Friends,

This article from today's NYT may be
of interest to Acorners.

Yours,

Ken

--

Is a Cinema Studies Degree the New M.B.A.?

By ELIZABETH VAN NESS

Published: March 6, 2005

RICK HERBST, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be
the current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old,
he graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he
studied filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather,
he saw his major as a way to learn about power structures and how
individuals influence each other.

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film
and media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film
to grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not
represented," said Mr. Herbst, who envisions a future in the public
policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct
power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic
skills to do exactly that.

At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about
the fate of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries
routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not
altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an
entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who
believe that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional
language of the future.

Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer
programs in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown
steadily over the years, even while professional employment
opportunities in the film business remain minuscule. According to the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about 15,050 jobs for film
producers or directors, which means just a few hundred openings, at
best, each year.

Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has
often turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the
road to doing something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a
film major from the University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled
through years of uninspiring nonunion work managing crews on
commercials, television pilots and the occasional feature before
landing his noncinematic job designing advertising for Modern Luxury
Media LLC, a Chicago-based magazine publisher.

"You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll
work into this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more
pigeonholed as a technician," said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.

For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood
job is no longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique -
newly democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a
picture to a few thousand dollars and renders the very word "film" an
anachronism - the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the
military.

At the University of Southern California, whose School of
Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in
1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students
take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because
Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the
university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that
says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to
movie world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between
those who can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms.
Daley said. "Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."

In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.'s film school to take
advantage of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to
Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic skills as a new form of
literacy. One such is David Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after
a stint in the military intending to become a filmmaker, but - even
after having had the producer/director Robert Zemeckis as a mentor -
found himself drawn to the school's Institute for Creative
Technologies, where he creates military training applications in a
variety of virtual reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he
developed was privately screened for the directors John Milius and
Steven Spielberg, who wanted to understand the military's vision of
the future.

"That was like a film student's dream," said Mr. Hendrie, who
nonetheless believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely
to accomplish on the studio circuit. "I found myself increasingly
demoralized by my experiences trying to pitch myself as a director
for films like 'Dude, Where's My Car?' " Mr. Hendrie said. "What I'm
doing here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests I've always had,
and in the end excited my passion more."

In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD
that warned against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to
show three dead bodies. That and the series of gruesome execution
videos that have surfaced in the Middle East are perhaps only the
most extreme face of a complex sort of post-literacy in which
cinematic visuals and filmic narrative have become commonplace.

Melding easily with the growing digital folk culture, some film
majors have simply taken to creating art forms outside the boundaries
of the established film business. In one such instance, Wes Pentz, a
k a DJ Diplo - a 2003 graduate of Temple University, where film
majors are encouraged to invent new career paths in museums, leisure
businesses and elsewhere - broke through with his trademark
Hollertronix, a style modeled on cinematic soundtracks. "I think of
my songs as having a movement, like I would watch in a film, and
there's a narrative feel to them," said Mr. Pentz, who said he had
learned to frame music differently because of his film school
experience.

In the public policy arena, meanwhile, students like Yale's Mr.
Herbst hope to heighten political debate with productions far more
pointed than the most political feature film. Even a picture like
"Hotel Rwanda," with its unblinking look at African genocide, is "a
soup kitchen approach," Mr. Herbst said: "You're offered something to
eat, but there are no vitamins." Bringing film directly into
politics, he expects to throw objectivity out the window and change
minds - perhaps not an unrealistic aim at a time when, in a bit of
what a headline in The Wall Street Journal characterized as "film
noir," the Edward D. Jones & Company brokerage has entered the fray
over the proposed Social Security overhaul with a highly produced
video.

To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make
economic sense of film education, which in the past was often a long
path to nowhere. "Most find their way, and the skills they learn from
us are applicable to other careers and pursuits," Dale Pollock, dean
of the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts,
said of his students. "So we're not wasting their time or money."

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that
to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's
mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students
to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet
components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way,
our multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every
student in the university," she said.

Copyright (c) 2004 New York Times