The Education of the Filmmaker in Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas

M. Hjort

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137032683
• eBook ISBN: 9781137032690
• Topic: Éducation
• Subtopic: Art général

Using case studies from Nigeria, Qatar, the United States, the West Indies, and others, the contributors to this volume examine aspects such as audience response, film education for children, and the impact on crime in the various studios, clubs, film festivals, NGOs, peripatetic workshops, and alternative film schools where filmmaking is taught.

Part I

Africa

1

Audience Response in Film Education

Anton Basson, Keyan Tomaselli, and Gerda Dullaart

In this chapter we discuss a contemporary private initiative, so as to illustrate industry-oriented and audience-oriented film education. The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance, trading as AFDA, was established in 1994, the first year of democracy in South Africa. We focus on how AFDA places entertainment value at the center of its curriculum, and how this value is theorized, applied, and achieved, within the context of South Africa’s film industry and history.

The film industry in South Africa offers little secure salaried employment.¹ Skilled filmmakers provide a service industry for international movies and commercials shot on South African soil. They also work in the production of South African feature films, TV, music videos, and commercials. Graduates thus enter a seasonal and freelance industry where entrepreneurship and responsiveness to change are coping strategies for a nation and industry in transition. Therefore this chapter also looks at AFDA values and at how attitudinal and networking skills are taught alongside creative and craft skills to enable graduates to navigate the changing industry and the transition from film school to work. As globalizing processes have made collaboration possible, the chapter touches on relevant curricular responses.

Film Education: Early History

Although film technology came to South Africa as early as 1895 and feature films were produced in the 1910s, film and TV education was a latecomer to South Africa, just as TV broadcast was introduced only in 1974 and importing TV technology was prohibited up to 1972.² The delay was due to the apartheid state’s ideological suspicion of the medium. Tertiary education institutions responded to TV by introducing film and TV modules, in mostly small-scale ways, from the mid-1970s.

The highly capitalized Pretoria Technikon Film School, established in 1964, was the single exception.³ This school then operated in a “Whites Only” environment. Its student productions, unlike their counterparts from other universities, were largely apolitical, exploring universal themes and formats.⁴ Anti-apartheid English-language liberal and left-wing university courses using super 8, 16mm, and video, tended to promote critical analysis, where other universities adopted commercial models. Most taught classical film theories,⁵ cinema literacy,⁶ media critique,⁷ and film as art in relation to production practices.⁸ Political economy studies underpinned sociological approaches.⁹

Some lecturers enunciated critical approaches within the specific production context that was then a new media environment.¹⁰ This environment was characterized by racially restrictive job, exhibition, and capital markets. A number of lecturers drew on radical aesthetics and production practices to equip their mainly white students with approaches enabling a critique of apartheid.¹¹ Some early discussions on the paucity of appropriate funding models for production courses were published,¹² while one briefly discussed the interrelation between technical expertise and film theory.¹³

The end of apartheid and the dawn of a tentative democracy offered freedom and opportunities not previously possible. One of the flaws in apartheid had been the lack of a viable internal market, as blacks were largely excluded through class repression. In feature film production, the lack of a viable white cinema-going audience had been compensated for by state subsidies for qualifying films.¹⁴ The late introduction of TV had stunted employment opportunities for graduates though the feature film industry had performed relatively well up to the late 1980s.¹⁵ However, during the last 16 years of apartheid, TV directors and scriptwriters had forged significant aesthetic and critical contributions on the growing number of free-to-air TV channels developed by the state-controlled SA Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). While directors usually took audiences into account, their agendas were more likely ideological—opposing, supporting, ignoring, or critiquing apartheid.

The defeat of apartheid brought a number of new factors into play with regard to TV production. First was artistic freedom, which had previously been muted in film (stage drama was always an exception), though the critical films of Ross Devenish and Athol Fugard, and the early corpus of Jans Rautenbach stand out. Second was the revitalization of a moribund economy from late 1974 onwards, which opened up new business opportunities linked to South Africa’s inclusion in global trade agreements such as GATT (with import duties on electronic goods being lifted). Film industry infrastructure developed in the late 1980s when a slew of high-budget international feature films took advantage of the last gasps of the state subsidy. This trend continued into the 2010s, but was also susceptible to macro-economic fluxes. In 2006, for instance, 80 percent of the commercials made in the Western Cape, had international clients.¹⁶ A service sector, however, does not grow an industry.¹⁷

Third was the development of a commercially owned station, M-Net, in 1984. Satellite TV was introduced following the launch of the PAS 4 satellite in 1996, which connected South Africans to global networks. This also enabled South Africa to open up hundreds of satellite channels across Africa via Direct Service TV (DStv). DStv has a number of channels dedicated to African and South African programming.

