THE FILM
SCHOOL AS ETHOS
I write this paper as neither academic nor theorist, nor even as a successful
filmmaker. I have not been paid to write it, nor to travel from Slovenia,
where I live. I write it out of loyalty to one moment in Scottish film
education that brought a strong sense of ethical purpose to filmmaking,
and that was effectively extinguished before this idea could be properly
formulated, properly funded and taught, and properly defended. It existed
as a subtext, an unspoken ethos, a sense of purpose that battled with
the day to day problems of setting up and running a film school: learning,
teaching, and managing the practise of filmmaking. And in retrospect,
this - the ethos - is the most important legacy of the school. And also
the most contentious, and the hardest to define.
A body of work exists, has found its audience and has been broadcast in
Britain and abroad that carries the name of an institution whose existence
was denied at the time, but whose influence continues to inform the work
of those of its students that went there to learn, and who cherish the
experience.
I speak as the first student to step through the doors of the Scottish
film school and the only one to be banned from entering it a year later.
Also as one of several who used the words Scottish Film School in the
title of our work not because it existed as a secure institution but because
we sought recognition for it. We were proud of it, proud of its ambition
and its purpose. Briefly, this fictive institution amounted to a collective
identity. I speak to convey a personal experience rather than the kind
of statistical criteria of success by which education is commonly measured.
I am, you might say, without objective criteria.
Extract: Brotherly Love
Theory, the topic of this conference, was not very important at that time
- at least, contemporary theory wasn’t even if we found some resonance
between our work and classic film theory - but now, with hindsight, a
decade later and as another film school takes its own hesitant steps towards
self-definition, this is perhaps the moment to consider an adventure in
education not just for its aspirations but also for its results and its
influence, to celebrate it, and to draw a few conclusions.
The evolution of a graduate film studies department into a postgraduate
course in practical filmmaking, the vital jump that allowed interested
adults to be attracted back into education and toward film as a creative
medium, happened at least partly because the Scottish National Executive
had been prepared to countenance funding a national film school. There
was willingness in Scotland to take that kind of leap. But when it started
the base was not yet secure, there was no permanent building, and the
school had to prove itself. The achievements over the first few years
were, by any standard, sufficient to justify funding a permanent building
and a studio, in the quality of the work, in the proof of industry interest
and willingness to collaborate, and in the extremely high rate of applicants
for the few places available. But, it seems in retrospect that the parent
institution, Napier University, was not prepared to allow one department
to grow, and to become autonomous, and the Scottish Film School project
was finally and unfortunately, strangled in its own umbilical cord. The
dramatic moments occurred over the proposed purchase of the empty STV
Gateway Studio in Leith Walk in Edinburgh, and after that opportunity
was lost the expansive spirit of the school burst, and the atmosphere
shrank, back into what the university felt, I suppose, to be proper, to
have limited budgets and courses for technical training. A sad turn of
affairs that seems unfortunately to illustrate the perpetual and degrading
conflict between vision and ambition on one side, and the fear of it on
the other.
But in the first year, ten years ago, the department had made that vital
first move into its own territory, a vacant building that happened to
be being leased by Napier, that stood alone in central Edinburgh in the
Grassmarket, and the expansiveness of this occupation encouraged freedoms,
responsibilities and risks that could adapt to this sense of a new beginning,
qualities that were inevitably reflected in the film projects themselves.
The place was open twenty four hours a day, untrammelled by unnecessary
restrictions and rules, and able to absorb as much energy as one could
throw at it. This was an exciting and unpredictable moment, a kind of
fertile chaos, and a good paradigm for how to begin a serious project.
The whole apparatus of institution was less necessary than the sense of
opportunity and adventure. The school was being created day by day, it
was being made in a series of mutual provocations between students and
course leaders, but the good will and curiosity that lay behind the promise
of core money and the ambition of those funding and leading it found its
mirror in the willingness of professionals to be involved, and the wiliness
of students who knew that soon they would be needing to find a job.
This was an important dimension of how the school operated, this frayed
edge between education and employment, professional and vocational, between
teaching and being a practitioner, between one public role, and another,
and ones own private life. The school and the course leaders were deeply
criticised for this, but in my view it was precisely the lack of boundaries,
the social blur that made it an explenential learning experience. Jack
Shea, the course leader, for example, cut a film while he was teaching
that year. It was a rather fraught experience for him, but a marvellous
film, a masterpiece in its way. And importantly, the editor Terry Twigg
and the assistant editor found themselves working not in isolation, for
once, but in a school, in the midst of all the tension and gossip, and
more than willing to socialise and to share the pains of their own and
others' projects. To see a major documentary being cut under your eyes
- that was fruitful. That was education. Terry eventually adopted the
faintly donnish, Oxbridge habit of leaving his door slightly ajar if he
was receiving visitors, and closed if he wasn’t. It was about editing,
learning editing, but it was also about making relationships, about being
mature, curious, and respectful, the vital human component of a film education
that is just overlooked. Not about being right, or being correct, but
finding who you cant get on with and who you can, and having a big enough
pool, or river of people passing through to allow for social rebalancing,
recovery from those small deaths, and small births.
