The training of professional film workers in Europe

Abstract

WHAT the technical, artistic, and communicative qualities of the motion picture will be 20 years from now may well depend upon what is happening in a dozen or more schools and institutes in various parts of the world where hundreds of young film makers are being trained today. In the United States, colleges and universities have been slowly expanding their programs for the training of both professional and nonprofessional film makers,' although Hollywood has only recently become seriously interested in professional training of film workers at the university level.2 In Europe, state schools of cinema have been in operation for some years, and professional training in motion picture production has become a matter of national concern. The impetus for such training on the Continent came somewhat earlier than in our country for several reasons. First, while in the United States, pioneers like Griffith and Chaplin were making film history, Europeans like Pudovkin and Rotha were also writing about it, building a set of classic principles which could be transmitted, developing a "language of film" which could be effectively taught. While the entire energies of American film producers were going into production, a group of European film makers like L'Herbier in France, Eisenstein in the Soviet