The opportunities for film, and especially video, in this newly reregulated and rapidly expanding broadcast environment, aided by the invention of cheap but sophisticated cameras and production technology, were seized by the growing production and education sectors. Complementing universities from the 1990s are a number of prominent private schools such as Open Window, CityVarsity, AFDA, Big Fish, and other smaller outfits, each with its own signature. AFDA’s signature is unique in its emphasis on collective filmmaking, in which each key crew member is a respected creative, not just a technician charged with executing the vision of the director. According to Martin P. Botha, AFDA executive chairman Garth Holmes stated in 2004 that auteurism had died with the 1960s French new wave.¹⁸ AFDA’s strong emphasis on collaborative learning is inspired by the ubuntu philosophy expressed in many African languages, for instance the Sesotho “muntu umuntu babantu”—I am a person through other persons. Many AFDA shorts, Botha continues,¹⁹ reveal a distinctive “AFDA brand” almost like in the old Hollywood studio system. CityVarsity and the University of Cape Town encourage the nurturing of directorial voices. Community-based film training such as Community Video Education Trust focuses on community video production, always struggling to survive financially.²⁰ In the following years, the film training landscape became one of constant change, as South African higher education continued its transformation project.

Little else has been published on production courses in the post-apartheid era,²¹ though some commentaries on student films and videos are available.²² These discuss post-apartheid ideological considerations and aesthetic choices made by students who often have a keen sense of technique but who tend to lack an historical film imagination and knowledge, and who often trade on superficial/literal iconography. Botha spotlights new graduates of some newly established film schools.²³ These graduates, he observed, exuded more originality in short films than occurred in an entire decade of filmmaking in the 1970s. Excellent guides like Leon Van Nierop now bring aspects of African and South African cinema to bear on film studies.²⁴

As state subsidies or grants do not support filmmakers in South Africa today, AFDA realizes that the success of its graduates is linked to meeting (or exceeding) the expectations of both industry and target audiences. Senior students at AFDA therefore do internships or have professional mentors to ensure their research projects are applicable to the film industry’s needs, and participate in master classes with top industry representatives. As the majority of South Africans continue to live in poverty, training for economic viability is paramount for AFDA. A national research and development project is under way regarding competitive advantages of South African cities in the film industry, as well as the feasibility of bringing small container-based cinemas to informal settlements, creating audiences and leisure spaces where currently there are none.²⁵ Such audience development will increase awareness of making films for entertainment. A successful South African film producer, David Wicht, highlights the need for training for entertainment:

[We need] to come up with films that the public will pay good money to see. We need to build up confidence not only with investors, but with the cinema going public as well. Mostly they stay away to avoid the “cringe factor.” Foreign buyers just roll their eyes at the memory of the box office death of the worthy but dreary anti-apartheid films that have been made about us (albeit by foreign filmmakers.) We need to grasp the fact that we’re in the entertainment business, not sociology, and that film is an expensive medium that cannot serve the whims of a minority audience.²⁶

Taking up this task of training and development, AFDA’s pedagogy uses a work-integrated approach, fusing a safe learning environment with exposure to audiences and industry, while making it necessary for students to work together and forge long-term partnerships for entrepreneurial efforts in the industry.

Teaching Film Production for the Market: Work-Integrated Learning

Assessments are done by means of film, video, and multi-camera television productions in a simulated work environment. At exit level, assessment is inter alia done by a paying audience comprising lay members of the public, specifically of the target audience of the graduation film, and not just by academics, critics, and filmmakers. The curriculum embraces the notions of entertainment value and the creation of products for target markets. As AFDA CEO Bata Passchier puts it: “A discipline has no value outside of a production. Discipline standards can only be assessed within the context of a production. Production standards can only be assessed by a target market.”²⁷

This assessment framework, which aims to make graduates immediately employable or self-employable, incorporates both an academic and an ideological position since AFDA’s mission statement includes its aim to contribute to the development of the local film industry and to nation building. In this context, nation building is an uncynical, constructive, diverse, and inclusive process, contributing significantly to sociopolitical and economic healing. Making films for one’s self is replaced by AFDA’s mission to get to know our new nation, to nurture young filmmakers who continuously construct a nation, as “a strategy to create popular cinema for the people, by the people.”²⁸ Where AFDA offers a commercial and audience-led imperative, Botha argues for diversity of theme, not just “getting buttocks on seats.”²⁹ Self-expression means enabling voices silenced during apartheid: blacks, women, gays, and lesbians. This a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: More than Film School—Why the Full Spectrum ofPractice-Based Film Education Warrants Attention
• Part I: Africa
• Part II: The Middle East
• Part III: The Americas
• Notes on Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index