So. A fertile chaos and a film school run by practising filmmakers. A
frayed edge. An emphasis in everything on the practical, the real doing
of it, the tension, the money, the people. It was not so much what it
had been preconceived to be, as what it was becoming. This is the key.
I remember this whirl of activity - bruised egos, personal animosities,
painful exercises, the relief of lectures, and the curiosity of visiting
professionals as to what was in fact going on in there. The script deadlines,
making workshops, finding my own path out of improvised theatre into film.
For me, one of the benefits of situating oneself in a huge rambling building
is the fact of a few empty rooms. Abandoning preconceived projects and
developing new ones as fast as possible, learning editing on atrocious
material but with an old pro with whom I have maintained a working partnership
for more than ten years. Revising scripts, finding quick ways to do things,
learning on the fly. Demystifying the filmmaking process. Learning everything.
Specialisation implies ignorance of other specialisations. So, refusing
to be specialised. Watching as many films as were hanging around or as
were seriously suggested to me. And finally, after screwing up with elaborate
shots and set ups, getting it right with elaborate shots and set ups.
The thing that drew it together was the sense of being a national film
school in the making. That we were part of a new language. And, I might
say, it was a very multi-national group of students involved. This idea
imparted a motivation and contributed to a radical sense of empowerment
among hitherto ignorant individuals. It is still remarkable to me that
a bunch of ego-driven would-be directors still put Scottish Film School
on all their films when first, they didn’t have to, and second,
it didn’t even exist. I remember the feeling of betrayal when the
last big project to go through, a few years later, put some private film
company instead of Scottish Film School in the titles.
So. Fertile chaos. Film taught by film practitioners. A frayed edge. An
idea able to impart collective identity. And crucially, the beginnings
of enough budget to shoot and edit on film. To use celluloid. Film. Sixteen.
All that, on a twelve month course. In retrospect, I think the accelerated
nature of the course, and the need to improvise around the physical financial
and technical shortcomings was an advantage. The budgets were too small,
but they could be made bigger in some unconventional way. It wasn’t
disallowed. The crews were too small, but they could be made bigger in
some unconventional way. The rules weren’t written. Projects were
supposed to be short films, but inevitably we were going to take as much
rope as we could get, to use as much screen time as we could get. And
as it was a twelve month course, so problems needed to be rapidly solved
because of the shortness of time. Unmakeable projects had to be dropped,
ambitions tailored to be as big as they could go, but to stay within the
realm of the possible. Not dreaming, but doing. And while projects were
of course driven by the will of their directors, they were also driven
by a counter-cultural glee: that it was possible to attempt classic works,
big works, any work, in a way that existing institutions and competitive
film schemes would never permit. This kind of opportunity is a vital component
of any film culture.
And, of course, came over-spending. In my case, overspending to make a
film that had paid its way through broadcast sales within nine months.
This was the ultimate blurring of boundaries, perhaps. That we were capable
of producing commercial work. And among all these really crazy but still
welcome and instructive pressures, tasting the freedom of making ones
own film. In ones own way. These things were permitted briefly, in Scotland,
and the situation produced some fine experiments, remarkable to me for
their self-control, and allowed a number of individuals, equipped with
their new experience of advanced crisis management and of having taken
reasonably big risks, to commit themselves to the path of pursuing their
own personal style, and the intuitions about filmmaking in the broadest
sense that were hinted at, and, in fact, revealed.
I think that in every way, when I was there, the school exceeded the potential
of its staff and infrastructure (to say nothing of its much torn-up course
document) because everybody was desperate and short of time, because everybody
took film very seriously, and because all this intense energy was focussed
in a good building with amenable pubs around. Physically, socially, artistically
it was in no way isolated, and no individual had ultimate authority. This
is very important, I think. Fertile chaos. Film taught by film practitioners.
Frayed edges. An idea able to impart a sense of collective identity. Working
on film. Not to be isolated, and to be without ultimate authority. Like
a vortex it drew mass together. It drew seriousness, attention to itself.
This, for me, is a good model for post-graduate education. The vortex.
It acquires its own dynamic: individuals take a part of the whole weight
onto their own shoulders to pursue it in their own way, and The Scottish
Film School was an idea that operated, briefly, like a vortex. The point
was to take the medium of film and bring it of age as soon as we could,
in Scotland. The point was the risks that were being run.
