I recall that at the time that I joined the board of trustees of the AFI, the organization's reputation and credibility—at least in academic, foundation, and governmental circles-was pretty low. With the recent resignations of Frank Daniel on the west coast and Sali Ann Kriegsman on the east, I would guess that it is now about zero. Within the last two-three years, the turnover of first-rate people on the Institute's staff has been absurdly high. Those that I know of include Dave Shepard, Sam Kula, Bob Geller, Ron Sutton, Dave Thaxton, Richard Kline, Roger Heller, Joe Dispenza, Frank Daniel, and Sali Ann Kriegsman. I have worked closely, over the years, with Shepard, Kula, Thaxton, Daniel, and Kriegsman, and am familiar with the work of Sutton and Geller, and I have the highest regard for all their talents and energy, as does everyone in our field. (I am not as familiar with the work of Kline, Dispenza, and Heller, and so cannot comment upon their departures.) I don't know how such things are rationalized in private industry, but I can say from experience that in academic and civil service administration, a turnover of this many first-rate people in so short a time is considered a prima facie case of either a faulty operational philosophy or incompetent management. I am also disturbed that we have not had a meeting of the full board of trustees since January. So far as I have been able to determine, no date has yet been set for a fall meeting. As a trustee, I want to be as helpful and constructive as possible, and not to cause any more waves than necessary during this difficult period in the history of the Institute. I appreciate the fact that under ordinary circumstances, the proper role for a trustee is to provide support and encouragement to the administrators of the organization, and to avoid unnecessary meddling in their work. However, I must confess that I am beginning to worry about my own reputation and credibility in this matter. Increasingly, I am being asked by people in the academic world, the foundations, and the Washington community to explain what in God's name is going on within the AFI, and I find that I have no answers to give them-not even constructively dishonest ones. I would like to urge that a meeting of the board of trustees be scheduled in late September or October, at which the director and the executive committee members can review these matters for us and explain their meaning and significance. The people who serve on the board have given a great deal in the way of time, energy, and (in many cases) financial support, and are entitled to know what has gone wrong—or right, as the case may be. Cordially, Raymond Fielding. I myself can well understand Professor Fielding's desire for a meeting. Both Professor Perry and I are members of the Institute's University Academic Advisors and this group has not been consulted for over a year either, and feels that it has been quietly abandoned. Because most of the needs for film study were not being satisfied, and because this was felt to result not so much from a misallocation of resources as from a lack of understanding and concern, a Conference on Regional Development of Film Centers and Services was called at New Paltz, New York on February 13-15, 1973, and it was attended by thirty-five of the most distinguished and dedicated directors of film museums, archives and regional centers as well as filmmakers and educators from eighteen cities throughout the country. This group, representative of the field, expressed a massive dissatisfaction with the policies of The American Film Institute. The printed report of this Conference is available from the Pacific Film Archive, University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, and I request permission to read sections from it into the records. On the issue of regional exhibition programs: "Participants raised objections to the AFI plan, saying regional centers should be encouraged to develop their own programming, rather than simply having packaged programming 'sold' to them by the AFI. These participants viewed the AFI approach as 'centralist,' one where the AFI would control regional exhibition rather than serving it" (p. 19). On the issue of the selection of a core collection of films for study: A number of the participants indicated that they did not trust the AFI to properly carry out this project. A number of reasons were given. It was said that the interests and needs of film educators, filmmakers and university film people had been consistently ignored by the AFI. Participants who had been deeply involved in film study had not been consulted or even informed of the development of the core collection concept. It was said that minutes of the meeting in Washington on the core collection were written in such a way as to serve the purposes of the AFI and did not, in fact, represent or reflect the ideas of those who attended. One participant felt that the core collection concept was being presented to the conference as a “fait accompli" and not as a sincere desire for consultation. It was said that the Institute was so constituted so as to make it impossible for it to represent the best interests of the film study field. It was also felt that the national feeling of distrust toward the AFI made it unwise to work through them. (p. 29) The invited participants unanimously passed a resolution recommending that an ad hoc committee "be established to search out and organize an entity representative of and responsible to the major organizations, institutions and memberships concerned with the making, preservation, distribution, exhibition and study of film and