If one is in the business of teaching documentary film production, it is a very good idea to ensure one’s students avoid early editions of Bordwell and Thompson’s cinema studies textbook, Film Art. Suddenly (for instance, on page 128 of the 3rd edition (1997)), in the midst of a theoretical discussion of non-narrative films, these eminent scholars are pitching, by way of example of a documentary type they have identified, a movie:
Suppose we are setting out to make a film about our local grocery store … We could go through the store and film each portion, to show what sort of things the store contains. We might show the meat section, the produce section, the checkout counters, and other categories within the store. (1997: 128)
And, if they were your production students presenting your class with such a film, you would have to give them a ‘C’ – or worse.
What is awry here is that this procedure does not suggest a documentary. It suggests rushes and to be fair to them the passage has been dropped in later editions. (They also, however, suggested a film about butterflies which ‘might use scientific groupings, showing one type of butterfly and giving information about its habits, then showing another with more information, and so on’. This collection of rushes, willfully ignoring the compelling narrative of pupae to flying insect, they are still pitching (2004:123). ‘C’ again, I’m afraid.)
Pregnant though this example from Film Art is for those who would dismiss the usefulness of film theoreticians to the business of practice teaching, this does not mean that there is consistently nothing in theory of value to the production class. After all, the very possibility that theory must be inevitably irrelevant to practice is, pace Film Art’s documentary proposals, an Anglo-Saxon absurdity – a riff on the ‘those who can do, those who can’t teach’ crassness than which little is as stupid. The Bordwell-Thompson grocery store and butterfly films are rare examples of high theoreticians essaying what amounts to practical guidance rather than the usual analysis of existing texts. This later work, however, is crucial to our understanding and, it must be said, it has few practitioners (as it were) as acute and astute as Thomson and Bordwell. Analysis necessarily informs the sensibilities and responses of students and practice teachers without due consideration of which they would be potentially doomed to live the unexamined creative life. Of course, this is self-evident. Without analysis we are compelled to repeat history as farce, reinvent the wheel, be Groundhog Day prisoners.
The clue to the hostility to theory often (and vehemently) asserted by practice teachers lies in the definition of the very word. In English, one meaning of ‘theory’ is that it is the extraction from practice of a body of ‘rules, ideas and principles and techniques that applies to a particular subject’ (to quote the OED); and these (the obvious result of analysis) are distinct from the practice itself. Alternatively, a second meaning has it that ‘theory’ can be divorced from practice and relates to abstract thought or contemplation. (There are other less pertinent meanings but in this context these will suffice to illustrate how the supposed theory/practice chasm in Anglophone film education arises.) What practitioners (and those who teach practice) commonly mean by ‘theory’, it would seem, is only the later second meaning – the abstract stuff which is allegedly such anathema to the practical Anglo-Saxon mind. Continental Europeans seem less inhibited with their auteurisme and dogmes; but in Anglophone realms theory that can be abstracted from practice, the first meaning, is somehow not considered ‘theory’ at all.
Take Alan Rosenthal, as crucial a pioneer of documentary film studies as anybody and, I must confess, a colleague with whom I have had the honour of making a documentary or two. Rosenthal, an Oxford and Stanford graduate with more than three decades of filmmaking and sixty titles to his credit, has consistently maintained his hostility to what he thinks of as ‘theory’ even as he has, with book after book, contributed to it – or at least to its unacknowledged first meaning.
