Camera And Action, page 6
Incorporating film arts in the university system challenged the dominance of the traditional arts. Consequently, many campuses resisted the curricular needs of those who saw the importance of studying motion pictures as an art. One professor argued that university administrators "never thought much of film as a bona fide area of study. There were a few exceptions ... but in the main, film, much less film-making, had no substance, no discipline, no ... respectability."29 Yet, the boomers were the one generation that had grown up with movies more than books as a primary form of entertainment. Thus, for professors who had argued film's artistic function, the college audience provided experience and enthusiasm. Professor and AFFS Chair Jack C. Ellis was one of those who spoke about the possibility of developing serious screen programs on campuses. "We share a belief in the major role the Federation will play," he argued, "in the unprecedented stirrings now affecting the field of film study and appreciation - the increase in teaching of film at the higher and secondary levels."30 Filmmaker Arthur Mayer, who was already involved with screen education, argued that failing to implement cinema studies made no sense since film has played a "critical role ... in the development of ... students." To ignore the importance of creating film departments with "critical standards" as for "all of the arts" was simply shortsighted.31
A significant step toward sanctioning film as an academic pursuit occurred in the fall of 1964 at Lincoln Center in New York City. The national conference on film studies convened to review the American Council on Education's (ACE) six-month survey of screen education in secondary and higher education institutions. ACE, a conservative, nonprofit agency based in Washington, D.C., with 1300 college and university members, was the principal coordinating agency for higher education in the United States. To meet its goal of integrating film courses into campus curricula, the Council brought leading film scholars together. Their ultimate goal was "to have a film study course in every college or university in the country, and as soon thereafter as possible, in every high school in the country."32 By 1965, the government agreed to fund a film-study seminar at Fordham University with a follow-up conference at Dartmouth in Hanover.
Dartmouth students had a firm investment in film as an academic pursuit since the campus served as a distributing point for AFFS program material.33 Supported in part by a grant from the MPAA in cooperation with ACE, this three-day conference brought together approximately one hundred academics, film society members, government officials, and reviewers from the commercial market to organize the academic pursuit of film on campuses.34 The conference at Dartmouth signaled the beginning of film studies' permanent presence in colleges and universities. Participants confirmed that "the question of whether to teach motion pictures has been resolved affirmatively." The next step would be to decide "how." As Columbia professor George C. Stoney pointed out, "most of our education is concerned with words ... [but] who trains us to look?"35 New York University's Director for the Institute of Film and Television, Robert Saudek, predicted that his program would help reduce mediocrity in media. He firmly believed that film and television "will be changed only by well trained leaders who have both a respect for quality and a great deal of substantive knowledge." Considerable enthusiasm coming from students brought film studies programs to campuses "with unprecedented speed."36 Head of the Fordham Center for Communication, Father John Culkin believed that film was such an important art form that "students ought to be learning the fundamentals in grade school ... so that when they finally get to college, they have an opportunity to blossom out, without worrying about the mechanics."37 Developing film audiences may never have reached that depth, but in the midst of program exuberance, it appeared that it might.
Film arts as a part of the university structure was fostered through another channel, the University Film Producers Association. The organization's journal facilitated dialogues on film studies and advanced methodology.38 A 1965 brochure listed as one of its goals, "To improve the art of motion picture through the training of tomorrow's filmmakers and filmteachers." Believing that the university would provide a wellspring of capable filmmakers, teachers, and viewers, film academics discussed technical aspects of film production along with how film is seen and understood. Shirley Clarke, educator and founder of a film distributors' cooperative, advocated that the university should be a place to change Americans' attitudes toward film artists and help solve the problem of public perception of filmmakers merely as technicians. A competent program in her estimation would educate an audience "to support, and most important of all, to enjoy ... films that attempt to expand the medium," even experimental films. Film is "not merely escapism," she reminded. "Film is an art just as literature and music are arts: serious, deep, and searching." Developing a "broader basis for enjoyment" meant treating film and filmmaker as art and artist. Clarke recognized the value of the university to do so. As she contended, "University people occupy an important position as opinion makers in this country, so let's use it."39
Administrators and teachers, with the support of students, initiated fully-fledged curriculum change and department organization to professionalize film study. More important for the industry, film art took the viewer into the classroom where students were audiences "learn[ing] to experience film as a contemporary art, not as a classical one."40 As one educator claimed after the Dartmouth conference, "Perhaps no studies in American education are growing with such exuberance as film studies."41 Besides the well-equipped and developed film schools at USC, UCLA, and New York University, over a hundred other campuses offered courses and degrees in film by 1967. More than 35,000 students took over one thousand courses on campuses ranging from Alabama and Massachusetts to Texas and Utah.42 In time, university programs extended beyond aesthetics. To address the art form's impact on viewer experience, curricula included courses in the sociological and psychological study of the medium.
