Abstract
This paper considers the extent to which European countries have distinctive models and approaches to film education, and the extent to which a supranational model of European film education might exist in competition with those national models. It considers where film education is positioned in relation to other subject fields and disciplines (literacy and media literacy); the role of the European Commission in promoting both European and national approaches to film education; and the potential of transnational film education programmes to move between national and supranational film education cultures. It draws on data collected for Screening Literacy, a survey of film education funded by the European MEDIA programme that was carried out in 2012.
Highlights
An initial look at Europe might support the idea that what could be characterized as different national film cultures exist
French film culture is preserved through decisive state intervention: a ban on screening film trailers and advertisements and ‘film-free’ Friday evenings on public service television, to encourage people to go to the cinema
On even a cursory consideration, the high valuation of film as art is in turn reflected in the character of French film education, which has an aesthetic focus on art cinema, a sense of the global and historical canvas of film, proudly celebrates ‘the cinema’ as the pinnacle of film culture, and is dirigiste and elitist in its canonizing of certain film-makers and films
Summary
An initial look at Europe might support the idea that what could be characterized as different national film cultures exist. These categories are slippery and overlapping: they mix symbolic meaning-making systems (film as a language and art form), with medium of communication (mobile devices, binary code, radio broadcast signals), with industrial sectors (advertising), while at the same time leaving out traditional meaning-making systems (speech, written language, music), even though these systems are completely integrated into contemporary digital media (one cannot use Twitter without being able to write, for example) When it comes to defining ‘media literacy’, these confusions are transferred into classrooms, cinemas, and education and cultural policy. A sceptic’s view of the value of ‘strategies’ might well be challenged by Northern Ireland as an example of a political–cultural–educational process that combined to create Europe’s arguably most robust and integrated film-education infrastructure
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