MEA – The Media Education Association Resource Network

In the first part of this article on Film Club (published in the Winter 2008/9 issue of PoV), I considered the current government-sponsored venture for promoting film in schools in the context of what had happened in the years since the Second World War. My investigation involved both what film teachers had achieved under their own steam in schools and what provision the film industry had made for child audiences, particularly in weekend cinema screenings. In this second part I aimed to consider in more detail how Film Club was in practice engaging with its client group. As will become clear, it has not been possible to examine on the ground the detail of the ordinary delivery of the Film Club project.

There is however one aspect of Film Club’s provision that is novel and separates what it is currently offering from what was previously possible: the introduction into schools of professionals from the film industry. The industry-funded body Film Education has for many years very successfully organised events involving film making personnel to which schools have been able to send parties. These occasions provide the opportunity for students to hear from leading figures in the British film industry. Those attending would however usually be older students studying for film and media public examinations. The very distinctive feature of the Film Club approach is that the industry professional
visits the school. Those with experience of life in schools will know how positively children usually respond when someone of significance from the world beyond the school gates actually enters ‘their’ territory.

I attended one such event at Holland Park School, a mixed comprehensive in inner London. What struck me immediately was how prepared the Film Club VIP Team was to take responsibility for the occasion: the teacher running the club was very well supported. The team expected to organise the venue, greet the speaker and run the event. Clearly Film Club recognised that for occasions such as this to succeed, a busy teacher needs back-up when Film Club is on display.

Film Club offered me a choice of events to attend and I selected Holland Park because of its long history of involvement in the fi lm teaching movement. I first encountered the school’s film work in the mid 1960s when Vivien Jacobs established screenings there. Indeed when her former student Hilary Benn was interviewed by the Guardian (in the run-up to the Labour Party deputy leadership election) one school memory that he highlighted was that of the stimulating and varied film programme at the school.

“There was one wonderful teacher called Vivien Jacobs who put on a fi lm every Wednesday afternoon; we got the chance to see these wonderful films from all over the world.” One of her successors in the Holland Park film teaching tradition was Ian Wall, who subsequently left to run the national organisation, Film Education, which he has now done for more than a quarter of a century. Perhaps a legacy of Holland Park’s long history of screening films was that the Film Club event took place in a large hall where the extracts were projected on a big screen, giving club members a strong sense of being at the cinema.

A director visits a school . . .

The session I attended was a visit by film director Oliver Parker that took place after school on a Friday afternoon in mid winter. That is the kind of scheduling guaranteed to test to the limit the loyalty and enthusiasm of Film Club members. There were about forty children present, with a majority from Year Seven. Given that Holland Park has some 1500 pupils on roll, having only about 2.5% attending Film Club might seem to indicate that it has only limited appeal. Nevertheless if the Holland Park Club’s aim is to build on the loyalty of an enthusiastic young cohort, then that is a sound strategy. The smaller number did allow Oliver Parker to relate very easily to the young audience and he was scrupulous in ensuring that the ultra-keen questioners did not marginalise their less demanding neighbours. Certainly all children who wanted to ask questions had the opportunity and there were always hands raised by potential questioners: the maximum at any single moment being seven! Most children took the opportunity to ask a question. The audience behaviour throughout was exemplary. There was a separate session afterwards for older students who were studying for public examinations. Parker had been consulted by Film Club beforehand and had selected extracts from three of his films, An Ideal Husband (UK 1999), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002) and St Trinian’s (2007), which were ready for screening in sequence on the day. Parker explained how his adaptations of the Wilde plays had essentially been treatments of the original texts to make them more susceptible to a cinematic treatment. For the young audience this was perhaps a rather remote concept and they preferred to ask the director how he worked with particular actors in different situations.

St Trinian’s was much the most familiar film for this audience and questions tended to be more specific. Inevitably audience interest focused on how children and young people were selected for parts in films. One aspect that Parker stressed was how 21st century values had meant that his St Trinian’s girls could not be depicted as being as dissolute as their 1950s’ predecessors. In the earlier films the filmmakers, Frank Lauder and Sidney Gilliat, had been able to show the girls smoking and drinking alcohol. From the extract of Parker’s 2007 version which was screened, the children might reasonably have deduced that in this century the older and more traditional vices had been supplanted by greater violence among teenage girls. Had it been possible to screen an extract from a 1950s’ St Trinian’s film alongside the modern version, then the children might more usefully have detected the discrepancies for themselves and better grasped the significance of such social engineering in the cinema. The fi rst ‘St. Trinian’s’ film, The Belles of St. Trinian’s was made in 1954, released with a ‘U’ Certificate and as such was viewed in the cinemas by children of any age. St. Trinian’s (2007) has a 15 Certificate and so most of this particular Film Club audience would not have been able to see it in the cinema. It is not suggested that it would have been appropriate for Oliver Parker to have developed the issue of film classification in his presentation. However issues around the classification of films by the BBFC and their relationship to the age of each specific Film Club audience are addressed at the Club’s induction meetings.

. . . and an actor

I was also able to interview the actor Lesley Manville about her visit to a Film Club session at a sixth form college. Her audience was an older and more specialised group of around thirty film/media students. Again the Film Club team were in attendance and had prepared the extracts she had selected, in this case from the work she had done with the director Mike Leigh. Perhaps as a result of the venue being a college containing older students, this particular Film Club session had been accommodated within the time-tabled college day.