Professors trained graduate students who helped create film studies classes and production centers. Graduating teachers took film education to the secondary schools and in turn brought students to the college campuses as experienced undergraduate viewers. By 1969, approximately one hundred campuses added film courses, increasing campus programs by 84 percent.43 The Director of Educational Programs of the National Endowment for the Arts determined that enthusiasm for film on campuses had "never been more intense." Fervor came from those "articulate and intelligent students on the academic scene [who] not only know where the action is, they are [director's emphasis] the action."44 This new breed was not to be dismissed as rebels. They not only had a cause but were clearly on a mission.45
College-aged audiences soon expected entertainment films that had something to say. The "key word" for one university newspaper selection was involvement. "Any film which cannot emotionally involve the viewer and make a lasting impression on him can be considered a failure," the writer declared. Prospective audiences were "people who have newly discovered film, who care about it, and want to make it over; they are actively interacting with the flickering shadows at a new level of awareness and intensity." As associate editor for Time, Henry Bradford Darrach, Jr., described them: "The new generation of moviegoers believes that an educated man must be cinematic as well as literate."46 Series organizers tailored the "long range goals ... to help develop a more discriminating audience for all feature films."47
To professors and film society members alike, the sophisticated college student offered a prospective, ideal viewer. Whether a film-course dilettante or a cinema major, as University of Southern California professor David Stewart commented, a film student will "become a more informed film viewer, a better audience." Northwestern professor and AFFS Chairman of the Board Jack C. Ellis pointed to the growing sophistication in film taste on campus by the later 1960s. Students "follow film-makers," he remarked, "rather than stars, and are working out hagiographies of what are to me very minor saints and new canons of taste that challenge the rigidities of my own middle-aged aesthetic." Like other academics, Ellis saw himself as "increasingly in the business of educating future film audiences, critics, scholars and teachers." Instructors saw new film sophistication in young viewers.48 Thus, academics by the late sixties could not only assume student interest in film but also expect cinematic knowledge. To USC film professor Bernard R. Kantor, "Our colleges and universities are working hard trying to develop these audiences through their film study courses."49
While screen education required a classroom, a projector, and passionate followers, incorporating production training was a bit more complicated. For those campuses that were able to provide the space, funding, and equipment, filmmaking labs expanded and programs multiplied. With lighter technology, students literally went out into the world to film. Unlike a previous generation that created the world in a studio with machines nailed to the floor, young filmmakers and teachers saw the camera as the most valuable source of spontaneity. Visual verisimilitude - telling it like it is - connected filmmaking to contemporary beliefs about the value of artistic communication. Film functioned as a path to action for young filmmakers and viewers by virtue of its accessibility and its entrance into classrooms as a legitimate academic study and creative form of expression. Film professor Alvin Fiering of Boston University, for example, explained that "what distinguishes the [B.U.] film program ... is the emphasis placed upon personal expression." Personal filmmaking, professors hoped, would lead to diversity in film content.50 Similarly, at New York University, as Martin Scorsese remembered of his college experience, production "had to do with more personal filmmaking, with themes and subject matter that you felt more confident dealing with - about yourself, about the world you came from."5' Student filmmakers' enthusiasm to represent the world by taking their art to the streets did not go unnoticed by one policeman rushing to help a Northwestern student whose shirt was covered with blood. Stopping in "horror and anger," he soon discovered a student filmmaker had set up the entire scene. "Everybody's making a movie," he sighed and went on his way. Students at Northwestern filming for their film class could have been anywhere in America since programs turned to the moving picture as "artistic self-expression" mixed with social activism.52 Such passionate enchantment mesmerized filmmaker Stanley Kramer as he worked with college students. "All the young people who used to want to be novelists," he remarked, "now want to be filmmakers."53
The 1960s provided the social environment of activism that enhanced the development of film studies. Making/watching film gave the under-twenty-fives "a piece of the action, whether in running a university, the country, or the world."54 One free-standing film department, for example, developed out of the 1960s climate of advocacy. Students and professors "founded [the San Francisco State Cinema Department] amid the political activism and artistic experimentation of the 1960's."55 Others combined film studies with English and history departments. By and large, what had changed in campus film programs during that time was a shift in values and beliefs about the university. One Stanford professor pointed out that "students come here with the knowledge that this is not a prep school for the industry salt mine." Making room for artist experimentation instead of the purely industrial technician shifted emphasis in screen education. An Ohio State professor explained, "Our theory is that people have to have something to say before we can help them become film-makers. The technical aspect is not the real problem."56
The primary advantage of developing film as an academic pursuit during the studio break-up period and 1960s activism was that the university supplied the young filmmaker with an ever-expanding, politically conscious audience and a relatively safe way to experiment with consciousness raising. Universities held film festivals and arranged film conferences to showcase student-artists. This pioneering effort resulted in the first National Student Film Festival at UCLA in September 1965. Festivals increased spectator numbers at UCLA from a few hundred once a year to seven thousand twice a year.57 The Fordham University in February 1967 drew 1200 participants, both college age and younger from twenty-seven states. Student film festivals helped generate the possibility for film to offer a viable profession, whether as future professor or filmmaker. The university-sponsored festivals also provided a new service to the community, one a bit different from the 1940s' view of film for industry. Students working on projects exposed the university to "the community audience" as a place where film could be art and "endure as powerful experience." Students freely experimented and continually made "films that suggest the untapped potential of the medium."58
