51 Insights Film Schools Don’t Teach You (in the US)

Stepping outside the compound.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

In my courses, sessions, and consultations, I’m constantly encountering both student and practicing filmmakers referencing the same old rules.

Parroted in uniform fashion year after year throughout schools and online courses, these invariably dogmatic, restricting stipulations serve to shut down the learning of the aspiring cineaste.

You can’t do this. Don’t do that. Don’t step outside the established filmmaking groupthink. Behave yourself! Be safe or you’ll fail! This is the only way to make a story, a screenplay, characters, camera, editing, you name it — the only way to make them work!

My experience reminds me of something the novelist Marilynne Robinson said about her time teaching creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop to the effect that most of the learning her students needed was unlearning. So she found herself spending much of her time unteaching. And of course, it’s harder to teach once the student has been handed down a closed mindset.

Fortunately, those I meet online tend to breathe a sigh of relief when I counter their hand-me-down platitudes with fresh approaches. It’s as though they’ve been freed from some pedagogic jail and can breathe the oxygen of independent thought again.

Why do educators go for this learning by rote thing? Easier to repeat what has been repeated to them, I suppose. Safer to pass on what seems to have worked for them as practitioners.

Besides, ‘how to’ teaching is more straightforward and less risky than the ‘let’s investigate together’ ethos, by which we’re unafraid of not arriving at definitive answers but welcome open questions.

But there’s that seductive sense of belonging coming from membership of a club, in this case even, a cult. The rules trotted out again and again are — figuratively — the algorithms of so much film school education, its cleaving to single absolute truths that are neither absolute nor true.

Personally, I could never learn the information needed solely for the purposes of passing an exam. That drudgery strikes me as boring. I want exploration, questioning, deeper consideration. (Nor did this disposition do me any harm academically.) Similarly, I’m no good at the recycled prerequisites that pass for universal insight. Can’t handle them. They sap energy and passion. They reduce, flatten, denude.

So here are some examples of reflections and references I often bring up as an educator and consultant that, so often, are new to those in my classes:

1. “Film Production” is not creative filmmaking, just industrial process so don’t conflate the two.
2. Three-Act Structure. Why? There’s more to life.
3. Every scene does not need to move the story forward.
4. Do not “cut to the chase”, cut to the suspense:
5. Make the reader (audience) laugh, make them cry, but most important of all, make them wait! (Wilkie Collins).
6. Only connect! From Howard’s End, E M Forster. And freely too, across and between all aspects of story and screen.
7. You are allowed to make unmotivated camera moves.
8. Think “flow of energy”.
9. The symbiosis of camera and action, perceiver and perceived, language and subject.
10. Camera. Its contrasting functions in relation to its material.
11. What is composition, what mise-en-scène?
12. Drama — more than just “conflict”.
13. To show something to greatest effect, show the opposite just before.
14. Poetry of the image.
15. Mesmerism of the image.
16. Cinematography — voice of the image.
17. Those who know everything discover nothing.
18. The “industry professional” — the cultural conformist.
19. Principles not rules.
20. Multi-functionality of dialogue: interaction of dialogue and image, dialogue and action, dialogue and edit, dialogue and meaning.
21. Subtext through the above.
22. Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches… Nietzsche. (Trailers and their appeal.)
23. We long for a happy ending, fear an unhappy one but those suggesting a sense of meaning render either outcome almost irrelevant.
24. Avoid comprehensive victory.
25. The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.(Baldwin).
26. Anti-intellectualism = nihilism.
27. Cinema is an art. The movie industry is an industry.
28. The particular yields the universal.
29. Images of dissonance.
30. Images of absence:
31. Every negation contains an affirmation. (Wittgenstein).
32. Join no club. Be alone.
33. Magic. Mystery. Mischief.
34. No commitment without obsession. (From Michael Caine).
35. Articulation of Narrative Point of View.
36. Sympathy. Empathy. Identification. Meanings of these words.
37. Journey of the Audience.
38. A film — palimpsest of its evolution.
39. A micro-story in a scene.
40. Dynamics of Eye Trace.
41. Multiple functions of background action.
42. If you’re dreaming, you’re asleep. (Martin Scorsese) So if your dream is to direct, wake up and do it.
43. Information. Emotion. Sensation. Imagination.
44. The Screen of the Mind.
45. Silence.
46. Emptiness.
47. The Passive Protagonist — why not?
48. Storytelling as questions, not explanations.
49. Resonance of contradiction.
50. Practical problems of story and storytelling prompt creative solutions.
51. A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving. (Lao Tzu)

Peter Markham

September 2024

Author:
The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen (Oxford University Press) 10/23
What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20