Teaching the Film Industry and Curriculum Realpolitik

Approaches to Industry
1. Contextual Studies for Film Analysis - How film industry knowledge informs an understanding and appreciation of a specific film or group of films. This is most likely to make reference to broad characteristics of a studio or national cinema (e.g. size of budgets, use of stars, regulation, sometimes more specific factors such as test screening feedback, etc.)

Approaches to Industry
2. Producers and Audiences - How film industry knowledge informs an understanding and appreciation of audiences: their choice of films; their behaviour as fans, etc. This is most likely to focus on the interaction between industry as producers of films and audiences as consumers, working on the premise that there is a dynamic relationship.

Approaches to Industry
3. Film as a [National] [Global] Cultural Industry - How the formulation of film / cinema as a cultural industry raises broader ideological issues . This may investigate characteristics of a national cinema, including specific policies / strategies and their rationale with a likely focus on the struggle for distinctiveness. Alternatively attention may be on globalisation and the trans-cultural .

Approaches to Industry
4. Business Studies for Film Making

- How business planning and specifically the financing of film production and distribution informs practice-based work in filmmaking .
Given the small scale of student filmmaking projects, learning about the pragmatics of, for example, film finance, production budgeting and marketing often needs to be supplemented by case study analysis. (What do we mean by industry in this context?)

Some positives of embedded industry teaching ..

A focus on aspects of industry is important as it allows students to locate themselves more clearly as consumers, fans and to become critically aware participants within film culture Knowledge about the industry is interesting because it has a perceived value in informing other work: film analysis, filmmaking, audience study, etc. Industry case studies contain a problem-solving dimension and an ideological / ethical dimension. As such they are intrinsically interesting, generating discussion, debate and critical enquiry.

Challenges
With a primary focus elsewhere (on film analysis and film making), how do we move beyond a marginal, superficial and fragmented industry knowledge?

Historical studies of the film industry are plentiful and secure in the knowledge they contain, while accessible studies of a much more complex contemporary industry are few. How do we move beyond the safe teaching of the out-dated?
Models of film industry practice do not fit well with student short-film production, often best supported by a d-i-y guerrilla filmmaking manual. How and what kinds of industry learning can occur in production work ?

Teaching about the industry within which kind of film education?

Film within the humanities Film within media communications Film within the vocational curriculum Film as hybrid (e.g. current A Level Film Studies)

It is difficult to talk about the teaching of the film industry outside of the context of the current uncertainty that hangs over Film and its place in the curriculum uncertainty created by poorly informed policy makers.

This is most evident at the interface between HE and FE .

Extracts from Goves letter to Ofqual

It is my view that the single most important purpose of A level qualifications is to prepare young people for further study at university, whether in the specific subject studied for A level or in a related subject area.
..evidence of those universities that have engaged in the development of qualifications ..with a particular emphasis on our best, research intensive universities such as those represented by the Russell Group.

Soft subjects
Soft subjects are usually subjects with a vocational or practical bias, for example: Media Studies, Art & Design, Photography and Business Studies. However, there is no set definition of a hard or soft subject. Cambridge and the LSE specifically name Film Studies as a soft subject.

Skillset and the Universities

Skillsets role intends to privilege . methodologies and teaching aimed at promoting and supporting industry growth. Therefore we can only support those courses that give evidence they supply industry with the types of talent required. [For accreditation as a Skillset Media Academy]. it should be noted that our assessment is industry practice-centred, not pedagogy-centred.

Skillset Course Accreditation and Media Academy Licensing: Guidelines for Application 2011/12, p.5

The near-future in HE
Academic Film Studies will be under threat in the same ways as are all humanities subjects and are likely to be sustainable only in ivy league universities which can maintain levels of research and scholarship that are its own justification.

Vocational film will become ever more market-driven and uninformed by scholarship. Private sector HE institutions may come to dominate with some form of higher apprenticeship curriculum.
Successful degree programmes that attempt to balance the theoretical and practical may become particularly vulnerable

Teaching aspects of the Film Industry in the 16-19 curriculum

Would a greater focus on aspects of the film industry: increase the perception of Film as an academically soft subject? [Media Studies and Business Studies are named as such] encourage a consolidation of Film within the vocational curriculum? enhance the subjects academic credentials by locating film more explicitly as artifact within a rigorous study of its material conditions of production and circulation?

A strategic question
In the present political climate how would a greater or lesser emphasis on Industry influence Perceptions of the place of Film in the 16-19 curriculum?