Yet, not all were encouraged by what they saw. University training to some was hardly more than "amateurs teaching amateurs to be amateurs."59 UCLA studio director Warren Hamilton claimed he had "never seen production more sordid, sour and sick than some of today's offerings."60 The posturing of youth as sophisticated filmmakers trained at the university "laboratory" did not guarantee a job as a professional anymore than a class in creative writing led directly to a publishing house. Just where their projects led was a question waiting to be answered. One student on the UCLA campus vowed to hide his degree when seeking a film career.61 It was all too evident that the university-degreed still had to earn their elders' respect. To industry traditionalists, making a film was not a matter of going to college when they could point to the unschooled Stanley Kubricks of the trade.62 At mid-decade, turning out sophisticated students "merely meant more well qualified students rejected by unions or studios or both."63 The truth of the matter was that studio doors were closed "for the great majority of such students."64 Still, as noted at the New York University's Summer Film Workshop in 1967, "the film industry, the unions, the trade and vocational centers, in giving up long ago the training of young blood for film-making have created a vacuum which has been filled by colleges and universities."65
UCLA professor Colin Young saw the value in university training. In his opinion, the sixties crop of students were "more promising than ever before ... [with] greater skill in dealing with their own minority audience then [sic] their predecessor ... both in subject and style."66 Others, such as Los Angeles Times film critic Charles Champlain, "foresaw a good future for students' films because audiences demand not only technical excellence but films that have something to say."67 Critics failed to note that one could find the likes of several professionals from the industry such as Stanley Kramer, Haskell Wexler, and Jean Renoir working closely with students on campuses or making guest appearances in classrooms.68 Between facilitating experimentation and conveying film wisdom, film studies and production at least offered alternatives, possibilities for education, and options for the future.61 Not only did film curricula help develop the discriminating eye earlier advocated by film sophisticates, the university also became a place for an unprecedented place of cultural production. Campus study focused on changing attitudes, teaching respect for film, and understanding film as a craft, an art, and a social tool.70 Moreover, legitimizing film academically meant arguing its importance along aesthetic lines in a place that could far better institutionalize it as a serious art form and artistic study than the federated film societies or campus series. As one student remarked, feature-length films "thought of five years ago only as an entertainment ... are now in and regarded as a legitimate pursuit in America. Film education programs encouraged cinema to grow as an art form. 1171
Changing perceptions of what an aesthetic product could provide, be, and do came most distinctly from the campus classrooms that conferred on film a new cultural role. One enthusiast observed, "Students realize that films are an important cultural force, and more and more of them feel that American films do not reflect an accurate view of present values. They want this changed.... The best way to do this is to learn the business."72 Saturday Review critic Hollis Alpert applauded young film goers' progressive sensitivity. "The most important development (and it took the rise of a whole new generation before it became apparent)," he remarked, 11 was the visual training and orientation the young viewers received."73
Campus production centers and college curricula had clearly cultivated the first of the film studies' generations, the industry's future model spectators. As makers and viewers, many young adults used film and the college campus for a site of negotiation and a place to stage their own authority. Young people who grew out of the habit of family movie-going helped create an audience gap of sorts for the industry and found colleges viable vehicles to move in a new cinematic direction. Hopes loomed for film's potential. It was the one art form in high demand. Simply put, the timing was right for young artists who had an eye for contemporary life to break into an industry steeped in tradition. Young audiences provided the reason and force for the shift.
Yet it is not entirely clear just how audience sophistication or production at the university could change the marketplace. Does a literate viewer and filmmaker guarantee film variety and value? Do film "literates" warrant more say than do "illiterates"? On what level does knowledge of a movie's production history or aesthetics influence film's marketability?74 Likewise, the protective campus environment and the "pre-existing" audience shielded student filmmakers from the daunting task of having to entice distributors, exhibitors, and general public interest. Unquestionably, the university would not be the model for the marketplace, but it did provide an arena where attitudes and tastes developed, and values and hopes were debated. Student film competitions brought student organizations together to create new spaces for developing film consciousness among young viewers. Moreover, campus competitions exposed potential artists. New York University graduate Martin Scorsese won the first prize at a 1965 festival and was filming in London by 1968. The National Student Film Festival, sponsored by the National Student Association, Motion Picture Association of America, and Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, in January 1968 sported THX 1138, a sci-fi picture shot in Los Angeles by George Lucas (UCLA). Of thirty-seven entries, Lucas won in the category of drama and received a contract with Warner's to expand THX 1138 under the guidance of Francis Ford Coppola. Even though Scorsese's and Lucas' instant success contrasted to the more typical fate of film graduates, their popular appeal proved that the university-trained was well on its way into traditional Hollywood.
