Practice-Based Film Education in Lithuania: Main Actors and Sites of Struggle

Abstract

The aims of this chapter are to identify the main Lithuanian agents operating in the field of practice-oriented film education, and to analyze their position and positional shifts in the field of culture and art education in general from the perspective of recent history. I will regard the respective field as a “site of struggles” and “power,” as Pierre Bourdieu puts it, in which operating agents use different “activities and specific strategies”1 in order to transform or maintain traditional relations in a given area. In so doing, I hope to identify the key stages of practice-based film education in Lithuania and to reveal the importance of different forms of training or tutoring: those linked to a conservatoire-style model of the film school, and those driven by a search for alternatives and a commitment to “learning by doing.” I further argue that Lithuania is quite distinctive as a country when it comes to the “tolerance” it exhibits toward self-trained filmmakers and their ideas. There appears, I contend, to be a kind of intuitive appreciation of the sorts of “molecular” structures that Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have identified in a quite different context,2 and of the ways in which such structures contribute to a vital kind of creativity that can be crucial for a given milieu.