The Essential New Art Examiner

Letter to Aspiring Filmmakers

M i c hael R a b iger Letter to Aspiring Filmmakers March 1976 The last decade has seen a tremendous growth of film study. Much of it is half-baked, but it’s sure that “the 20th century art form” is catching on. Some declare cynically that interest in film is related to the decline in literacy. Be that as it may, it seems that film has become the fashionable means towards self-discovery and self-expression. To develop a critical response is relatively easy, but to then meet one’s own expectations as a film maker is a very different matter. Learning to use film means also learning how one perceives, how one’s consciousness actually works. If you set about trying to be a film maker there are several roads to becoming professionally competent. You can sweep floors in a film company and learn apprentice fashion. Few such chances exist. You can buy your own equipment and learn out of books. It’s equally safe to buy your own aircraft and fly by printed instructions. The expensive independent film-makers’ packages of used equipment always for sale are mute testimony to many a lost shirt. Or you could take courses. That costs money, so things are getting serious. What’s it to be for? Maybe you’ll shelve that question, and figure out what to do with your skills when you have them. If you live in the big city, you’ll probably have two kinds of choice; technical film school or arty film school. The former is meant to put you on the lower rungs of a long ladder leading (for those with stamina and some flair) to the film industry. This means films for TV, industrial films, educational or advertising films, and beyond these possibly unexciting prospects, there is the Golden Fleece itself, the impossible dream you hardly dare divulge even to your best friend—Hollywood, Calif. 36   T h e E s s e n t i a l N ew A rt E xaminer Taking that direction is a long stony road. It offers uncertainty and threatens to subject you to grey disciplines and greyer personalities. Understandably, those emerging from the educational treadmill are in no mood for more “discipline.” They crave an atmosphere that promises to gratify their ideals and longing for individuality. Many aspiring film makers (young ones in particular) who don’t immediately have to support themselves, find what they know about art school much more attractive than what they know about the craft oriented school, which carries sordid trade and commerce associations. Unfortunately, important decisions are often made with only such stereotypes available. It would be better if you could sit through a day of material produced by students of the two different kinds of school—a typical day’s screening, let us say. The craft school films may strike you at first as pedestrian, juvenile in conception, or over-earnest. Often they will be deficient in their story line, or mistaken in conception so that they are abstruse. In their failings they are easy to disparage, yet it is unusual that one does not get a feeling about the makers. Most of these films succeed in some way, somewhere, and almost all communicate human concerns and evoke feelings. As the students become more advanced, one sees an increasing mastery of the means and tools of the cinema—the use of light, the use of the camera, of subject matter and actors, of composition, of the elements and rhythms of sound and of visual rhythm in editing. A day’s footage in a fine art film school cannot but strike you differently . Concentrating heavily upon visuals and dense, repetitive visual techniques, the footage by comparison seems abstracted, tells no story but is often attractively evocative by moments. The emphasis is upon color, form, movement and non representational imagery. When one does discern what the images are (a bicycle hub? A bathtub drain?) they seem to be used in an evanescent symbolical way which leads the mind outwards and then leaves it, lost. A day of such film will probably leave you bewildered and feeling that you have to learn much about art history and experimental film philosophy before you understand what the film makers said about their work. You might also feel that though the makers spoke of the feelings that motivated their works, the works themselves merged into an impersonal stream of flashing light which refused to yield...