Editorial: Welcome to the Film Education Journal (original) (raw)
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Peer review This article has been peer-reviewed through the journal's standard double-anonymous peer review, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.
Perspectives: A Dialogue Upon the Question of Value in Film Education
Film Education Journal, 2019
The question of aesthetic value remains a source of tension within diverse film education environments. While film-makers and audiences have visceral experiences of the value of cinema, these experiences are troubled by a contemporary film studies that tends to adopt a more relativist approach, suggesting that the experience of value is reflective of sociocultural subjectivity. Speaking from two different perspectives, Alan Bernstein and Andrew Burn explore the role of value in film education, and film culture more widely, in 2019. While Bernstein argues for a reinstatement of value as a fundamental aspect of how film is experienced and understood in educational contexts and beyond, Burn contextualizes questions of value within a wider framework of semiotic and aesthetic theory, arguing for a multimodal approach that takes into account the multifaceted nature of film.
Video Essays: Curating and Transforming Film Education through Artistic Research
International Journal of Film and Media Arts Vol. 5 No. 2 (2020): GEECT Special Issue: Mapping Artistic Research in Film , 2020
This article seeks to foster reflection on film pedagogy and research, encouraging academics to engage in artistic research and teaching methods. It specifically focuses on the video essay as a teaching and learning method, one that requires the willingness to take risks, but also, that can lead to a transformative experience in a still hierarchical educational system. The increasing openness to video essays in film journals shows an awareness of the way in which artistic research may contribute to decolonise academia. The practice of video essays leads to an inclusive, collaborative and polyphonic research environment, which dismantles the idea of a film canon. It contests the privileged position of the written ‘text’, when this is just understood as the written word. It also contributes to blurring the distance between the status of students and that of researchers. It invites them to assimilate work practices, curating and filmmaking, which sometimes happen simultaneously, curating through filmmaking. This article shares the example of the design of the video essay as a creative assessment method for two film modules in the MA Global Cinemas and the BA Creative Arts at SOAS, University of London. It stresses the importance of connecting research, practice and teaching, that is, the recursive study of film through film. It suggests that through making video essays class members become co-curators of the course, where learning is a multi-directional and collaborative experience.
New Perspectives on Teaching Film Education. 2015.
Martin, S. & Eckert, L. (2015). New Perspectives on Teaching Film Education, In : Conference Proceedings. The Future of Education, Hrsg. Pixel, Liberia universitaria edizioni, Padua (Italien)., 2015
2015 New Persepectives on Teaching Film Education | mit Lena Eckert | Conference Proceedings. The Future of Education | Libreria universitaria edizioni | Padua Our contribution investigates the question of how to teach film to students, teachers, educators, and others. More specifically: How can one enable people with different professional backgrounds and without prior training to educate children about film? To show children what is special about perceiving films, how films function, how they are made, and how films change views about the world?
A Pedagogy of Cinema is the first book to apply Deleuze's concept of cinema to the pedagogic context. Cinema is opened up by this action from the straightforward educative analysis of film, to the systematic unfolding of image. A Pedagogy of Cinema explores what it means to engender cinema-thinking from image. This book does not overlay images from films with an educational approach to them, but looks to the images themselves to produce philosophy. This approach to utilising image in education is wholly new, and has the potential to transform classroom practice with respect to teaching and learning about cinema. The authors have carefully chosen specific examples of images to illustrate such transformational processes, and have fitted them into in depth analysis that is derived from the images. The result is a combination of image and text that advances the field of cinema study for and in education with a philosophical intent. " This outstanding new book asks a vital question for our time. How can we educate effectively in a digitalized, corporatized, Orwellian-surveillance-controlled, globalized world? This question is equally a challenge asked of our ability to think outside of the limiting parameters of the control society, and the forces which daily propel us ever-quicker towards worldwide homogenization. With great lucidity, Cole and Bradley offer us profound hope in Gilles Deleuze's increasingly popular notion of 'cine-thinking'. They explore and explain the potential that this sophisticated idea holds for learning, in an easy going and accessible way, and with a range of fantastic films: from 'Suspiria' and 'Performance' through to 'Under the Skin' and 'Snowpiercer'. This extremely engaging and compelling text is likely to enliven scholars and students everywhere. " – David Martin-Jones, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, UK
On the Edge Practice Reflections on filmmaking pedagogy in the age of the Creative Industries 1
This paper aims to reflect on film practice pedagogy and students' political agency, drawing on our experience of teaching for nearly a decade on the BA (Hons) Film Production course at the University of Portsmouth, as well as course leading and shaping curriculum for a period. The course at the University of Portsmouth is in many ways indicative of the wider context of filmmaking education in the UK. Its development could be seen as a direct corollary of the educational and cultural agenda and policies ushered in by the New Labour government in the early 2000s. This agenda was informed by an approach to Higher Education that placed it at the service of the economy and industry. HE institutions were encouraged to 'produce' graduates who would possess the skills to contribute to Britain's growing post-industrial knowledge economy (Duncan Petrie, 2012; Ramsey and White, 2015).Part of this agenda was the reframing of arts and media within an economic context, resulting in a terminology shift that labelled them as 'cultural industries' and later 'creative industries'. The new agenda of the Creative Industries was: " signalling a new and apparently seamless integration of culture and the market " (Duncan Petrie, 2012: 364.), entailing a realignment of the British film industry as a hub of skills and services catering for the global film market, and a new strategy for filmmaking education, led by the UK Film Council and Creative Skillset: an organization initially set up in the early 1990s to coordinate training across the film and television industries.The new film education strategy emphasized vocational training, skills development and links with the industry, noting bluntly that – " there is a clear distinction to be made between academic studies and vocational provision " (SkillSet/UK Film Council 2013: 17). As Petrie puts it, conspicuously absent from this agenda " is an acknowledgment, let alone discussion, of the importance of critical thinking to the propagation of creative, innovative, vibrant and socially relevant film and television production " (2012: 369).