His handbook, Writing, Directing and Producing the Documentary Film, for example, promises that: ‘Rather than dealing with theory… he tackles the day-to-day problems’ (1990, emphasis added). The negative part of this claim is more than a little fraudulent (and a good thing too, I would have thought, given the book comes from an academic press). This is primarily because Rosenthal is at pains to stress the importance of structuring material; and, both as a filmmaker and a teacher, he knows that without story – narrative -- documentaries will always work (to use a phrase of Dai Vaughan’s) ‘better in the head than on the screen’ (1983: 75). Bordwell and Thompson’s search for non-narrative documentaries, when it is not ignoring narratives in documentaries they claim have no such thing, cite films – Les Blank’s Gap-Toothed Women (1987), for example – which perfectly illustrate the truth of this. Such documentaries, even the best of them, Humphrey Jennings’ Words for Battle (1941) for example, always play ‘better in the head than on the screen’; and I know from my own experience of Rosenthal how well he understands this and how meticulous he is about avoiding non-narrative difficulties.
When working with him on a film about the Holocaust, in a footling (albeit unconscious) attempt to apply Film Art principles of the ‘categorical’ documentary, I decided that the way to deal with the history of Nazi persecution in the 1930s was by utilising the following format: medieval Anti-Semitism said ‘you cannot live amongst us as Jews’; modern ‘political’ Anti-Semitism argued ‘you cannot live amongst us’; the Nazis said, ‘Jews, you cannot live’. This led me to produce a draft script in which an account of the development of Nazi Anti-Semitic legislation (‘you cannot live amongst us’) starts with the Nuremburg Decrees, 1935. These were therefore placed in a draft script before the start of the ‘you cannot live’ phase, dated to the establishment of the first concentration camp, Dachau, 1933. Alan was quick to point out that the script, however elegantly obedient to these categories, deeply offended the chronological imperative of the narrative. 1935 has to come after 1933 if the audience is not, as it were, to loose the plot. This quite proper insistence on chronology rather than clever, clever ‘categories’ was of course exactly the result of his extracting from his experience of creating effective communications (‘practice’) a specific theory of how to do this when making history documentaries.
Of course, he did not see it this way. In rejecting my draft, Rosenthal did not bother with any of the extensive theoretical work on narratology. Barthian hermeneutics, Genetttean iterations or Seymour Chatman’s chrono-logic and so forth were not played into the argument. He was merely being ‘practical’; but what he presented as (de facto) experiential is theoretically grounded all the same. Rosenthal has a theory, whether he calls it that or not. When the blurb on the latest edition of his handbook states that he stresses ‘story telling’ (2008) (while, by the way, abandoning that rather silly claim to be eschewing theory), it is merely acknowledging this fact. All practice-based teaching of, exactly, writing, directing and producing any film is necessarily theory-based in the sense I am suggesting the word must be used.
And so what is more useful – especially to those (students, say) who lack the decades of practice of a Rosenthal? Just being told that experience, which must be obeyed, says ‘do this’; and that those (film studies theoreticians) whose experience is merely of watching the screen have nothing to say on the matter? Or, instead, being taken through theory-based analysis which offers reasons for obedience but at the same time lays a foundation of insight that allows for rules to be questioned and, indeed, broken? This choice is, to use a theoretical term, a ‘no-brainer’.
I would argue the need for theory does not just apply to documentary nor just to narratology. All of theory (even ‘post-theory’ musings) can be of value to all of film production teaching. It does, however, need integration into the practice strand of a programme and, certainly at university level, this melding can be hard to come by.
First there is the hostility between the two camps most vividly expressed, if the faculty is large enough, in different departments. The film production teaching staff are often at odds with the film studies professors or visa versa. The theory lot can be merely a service department providing ‘Film 101’ and a bit here and a bit there to satisfy the overall institutional requirements of traditional pedagogy – book-based learning delivered in lectures and seminars and assessed via papers and exams. The only gesture to the specificity of the subject is the augmentation of the reading list with screenings.
The theory people can regard the practice teachers dismissively as (to use a term once current at one institution where I have laboured) ‘woodworkers’. For a practice teacher, making one’s way in the academy on the basis of one’s professional qualifications alone is still hard. Continuing to work as a media professional can count for little. This is in contrast, it can be noted, to the acceptance, as legitimate academic enterprise, of other artistic performance of all kinds, say in music as well as the plastic arts.
