Creativity in Film Education - A Seminar on How to Learn to Watch and Make Films

Alain Bergala is a French film education expert, filmmaker and author of the book L'hypothèse cinéma (The Aesthetics of Film), which was recently published in Finnish. This year at the Midnight Sun Film Festival, he held a seminar concerning film education for young people and children. The precise topic of the seminar was the pedagogic project Cinéma cent ans de jeunesse, established in 1995, which aims to introduce film education to primary and secondary schools. Now, twenty years after its inception, the scheme spans forty different school classes all over the world.

Opening the seminar, Bergala gave a brief outline of the history of French film education. The guiding ideal of French post-WWII film societies was the idea of high culture uniting people from all backgrounds. However, the advent of television and the recent digitalization of audiovisual culture have diminished artistically ambitious cinema into a small island of its own, which the general public has no connection to.

School classes that commit to the film education scheme spend the whole year working in tandem with their teacher and a professional working in the field of cinema. In the autumn term each student completes exercises that familiarize them with the formal language of cinema. These exercises are based on a DVD of film extracts compiled by the project coordinators. Clear, common rules and rotating roles within the group make sure that the learning process stays equal to all. The spring term culminates with the students making and watching their own films.

Among the examples screened by Bergala illustrating the type of educational film extracts included in the DVD were scenes from classic films that utilize the long take (plan-séquence) in different ways. The students’ task was to consider, without the teacher’s assistance, what is the extracts’ common factor and then film a scene of their own based on how they understood the set of extracts. In order to keep the learning process spontaneous, it is essential that the students do not merely attempt to copy the scenes they have just seen, but instead attempt to say something about a topic personal to them.

At the end of the seminar, Bergala reflected on the benefits and challenges of digitalization. Whereas before the filmmaking process consisted of a clear and linear set of choices, it is now possible to film a limitless amount of material and then work it into an endless number of differing versions. Similarly, the way in which people watch films has also changed: according to Bergala the habit of watching an entire film from start to finish is a disappearing tradition and therefore educators cannot demand that from today’s youth. Instead, they should for example attempt to illustrate the connections between different clips found on the internet.