media-the servicing and education, broadly conceived, of the film/media needs of all our citizens" (p. 30). The members of this National Committee on Film and Television Resources and Services are: James Blue-Co-Director, Film Program, Rice University MEDIA CENTER Sally Dixon-Curator, Film Section, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute Sam Kula-Archivist, The American Film Institute, Washington, D.C. Gerald O'Grady-Director, Center for Media Study, State University of New York at Buffalo Sheldon Renan-Director, Pacific Film Archive, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California Ron Sutton-Exec. Sec., National Association of Media Educators Jonas Mekas-Director of the Anthology Film Archives and Board member of the New York Filmmakers' Cooperative, was appointed Recording Secretary. During the first year of its existence, the Committee added the following members: Frank Daniel-Dean, Center for Advanced Study, American Film Institute Daniel Taradash-Screenwriter, former President of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences David Stewart-Director of Special Programs, Corporation of Public Broad casting Fred Barzyk-Producer-Director, WGBH Educational Foundation, Boston John Kuiper-Head, Motion Picture Section, Prints and Photography Division. Library of Congress Next month, this Committee will publish a report dealing with each of the five areas mentioned in the resolution above. It is the result of more than a year's research and writing by the members and their consultants, and will be freely distributed to all those concerned with film and television in the country. Regional meetings will discuss the report from January through April, 1975, and the response of the field to this report will be recorded and digested. Then, a final report on the needs of the various film and television constituencies in the United States and their suggested solutions to these needs will be prepared as a white paper and will be available by July. If this Subcommittee acts on H.R. 17021 without waiting for this consultation of their constituencies by established regional leaders, all people who have made contributions to the field, it will have completely disregarded this whole process which is being carried out voluntarily and without remuneration by those listed. As a member of that Committee, I urge you to put aside the proposed legislation until that time, so that you may reconsider it in the light of this survey of the media constituency. For the past two years, another report, "The Independent Filmmaker in the Kinevisual Age," supported by the John and Mary R. Markle Foundation and carried out by the H. W. Land Corporation has been prepared. It is the result of two years research and 375 interviews with people representative of all forces in film. I would request that this Subcommittee request access to this material by writing to the Markle Foundation at 50 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York 10020. It is information absolutely essential to your decision-making process. Our government was founded on a concept of the state articulated by Thomas Hobbes and John Locke as a union of the wills of all its citizens. If H.R. 17021 is passed, it will have one of two results among those educators whose opinions I have been reflecting by careful quotation and documentation in this testimony. It will either disastrously divide the field against itself, or it will completely discourage it and unite its members' wills in massive opposition to the prepared legislation. Neither would serve the cause of film or of the large numbers of the American people who are giving their talents and energies to furthering it. [From the Journal of Aesthetic Education] THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS OF MEDIA (By Gerald O'Grady) (Gerald O'Grady is Director of the Media Center at the University of St. Thomas in Houston and a member of the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he teaches graduate work in literature and cinema. He is also Visiting Associate Professor of English and of Radio/TV/ Film at the University of Texas at Austin. This article was developed from a talk presented to the Aspen Film Conference held at Snowmass-at-Aspen in July, 1968, the theme of which was “"The Film: Art for Whose Sake?") I Begin with the nature of man and the nature of his social organization: Kenneth Burke has shown us how "man is a symbol-using animal,”1 and Hugh Dalziel Duncan has explained how "society rises in and continues to exist through the communication of significant symbols" and how "man creates the significant symbols he uses in communication." 3 Proceed with the nature of education and of pedagogic instruction: J. L. Aranguren has pointed out that "education is the most fundamental means of socialisation and therefore of communication" and Jerome S. Bruner concluded some recent remarks on "Patterns of Growth" with "What I have said suggests that mental growth is in very considerable measure dependent upon growth from the outside in-a mastering of techniques that are embodied in the culture and that are passed on in a contingent dialogue by agents of the culture. This becomes notably the case when language and the symbolic systems of the culture are involved, for there are a multiple of models available in the culture for shaping symbolic usage-mentors of all shapes and conditions." 