The Film School Blues

by Stephen Tringali

Can art be taught? I’ve found myself wrestling with this question a lot lately. As any aspiring filmmaker will tell you, the first big questions are do I commit to such a field, and will it provide a substantial income?

Once these uncertainties subside and long years of poverty are embraced, the more important question of how do I go about understanding film’s aesthetic and technical qualities quickly surges to the forefront. Must someone teach me these skills, or can I learn them myself?

Now-famous writers and directors have answered this question in many different ways. The first and most obvious response is to go to school for film. Getting into a prestigious university is always a good idea. Martin Scorsese went to NYU, George Lucas went to USC, and Darren Aronofsky went to Harvard.

There are downfalls to this approach, however. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts comes complete with a $50,000-a-year price tag. California's schools are especially competitive and impersonal on the undergraduate film level, and Harvard, as we all know, is next to impossible when it comes to admissions.

It’s not impossible, though, to start a film career without a degree from a big name university. Anyone hear of the 1990’s independent film revolution? Several directors, including Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith, made names for themselves by funding their own work, screening their productions at film festivals, and then latching onto a studio interested in purchasing their films.

I thought to myself, after considering these options: “Do I really need a university’s reputation to validate my skill?” Any film school will teach you how to operate cameras, how to edit film, and how to go through the stages of pre-production, production, and post-production. All I need to stand out is some raw talent and a little ambition, right?

The answer to that question has yet to be determined. I’m at American University to study film, but the school’s inclinations lean more toward documentaries and broadcast news instead of the material I find most interesting — movie theater and art house productions.

Is this such a problem, though? Can’t I apply the skills I learn from any film class, whether it concerns shooting wildlife documentaries or the history of film criticism, to my own films. I feel as though a cross-over appeal and a fresh perspective can both be attained. For example, learning to use an SLR camera to shoot pictures for the campus newspaper can give credence to my ability to use a video camera with the same F-stop and shutter speed controls.

Also, exposing myself to a variety of filming methods might shake the tendency to shoot material in a recycled, polished studio manner. Some of the most recent and compelling films deviate from these obvious structures. Children of Men, for instance, makes heavy use of long takes and an implied first person perspective, creative decisions that lend it a more immediate, war documentary tone.

But to answer my initial question, there is no failsafe method for cracking the cut-throat world of filmmaking. I feel as though many of us, now sinking steadily into the college atmosphere, are realizing just how much climbing we have to do before getting to that glorious zenith.

(Photo by S. Pedro de Sintra of Lisbon, Portugal via Flickr, using a Creative Commons license.)

films
film school
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