The Education of the Filmmaker in Europe, Australia, and Asia

M. Hjort

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230341432
• eBook ISBN: 9781137070388
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

Practice-based film education is a crucial element in the institutional landscape of film. This book fills the gap in understanding practice-based film scholarship, focusing on Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Part I

Europe

1

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

Renata Šukaitytė

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 Félix 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.

The History of Film Education and Film Culture in Lithuania

In Lithuania, as in other Baltic Republics, professional practice-oriented film education is relatively young, as is the study of the relevant practices by academics. This situation is caused by such factors as a long period of Soviet control, during which the film sector (including policy, film education, and distribution) was subject to institutional centralization; and the contraction of the local film industry in the years of political and economic transition, when the country had to make new laws and establish new institutions and networks. During this period of transition, film, quite simply, was not on the government’s list of priorities. The Lithuanian film directors and cinematographers who started and developed their careers during the Soviet period were largely trained at the State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow. The VGIK was not only a leading film school; for a long time it was the only available state film school in the entire Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Moreover, the school was seen as attractive, inasmuch as the young professionals who graduated from it were guaranteed a job. As David A. Cook puts it, “filmmakers were trained in their specialty at the VGIK in Moscow and then sent out to work in one of the twenty regional or specialized studios [ . . . ].”³

Despite the prevailing prestige of the VGIK, opinions on the overall quality of the teaching at the School varied inasmuch as talented filmmakers and teachers but also ideological “masters” were entrusted with the task of educating a new generation of Soviet filmmakers. Controversy about this issue is regularly mentioned in memoirs by, and interviews with, Lithuanian graduates of the VGIK. Auteurs such as Vytautas Žalakevičius, Gytis Lukšas, Šarūnas Bartas, and others recall the difficulties they faced when submitting their diploma films, which were considered irrelevant to the ideological program of the School. Even in the late 1980s Šarūnas Bartas found it necessary to switch his specialization from documentary film directing to fiction film direction for similar reasons. Probably because of this incident, during the meeting with students at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre on April 15, 2012, he responded with considerable reserve to a question about the importance of the VGIK in his life and professional career. His succinct response was as follows: “It was the only available school at that time, and so it couldn’t be compared to any other film school. If you wanted to be qualified to work in the professional film industry, and to be seen as credible, you simply had to have a VGIK diploma. It’s as simple as that.”

That the VGIK has played a crucial role in Lithuania is, however, undeniable. Over a period of 12 years (1953–1965) highly talented and intelligent Lithuanian film directors such as Vytautas Žalakevičius, Marijonas Giedrys, Almantas Grikevičius, and Raimondas Vabalas graduated from the School, as did the cinematographer Jonas Gricius. These names are important ones, for they identify figures who are considered the founders and framers of the so-called “Lithuanian poetic cinema,” which encompasses films such as Laiptai į dangų (Stairway to Heaven; dir. R. Vabalas, 1966), Niekas nenorėjo mirti (Nobody Wanted to Die; dir. V. Žalakevičius, 1965), Jausmai (Feelings; dir. A. Dausa and A. Araminas, 1968), Vyrų vasara (Men’s Summer; dir. M. Giedrys, 1970), and many others. At the same time, it is important to emphasize that there were other professionals as well, people who had found an alternative route into filmmaking. These were the Lithuanian Film Studio filmmakers, the most talented and influential “artisans,” who succeeded in achieving both national and international recognition. I have in mind here such film directors as Arūnas Žebriūnas (a graduate of the Vilnius Art Institute, who after several years of work at the Lithuanian Film Studio finally attended a short film scriptwriting and directing course at the VGIK in 1962), Algirdas Araminas (a studio-trained cinematographer and film director), Henrikas Šablevičius (a theater actor trained at the Lithuanian Drama Theater Studio), as well as the cinematographer Algimantas Mockus (a self-trained photographer and a studio-trained cinematographer).⁴ Still, the VGIK was crucial in forming the generations of Lithuanian film professionals who emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The academic culture of the VGIK had a role to play in this regard, thanks to professors Grigorij Aleksandrov, Lev Kuleshov, Mikhail Chiaureli, Aleksandra Chochlova, Igor Talankin, among others. Also, the School offered Soviet filmmakers (and student filmmakers) opportunities to meet their international colleagues, and thus to learn about the novelties of world cinema. Internationally celebrated filmmakers visited the VGIK, and while there, they offered master classes, screenings of their films, and so on.

In spite of differences having to do with modes and sites of training, the film professionals identified above all share a common cultural background, as well as the experience of dramatic historical events in Lithuania. All of them were born, and spent their early youth, in Lithuania before the Second World War— that is, they remember Lithuania as an independent country. They were born into families belonging to the local intelligentsia, which was closely linked to Kaunas, once the temporary capital of Lithuania. These film practitioners all witnessed and experienced the Second World War and their country’s occupation by the Soviets. They and their families were dramatically affected by these events. The fear of being killed or deported was constant, and there was the loss of friends and family members, of property, and of social status. It is not surprising that glimpses of these traumatic experiences and memories frequently re-emerge in their films. Moreover, as Vabalas indicated during an interview, the distinctiveness of Lithuania’s national cinema (much like the cinemas of Georgia, Latvia, and Estonia) originates in national art traditions, especially those of literature and the visual and performing arts.⁵ The theater of Juozas Miltinis has been of special importance, for his unique way of working with actors was very much appreciated not only by Lithuanian directors but also by other prominent Soviet film directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Semyon Aranovich, Aleksandr Zguridi, and Vladimir Basov, among others, who, recruited actors whom he had trained for leading roles in their films. Actors who deserve to be mentioned in this connection include Donatas Banionis, Bronius Babkauskas, Eugenija Šulgaitė, and Algimantas Masiulis.