In more traditional universities, student practice is only grudgingly admitted as assessable. One finds extraordinary cavortings – a course on film sound which is forced to require written descriptions of hypothetical soundscapes when what should be (and easily could be) created and assessed are the soundscapes themselves. In another, final projects, which were made but deemed unsuitable for assessment, had to be outlined on paper under exam conditions. The university in question had regulations which demanded no less. And this is also true of doctoral work. The solution to the endless debate around allowing ‘practice-based’ theses in the arts is easily solved. Just demand 100,000 written words of commentary (preferably with lots of footnotes as well) and the institution can pride itself on its academic adventurousness.
For practice teachers caught in such a position of enforced inferiority, a defensive hostility is a quite natural and, in my view, excusable reaction. After all, why are institutions hosting production courses at all? Why are they hiring people (scandalously unacademic!!) whose only value is the small matter of them knowing how to teach practice on the basis of their own experience? The answer, obviously, is student demand. The hypocrisy of the universities is self-evident; but this doesn’t make things any easier to bear. The despised practitioner is made not more happy with her lot knowing that without her efforts the finances of the university’s media education operation (and the ‘areas studies’ department in which it is often embedded) would collapse. The institution, also understanding this, can be nevertheless ever more adamant that insistence on its traditional ways and ‘standards’ is justified.
So is the answer then the free-standing film academy? Well, not entirely. These can often seem to be intent on twisting the concept of the conservatory into a trade school so firmly do they turn their face from offering anything other than practical training. They are aided in this by the fact that, when Anglo-Saxon practitioners within the film industry come up with something recognisably theoretical, it is likely to be nonsense. Take the shibboleth of ‘three-act structure’, as artificial a construct as any produced by scholarly theorising. It is clearly a theory, a paradigm supposedly explaining how mainstream narrative films are structured. It is offered up with a promise that utilising the formula will produce the grail of saleable commercial scripts (for example, Syd Field’s Screenplay: The foundations of screenwriting (2005) – ‘a bible of the trade’). Nevertheless, even praying in Aristotle does not alter the fact that this is to the analysis of narrative what flat-earthism is to astronomy. It does not begin to explain the structure of even Hollywood movies. The ‘three-act’ ‘trade’ gurus have extracted a theory from practice but having done so in so simple minded a fashion as to make their conclusion about as useful in helping a production student understand story-telling as Ptolemaic astronomy is. Collectively, Barthes, Genette and the other narratologists simply do an incomparably better job.
Film students, like their practice teachers, often simply do not want to know. They can be eager to support their instructor’s prejudices against film studies and not just simply because they disdain traditional academy learning requirements. They are, after all, also bolstered by that nineteenth-century rhetoric about art which makes them, to use Coleridge’s term, a ‘clerisy’ wherein artists are deemed to be ‘the antenna of the race’; or rather, they are novices to that clerisy. Although the privileging of art as the ‘the best that has been thought and said in the world’ does not, obviously, preclude the legitimacy of training, it can suggest that creativity springs fully-formed from the students’ mind and this can be stifled by externally imposed more formal knowledge. It is as if there is an assumption that the analysis of creativity somehow destroys it. Intuition trumps inference. Sustained by this vision, film students can be so intent on their own creativity that they have little time and less patience with any distractions from this – even, say, the straightforward screenings of the work of others, much less the more cerebral considerations of what others have done before. Far from avoiding reinventing the wheel, reinvention is what too many of them aspire to (and, indeed, is the only thing with which they are at ease). This is true of those within the university and is possibly even truer within the free-standing film conservatory
This, then, is the environment of film production teaching. The practitioners pour scorn on the scholars and hold their analyses to be incomprehensible irrelevances. The academy barely tolerates practitioners and thinks their more abstract musings are inadequate inanities. Students, ‘great artists’ in the making, are in the middle. What, as the man once said, is to be done?