And this is, of course, the proper function of a film school - to threaten
the consensus, to be outside, or on the margins of the establishment,
to endanger it by empowering people who have appeared from nowhere, but
who suddenly have their own consensual mass, and their own lives to draw
upon as material. It was inevitable that it would be hated and sabotaged
by a vindictive establishment, splintered, atomised, and what happened
is a tragedy to which I will return later. It is, unfortunately, a closed
chapter now. But for the purposes of this essay it is more apposite to
focus on the danger that presents itself to those who encounter such freedom,
those who taste it, who want to pursue it, because a properly counter-cultural
school - a school that is not aiming to turn out technicians for industry
but new authors - a properly counter-cultural school can offer them scant
protection. I know this, and others know it, and importantly, it was obvious
at the time. In terms of education this is perhaps more quality than detriment
because the mission of the school, the mission of counter-cultural activity
itself is primarily moral and any moral mission, of course, has to be
proven in the face of a hostile world. The Scottish Film School was an
interesting and important experience precisely because it was very unsafe,
very fragile, very exposed. A dangerous mission that we encountered in
many practical ways, but as I have come to realise, there were a number
of conscious formulations that lay behind this social experiment.
For example. Fundamentally. A sense of outrage that it is possible to
take a medium, film, whose strength, whose very nature is its in-built
naturalism, and to use it to lie. Also. A social despair, that we are
held in the spell of media hypnosis. A sense of duty: the first task of
a teacher is to de-condition the student, and to encourage them to de-condition
themselves. And an explicitly anti-theoretical position, in fact: Everything
we know is wrong. Herein lies the ethos of the school, the secret current
that informed and channelled the ambitions of those students who could
pick up on it. The sense of seriousness that is necessary to any mission.
And I would say that it manifested itself in the fact that although we
all played with drama, and more or less successfully, we were all using
drama to expose the real moment... and once the medium of film has been
demystified for you, it is a small step to realise how easy it is to introduce
cinema itself into truly dangerous and revealing real-life situations.
To keep in mind the art of cinema, carefully exposed film, that game with
significant time, but to use it to show the lies we live with, the redeeming
quality of human imagination, and not as manipulated, but as observed,
documented, and irrefutable. The pull of seriousness was always towards
documentary at the Scottish Film School, but a redefined documentary.
A new kind of documentary, more courageous, more beautiful. Films for
our time, of our time.
Can you imagine? Just those three words, Scottish Film School, and you
think you can remake the perception of the entire audience, everywhere,
and you even become willing to try? But schools must be about that. Empowerment,
even to folly. I remember the slogans, the sly challenges: Any fool can
cut a drama, but it takes an artist to cut documentary. Or even more revealing:
editing is as dangerous and difficult as brain surgery, but noone gives
you the manual. You have to write it yourself.
All of which are ways to address the big question: that in a culture addicted
to visuality, how to subvert that addiction. Man no longer lives, he only
looks. Written by Marx. To be quoted by Debord. How to subvert the debilitating
addiction to visuality? One way is to deny it, to cheapen it, to blacken
it. The worn-out tactics of sixties avant-gardism proposes to hijack it.
To wrench it out of context. The romantic tradition is to assert vision
over and above visuality, the route of the painter/mystic. But film is
seductive. Naturalistic. In which case: seduction of what? What nature?
Whose nature?
My own work has been informed not so much by any contemporary theory,
as by one sentence in Walter Benjamin, that I read while I was on the
course. That modern man, whomever, has a legitimate right to be reproduced
in this medium. And it is amazing to me that people from quite other cultures,
and quite other economic circumstances, can immediately recognise the
dignity of film. That they know what they are doing when they assert their
legitimate right. And it is not entered into naively. Everybody knows.
The Scottish Film School demystified film for me - it demystified money,
production, narrative structure, professionalism... everything. The demystification
is necessary, as well as the accelerated learning experience. But these
are pointless without a certain intuitive respect, a sense of the infinite
potential of people, and above all the sense of mission, seriousness,
work hitherto unattempted in film. The social experience, and the ethos.
These are the secret treasures of that experience, and what equipped me
for the projects I have undertaken in a more or less entirely hostile,
specialised and burocratic environment.
So I cannot believe that the fictional school was an illusion, but the
special blend of energies that allowed things to synthesise at that moment,
the fertile chaos, the frayed edges, the absence of fixed rules, the vortex,
the dynamic idea, the mission… they no longer exist. And the tragedy
of the film school, the Scottish Film School, is that the destruction
of an idea involves the destruction of an individual. As I said when I
began, I was not paid to write this, nor to travel here. I do it out of
loyalty to a moment in Scottish film education, and to a particular man,
Jack Shea. What happened to the school and what happened to him, is a
scandal, a tragedy. Beware.
But all the same he is still the only person in the world who can persuade
me, once I have cut the negative, to recut it. And this is from that particular
re-cut negative.
Extract: The Ring
Angus Reid, Ljubljana, November 2003
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