Ms Manville had gone to the event with a clear agenda: to demystify acting. She wanted to present the seriousness of being an actor, ‘not the celebrity side of things’. By concentrating on her work with Leigh she felt she had presented the students with a very different approach to film making. Her audience was ‘staggered’ to learn that Leigh and his actors worked for six months ‘before the cameras turned up’. By contrasting that director’s approach with the one more conventionally found in the film industry, she hoped that she had demonstrated how ‘actor empowering’ Leigh’s work was. Consequently actors who worked with him did not get typecast. One measure of success for such ‘chameleon actors’ was their ability to walk in the street without being recognised. She recalled that the questions generated by her talk had indeed focused on her agenda about the nature of the acting profession and on the ‘shallowness of celebrity’. Students were keen to find out the details of her career development and her personal commitment to the varying screen roles she plays. A recording was made of her main presentation and subsequent questions; then a shorter episode was filmed where a small group of students asked her prepared questions. This is currently on the Film Club website.

Her experience has served to make her even keener to be part of the Film Club experiment and consequently she is ready to convince other actors that they will benefit from participating in similar school visits. Film Club aims to have about ten such school-based industry sessions in a half term. Since each visit is attended and serviced to meet the requirements of the speaker, the limitation on the number per term would seem to result not so much from the availability of the professionals but from the constraints necessitated by the level of VIP co-ordination that Film Club has set as standard.

How do routine Film Club sessions work?

As those who read the fi rst part of my article in last term’s issue of PoV will be aware, I had intended to report directly from schools where Film Clubs were already established. I regret that unfortunately Film Club had a change of heart and was unable to meet my request to visit teachers who were already routinely running weekly clubs in their schools, which is after all the basic model of Film Club operation. I wanted to discover how the club differed from the more conventional school film society operation that some older readers would have known where the selection of features was made by the teacher, the programme notes were prepared by the teacher and the follow up discussion was chaired by the teacher.

I was disappointed not to have had the opportunity to discover at first-hand how these Film Club activities had moved on from past practice, especially since crucial to the Film Club approach is the involvement of children and students in the whole process: from the selection of the programme to the evaluation of the screenings. Different schools will organise this involvement in a variety of ways, where the age of the students will be particularly relevant to how a club works. It is clear from the Film Club website, with its regular ‘Review of the Week’ feature, that responses from the audience are a fundamental part of the validation of the Club’s operation. It would be enlightening to discover how this brief exercise is approached, particularly how the review writing is fitted into a wider discussion of the film. Perhaps in some Club environments review writing is undertaken in addition to more substantial written work.

The standard film society model used to be one of fortnightly screenings during only the Autumn and Spring Terms. I wonder how well weekly screenings through each term of the school year are sustained by Film Clubs and whether audiences fall away when evenings are lighter and outside temperatures warmer. Steve Murray, a secondary school teacher who is also a member of the Media Education Association Executive Committee, attended a recent Film Club induction session in order to enrol his school in Film Club. His account of that induction event and the procedures involved is printed alongside this article. What seems clear is that these induction events are essentially administrative and organisational: the interpretation of the film viewing experience is left to the individual teacher’s professional expertise. While it is wholly appropriate that Film Club does not expect to train teachers, the much larger question of how enthusiastic but inexperienced teachers are to acquire a broader understanding of Film Education is highlighted by the vigorous expansion of Film Club.

Film Education Strategy for 21st Century Literacy

It is important to note that Film Club is one of the key partners in the Film Education Strategy for 21st Century Literacy. Indeed of all the partners it is the one funded to have the widest reach. The basis for allocating the more modest funding given directly to the Strategy itself is that it should run a number of projects in partnership with others already engaged in providing education in film. These projects will involve a limited number of enterprises, albeit across a wide range of constituencies, and will provide evidence to be used in reinforcing the case to Government of the value of Film Education.

It is however Film Club, with its generous funding and wide reach, which must ensure that its own evaluation processes contribute significantly to this evidence gathering exercise. Furthermore if the numerically large discriminating audience envisaged in the Strategy document is to be created and then become influential in shaping British film production, it is through Film Clubs that the bulk of that audience will be recruited.

The end product of the Strategy exercise must be that the case for film education is finally and permanently made. For almost the whole of the period since the talking pictures arrived, teachers in the UK have been making the case for film education. Although there have been many ‘breakthrough’ achievements, there was always another generation coming along which, having very limited connection with the past, preferred to start yet again to make the ultimate breakthrough and determine finally to establish film education in its rightful and unchallengeable place. The reason for this perpetual reinvention is essentially very straightforward. Film only ever achieved the most marginal status within initial teacher training and currently is all but non-existent. Geography teachers do not need the support of a nationally funded scheme of Map Clubs to justify the status of their subject.

This halting progress of film education is rather reminiscent of the arbitrary way in which films were often viewed in the post-war period, with the ‘big picture’ and its supporting programme projected in a continuous performance. Members of the audience could arrive at any time and sit through the screenings until they identified on the screen the point at which they had come in – which would usually indicate that the time had come to leave the cinema. But of course where you came in determined your interpretation of the narrative and, with no resumé to assist, you made sense of things as best you might. There is now a very clear responsibility for all those bodies committed to delivering the Film Education Strategy to ensure that the completion of their enterprise really will constitute the final breakthrough. Their legacy for succeeding generations must be the lasting recognition in British society that film education finally made it in 2012.
© Terry Bolas 2009