Film education as a multiplicity of practices: A media-ecological perspective

Alejandro Bachmann,Manuel Zahn

doi:10.18546/fej.01.1.07

Abstract

This paper explores a media-ecological perspective on film-education practice. Drawing from their own experiences of teaching film (at the Austrian Film Museum and the KurzFilmSchule, Hamburg) the authors challenge monolithic theories of film education, suggesting instead that film education practices are shaped by context, and are relational to the spaces and institutions in which they take place. While the paper takes as its core point of departure Alain Bergala's The Cinema Hypothesis, its intention is to shift the way we look at and reflect on film education from one text towards a multiplicity of practices. Finally, the essay considers the extent to which each of these regional theorizations are bound to their specific conditions of practice and the extent to which they still carry within them a shared understanding of the aims of film education.

Highlights

This situation might be one of the reasons that Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis has been welcomed so gratefully, first in 2002 in France, later in its translated version in German in 2006 and a subsequent English edition in 2016. (Other translations exist, but it is the German version edited by Bettina Henzler and Winfried Pauleit that first brought the book to our attention, and the English version edited by Alejandro Bachmann that forms our frame of reference.) To say that The Cinema Hypothesis does not articulate a systematic theory is not in any way an attempt to downplay its significance
What has been discussed in this paper is first and foremost, we believe, a confirmation of the ideas and concepts that Alain Bergala brings together in The Cinema Hypothesis
It is our assertion that the basic notion of the passeur, which is so central to Bergala’s thinking, should be expanded in relation to the ‘conditions of practice’ of different contexts of film education

Summary

Introduction

While the last few years have seen a steady increase of practical endeavours in the realm of film education in Europe – from cinematheques, film museums and other institutions offering film workshops and projects aimed at children and teenagers, to European projects bringing together various initiatives and creating networks (such as the Framework for Film Education in Europe) – there is hardly any extensive theory of film education, let alone a many-voiced discourse surrounding it. Alain Bergala’s The Cinema Hypothesis had been published in its German translation a year earlier, and was seminal in working out the new concept: the intention was to establish common ground (what one could call a mission statement of the institution) that was to emphasize the differences in taste, as well as in artistic and educational approach, of all the film educators involved. This entailed a translation of Bergala’s understanding of the passeur into a practical environment, and the expansion of the concept to a team of film educators. Short films and the experimental artistic practice of the film-makers involved become relevant in an educational sense in that they irritate established experiences and expectations of what film is, and at the same time provide conditions of practice allowing for processes of learning to take place in the film-educational approach discussed above

Conclusion

Notes on the contributors