The emergence of an auteur cinema (frequently referred to by film critics as a New Wave of Lithuanian cinema) in the 1960s is crucial. The distinctiveness of this cinema in the Soviet context has been accurately defined by the Lithuanian film critic Saulius Masaitis (a graduate of VGIK, with a specialization in film criticism): “First of all, this kind of filmmaking cannot be called Soviet. Talented Russian filmmakers of the time, sensing the ‘thaw,’ attempted to rethink their own revolutionary history without forgetting to praise their idols. Lithuania has never been the country of revolutions. Thus, young filmmakers chose a different path for their work than Russian directors.” Masaitis further noted that: “In the best films of the time, the issues of tragic divisions in post-war Lithuania when brothers killed each other transcended a concrete geopolitical level and reached a universal dimension. Another issue, namely that of survival without losing [one’s] conscience and basic human values, was raised in films associated with the so-called poetic Lithuanian filmmaking.”⁶ These films were usually seen as belonging to a category of “black Lithuanian film” by the State Committee for Cinematography officers (Goskino), because they lacked a positive attitude toward Soviet life and Soviet people. As such, they often risked being shelved or being allowed only internal distribution (i.e. only in the cinemas of the Soviet Republic of Lithuania).

Lithuanian films of the 1960s and 1970s bring to mind fables such as those of Aesop, for they are rich in allusions, metaphors, and citations. There is minimal verbal expression in these films, which are stylistically comparable to the works of French poetic realism, Italian neorealism, and the new waves of Central Europe. As already mentioned, the works of Raimondas Vabalas, Vytautas Žalakevičius, Almantas Grikevičius, Marijonas Giedrys, Gytis Lukšas, Algimantas Puipa, and Robertas Verba (all of whom belong to the “middle generation” of the VGIK graduates) cannot be seen as Soviet “products” entirely shaped by the VGIK. Besides, it is difficult to measure the impact of the Soviet film school on the relevant directors’ filmmaking, especially since their most acclaimed works were mainly produced through the Lithuanian Film Studio and with major participation from local artists (painters, composers, actors, writers, and photographers) who, for the most part, studied in the local academic milieu and nurtured their talents in the local cultural scene. Significant in terms of the national identity of these films is the fact that many contain political and cultural subtexts (expressed via songs, references to art works or historical/cultural figures) that appeal exclusively to Lithuanian audiences and are only intelligible to them. It is thus fair to say that the Lithuanian Film Studio mainly produced local stories aimed at local audiences, to paraphrase Graeme Turner’s concept of what counts as a national film industry. ⁷ During the Soviet period, Lithuanian national cinema was regarded as a form of cultural maintenance, as a means of countervailing the cultural dominance of foreign films originating from an environment that was stronger in industrial and ideological terms. In Lithuania, that stronger context was intimately connected with mainstream Soviet cinema.

It was clear to many Lithuanians that the establishment and development of local academic programs devoted to the training of local filmmakers was a matter of considerable importance, both politically and culturally. Consequently, in spite of the strong centralization of higher film education in the USSR, in 1970 the first TV directing students started degree studies at the Lithuanian State Conservatoire (currently the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre), in the Department of Acting, and under the guidance of the film and TV director Algimantas Galinis. This initiative was a reasonable and, indeed canny, tactical step toward the creation of a national film school, for the “small” cinematic genres—documentary and TV dramas produced for the republics’ TV screens—were mainly shaped for regional audiences, with no intention of having them reach the big screens of the USSR. There was, in other words, a well-justified, even “natural,” need for local “TV craftsmen.” Many saw this initiative as decisive for a Lithuanian national cinema, for, as Tom O’Regan aptly puts it, national cinema is “simultaneously an aesthetic and production movement, a critical technology, a civic project of state, an industrial strategy and an international project formed in response to the dominant international cinemas.”⁸

Not surprisingly, it was only after the restoration of independence in Lithuania, in the early 1990s, that the first film directing course and degree program in cinematography were launched at the Lithuanian State Conservatoire, with sound directing and film production being established and developed by internationally acclaimed Lithuanian film professionals: Vytautas Žalakevičius, a scriptwriter and film director, Jonas Gricius, a cinematographer, Algimantas Apanavičius, a sound director, and Robertas Urbonas, a film producer. Moreover, in 1993 the Film and TV Department and Educational Film and TV Studio were launched at the Lithuanian Academy o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• Part I: Europe
• Part II: Australia and Asia
• Notes On Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index