4 We have arrived at the nature of our problem. In "Education for Real," John McHale argues that our traditional, so-called cultural, education is now, at best, inadequate and, at worst, a form of creative disenfranchisement from our emergent planetary culture, and makes a plea that the term "arts" be expanded to include our advanced technological media. The problem, now, is that those areas of our formal education which deal with the symbolic and value content of our culture do so almost entirely in terms of the past. By and large, they avoid immediate relevance to the external cultural environs in which the person finds himself. Outside the school, university or other educational institution these environs are those of the film, TV, radio, the pictorial magazine and massive "advertisement" of an enormously proliferated "mass" culture brought into being by our accelerated technology. It is largely within these media, now on a global scale, that the symbolic and value communication of our cultural situation is carried on." II The solution-how these new symbolic forms, the media art, might be incorporated into various stages of our educational processes-is not so easily revealed, 1 Kenneth Burke, "Definition of Man" in Language As Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 3. 2 Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Symbols in Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 44-47. J. L. Aranguren, Human Communication (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), p. 158. Jerome S. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), p. 21. 5 John McHale, "Education for Real" in Edwin Schlossberg and Lawrence Susskind (eds., Good News: A Curricula of Ideas to Be Implemented, p..5. The essay also appears in the World Academy of Art and Science Newsletter (June 1966) and is anthologized in Richard Kean (ed.), Dialogue on Education (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), pp. 120-25. as illustrated by the current confusion and disagreement about the teaching of film, to take the medium featured in this issue. 1. Should film criticism or film appreciation be taught, as they are in most colleges and universities which have recently added such courses, by members of the traditional departments in the humanities, such as English, French, classics? Will they misunderstand the very topics, such as structure, theme, and value, which they are usually most capable of examining, because they have almost no knowledge of the techniques by which and circumstances in which the new media are produced? 2. Should such courses be taught solely by departments of communication or of journalism and speech or of radio/television/film? Have even the younger members of such departments been given sufficient preparation in perceiving their subjects as art forms shaping our cultural environment or do they, as often seems the case, perceive them mainly as channels of information? Do members of these departments overemphasize technique and production to the detriment of the symbolic cultural values that concern McHale? 3. Should art departments expand their offerings to include photography, film, and television? Is it clear thinking or just accident that, on many campuses, photography is taught by the art department but film, with the exception of production courses, by other departments? (Why is it, incidentally, that still photography is part of the cinema curriculum in most European film schools but not in their American counterparts?) If photography is "still," aren't a great many paintings and sculptures becoming kinetic? 4. Should the teaching of film be placed in a more general context, which might be called media studies? If new departments or programs of media studies are created, there are two questions: how should their subject matter be defined and what kinds of curricula and training should they offer their students? In the short run, obviously, one simply chooses the most knowledgeable and skilled person, regardless of his departmental affiliation, to teach film. In the long run, I would opt for new multidepartmental programs of media studies. III How, then, should media studies be defined? Until a few years ago, the study of media usually meant the investigation of the transformation of information to mass audiences by means of newspaper, radio, and television; film, in its documentary uses, was sometimes included, as was the Hollywood feature film if studied, usually in quantitative fashion, in terms of audience patterns, class entertainment preferences, etc. The word "public" was usually understood to preface "media" and students pursued their programs within a curriculum which was much concerned with government policy and the advertising market-e.g., censorship and sponsorship. With the war came an emphasis on the measurement of propaganda, which continued during the years of the cold war, followed more recently by an emphasis on the relationship of media to voting behavior. About twenty years ago, a new concept began to emerge in the work of Marshall McLuhan. His three books, the humanistic leitmotif of which is the "man" of their subtitles, approached media from just as many different perspectives. The first, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (1951), was mythological and concentrated on newspapers, magazines, advertising, pulp fiction, and comic books: what was then called popular culture. The second, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962), was historical and juxtaposed a mosaic of meditations on the cultural interactions arising from the invention of the printing press; turning our attention away from the content and toward the form of print, he explained the cliche, "the medium is the message,' 6 Some would include film study under drama. See Richard M. Gollin, "Film as Dramatic Literature," College English Vol. 30 (1969), 424-29. 