe the next short involved much the same simple course of action, the next also—but at some point before too long perhaps, they would do something differently, more effectively, that new approach subsequently incorporated into later shoots. Expertise evolved so that before long there came about a language. Put untrained directors on sets today indeed, and over the months, the years, some will learn proficiency by doing, by trial and error. Art is not about doing whatever we fancy, it’s about doing what works. Stick with that, jettison the rest, and—soul and voice thrown into the mix (see my previous article)—the newly enlightened filmmaker is on their way…
No need for film school then? No need for the teacher? If the pioneers could work it out for themselves, why not Generation Z? Sure—if it’s content to go back to ground zero and spend the years it takes to get up to speed. But that couldn’t happen anyway—today's new filmmakers have grown up watching movies, consuming TV, following YouTube etc. so couldn't possibly start from square one. They’re pre-educated. (While some of the presumptions picked up along the way will have to be challenged and ditched—the beginning filmmaker often needs to be de-educated.) The question becomes one not of how education starts but how it continues and develops. It’s here that the pitfalls become evident. It doesn't help to have a teacher who wants to make the student into a simulacrum of themselves. It doesn't help to have a teacher insisting on hard and fast rules. Doesn't help to have one enslaved to common thinking. Doesn't help to have those who instill in the student the notion they’re unlikely to succeed because few do—a self-fulfilling prophecy. No. The teacher—more precisely the mentor—must permit the student their autonomy, seeing themself as the guide to the student’s agency, not the preacher of their own. The good mentor learns from the student so that the student can learn from the mentor. The good mentor does not attack the student, battling to break through their defenses, the good mentor invites, excites, challenges, questions, taking down those barricades of misconception and insecurity not by assault but by guidance in order to construct the sturdy houses of insight. The good mentor is as vulnerable as the good student. The good mentor shows the student how vulnerability, not infallibility, is the key to growth. The good mentor passes on the baton of the teacher to the student, rendering the student mentor to themself.
Akira Kurosawa, on winning the Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the age of 80, said “I don't think I understand cinema yet”. That's what the teacher, the student must admit to themselves. It's never going to make either of us into Kurosawa, but it will keep us on the journey of question and discovery. Because filmmaking can never be entirely learned, so it can never be entirely taught, but that doesn’t mean that effective mentorship isn’t invaluable… and when the mentor teaches the student to become their own mentor, that’s effective mentorship.
You can’t teach creativity. No. But you can learn it. It’s how you learn it, how you can be enabled to learn it, that’s the question.
Peter Markham January 2021
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge)
https://linktr.ee/filmdirectingclass