Well, first, I suppose, the entire Anglo-Saxon structure of the theory/practice divide needs to be acknowledged for the debilitating distraction that is. This does not mean, of course, the wholesale acceptance of the entire corpus of film studies. One is more than entitled to pick-and-choose, accepting one opinion or approach while rejecting another. After all this is what the scholars themselves do, sometimes with venom. Scholarship is not static and, indeed, its dynamism is often seen as a species of faddism, with one paradigm or focus (replete with its own arcane neologisms) succeeding another in popularity. Confronted by, say, post-post-modernism it is easy to mock; but so to do is to ignore what in the academically fashionable (or, indeed, in the previously fashionable) might be useful for the teaching of practice.
The choice of any particular theory, after its fundamental efficacy is determined, obviously depends on the practice teachers’ own predilections. Psychologically-based theoretical approaches might be more acceptable to some than are formalist ones; and visa-versa. Apart from history, which it is very hard to see as anything other than foundational, variety is to be welcomed.
Beyond the teachers’ preferences, though, there is the need to offer theory which makes sense to a particular student and a particular project. While not accepting that intuition backed by only an unexamined experience of the screen will liberate a student’s creativity, nevertheless it must be acknowledged that different students with different projects will find one set of theoretical insights of greater value than another. The instructor’s theoretical preferences should take second place to the student’s particular needs. With film production, as with all teaching of creativity, the student, not that unusually, can bring to the table material of a highly personal nature. Perhaps it is especially true of documentary, where the possibility of aping mainstream genres is attenuated, but projects so closely related to personal circumstance that dealing with it on film begins to look like therapy is not unknown (I recall a conversation with the Polish director Kristof Zanussi discussing a film-school at which we had both taught. ‘Tell me, Brian’, he said, ‘in America, psychiatrists are paid more than film professors, no?’ I concurred that I believed that this was so. ‘Next time I go there,’ he went on, ‘I ask to be paid as psychiatrist!!).
The instructor, of course, is the prism through which the student comes to theory but, and this is completely utopian, it would be ideal if the student encountered only those theories which worked for them. In other words, aside from a requirement to experience the history and range of the cinema, rather than a wadge of courses covering, more or less, all the rest of film studies, the student, guided by the instructor, should also be free to pick-and-choose what matters to her or him. And (this is the utopian bit) that alone should be what they are examined on.
This, though, is not entirely impossible but it does involve redesigning the curriculum or (as is far more viable) redesigning the curriculum but not really telling anybody one has done so. The clue is to make the sequence of practica the backbone of the course and to introduce theory as and when needed. The paper trail can show discrete modules on this or that theory but the content of those modules (and their assessment regimes) are folded into the practice sessions. In an informal sense this is far from uncommon. Practitioners sensitive to theory are always citing it in connection with the assign-and-critique process of production teaching. My experience suggests that in the course of working through a selection of projects with a class it is not very often that one finds oneself thinking of a theoretical concept one has not addressed. (This also applies, of course, to more practical but still abstract matters such as relevant media law). It is a question of doing this integration in a systematic way; and in the belief that there are few things of more practical use to a student filmmaker than a pertinent theory.
PS: All the above has, heaven forefend, nothing to do with epistemology.
Bordwell, D. AND K. Thompson (2004 [1997]) Film Art. New York: McGraw Hill.
Field, S. (2005) Screenplay:The Foundations of Screenwriting. New York: Delta Trade Paperback.
Rosenthal, A. (2002 [1990]) Writing, Directing and Producing Documentary Films and Videos. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Vaughan, D. (1983) ‘Portrait of An Invisible Man: The Working Life of Stewart McAllister, Film Editor’. London: BFI.
FILMOGRAPHY
Gap-Toothed Women (1987) Directed by Les Blank [Video]. Amazon: Flower Films.
Words for Battle (1941) Directed by Humphrey Jennings [DVD]. Amazon: Image Entertainment.