7 McLuhan himself first used the term as the title of the first chapter of Understanding Media and punned on it in the title of his next book, with Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Bantam, 1967). In a recent interview in Playboy (March 1969), he indicates that puns and hyperboles are strategies for drawing attention to new insights. In general, more time has been spent on misundersanding McLuhan as a popular medium than to understanding his work; recent books, subtitled "Hot and Cool," "Pro and Con." "Sense and Nonsense," produce few insights. More accurate "placements" of his work are found in the reviews by Hugh Dalziel Duncan, "Communication in Society." Arts in Society Vol. 3 (1966) and John McHale, "The Man from Mascom," Progressive Architecture Vol. 6 (February 1967). later associated with his work: "Technological environments are not merely passive containers of people but are active processes that reshape people and other technologies alike." The third, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964), was formal and followed seven groundwork chapters dealing with their psychic and social consequences with twenty-six more (symbolically the new alphabet) on the structures of individual media. It was this idea of media as extensions of our senses, as expanders of our psychic environments, and their aesthetically-oriented treatment as forms, structures, and models shaping our physical environment, conceived of as an art form, which caught the contemporary imagination. According to McLuhan's formal treatment, almost everything can be considered a medium, including all our languages-"language is the first mass medium." Pursued, that ideal could reshape our entire educational structure and all its subjects or fields in new ways. Given the completely remote possibility of that happening, I would like to delimit media studies to mean the exploration of the creation, the aesthetics, and the psychological, social, and environmental impact of the art forms of photography, cinematography, videography, radio, recordings, and tapes within the broad framework of general education in the humanities. I would call media studies the "new humanities" to distinguish them from the "old humanities"-literature, drama, the fine arts, etc.-from which they often borrow and with which they continually interact, mutually influencing each other. 10 I would make a special plea that, in our curricula, the new never be separated from the old. When the student of Greek reads Plato's Republic and faces the question of why the whole Hellenic system of education was changing, I would want him to have to ponder Eric Havelock's answer: "The fundamental answer must be in the changing technology of communication. Refreshment of memory through written signs enabled a reader to dispense with most of that emotional identification by which alone the acoustic record was sure to recall." The student in my period of specialization, the late medieval, undergoes a valuable heuristic process when he is made to consider the implications for literary form and style of McLuhan's many insights concerning the transition from script to print. The student of contemporary fiction will gain nothing but profit by mediating upon Bertold Brecht's remark: "For the old forms of communication are not unaffected by the development of new ones, nor do they survive alongside them. The filmgoer develops a different way of reading stories. But the man who writes the stories is a filmgoer too." 11 The interaction of contemporary art forms almost demands that we inaugurate a field of cross-media studies. In the past, men of letters (today, the phrase seems biased toward print) wrote in different genres-poems, plays, novels, essays. Some, like Henry James or George Bernard Shaw, wrote dramatic criticism and novels, or music criticism and plays. Still others, like the Polish Bruno Schulz or the Welshman David Jones, were writer-painters or writer-drawers. Arthur Miller is one key example of the emergence of a new kind of writer, the writer for many media, who has confronted and been deeply influenced by the communications revolution of our century. While his sole medium is writing, his first efforts were the radio drama, and the style of his stage plays will be better understood when the latter are examined. Later, he wrote for and was influenced by film, and his last play, The Price, began as a television piece. He has also written short stories and novels. He has said: "Movies, the most wide-spread form of art on earth, have willy-nilly created a particular way of seeing life, and their swift transitions, their sudden bringing together of disparate images, their effect of documentation inevitable in photography, their economy of storytelling, and their concentration on mute action have infiltrated the novel and play writingespecially the latter-without being confessed to or, at times, being consciously realized at all." 12 The poet Michael Benedikt concluded an explanation of God8 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), preface. This by no means implies that the newer media should be studied only as a means toward interesting students in the classics like Shakespeare and Dickens, an attitude put forth by David Riesman in his introducion to Reuel Denney's The Astonished Muse: Popular Culture in America (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964). p. vi. 10 Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 208. 11 John Willett, trans., Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 47. 12 Arthur Miller, The Misfits (New York: Viking Press, 1961), pp. ix-x. 42-830-74- -8 |