by Professor Thomas Schadt
Managing Director of the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg
Learning to ”make films“ and assuming a specific professional function in their production is like walking on a winding road. It is a process that can only partly be planned out in advance. Instead, it is an individual path which every student experiences in a different way. That is why covering the span between artistic freedom on the one hand and market demands and requirements on the other in training requires a great deal of consideration and a coherent concept.
Twenty years ago, the founders of the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg made very prudent and right decisions in this area: Focusing on learning by doing, championing hands-on and team-oriented teaching which from day one enables the students to not only be enthusiastic and imaginative about filming, but also to find creative ways of bridging the gap between their imagination and the cinematic techniques available for translating it. Moreover, it was decided that, rather than appointing a permanent teaching staff, the academy would employ lecturers on a short-term basis who can provide students with concrete knowledge based on their recent experience in the industry. Every academic year, the Filmakademie employs more than 400 lecturers and course instructors. It was also decided that the academy would adopt the legal form of a non-profit limited liability company with a supervisory board and a management board. The fact that the two boards’ functions are clearly defined enables the academy to react quickly to rapid developments and changes in the film and media industry. And finally, the academy’s founders rejected any reservations about the linking of art and commerce. One does not exclude the other, and it is an existential prerequisite for the creative tension characterizing the academy that its curriculum cultivates sheltered and protected zones of creativity while also reflecting the demands and expectations of the market.
This approach has provided the foundation for an educational institution which has earned the right to count itself amongst the very best film schools of the world. In combination with the Institute of Animation, Visual Effects and Digital Postproduction, which Professor Thomas Haegele has integrated into a worldwide network during the past years, and the internationally orientated Atelier Ludwigsburg-Paris, organized and coordinated very successfully by Professor Dr. Peter Sehr, as well as the neighboring Academy of Performing Arts with its partly film-specific acting training, the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg is rightfully held in the highest regard by the film and media industry.
What kind of graduates do we produce? Needless to say, our graduates emerge from their studies as highly trained craftspeople. Imparting these skills is perhaps the easiest, most calculable aspect of our work. A more difficult and delicate teaching task is to cultivate and promote the kind of individuals who, thanks to the personality they developed during their training, will later be able to successfully assert themselves in the market. Good craftspeople who are unable to communicate their ideas and convictions effectively are at just as much a disadvantage as those ingenious individuals who are unable to communicate or translate their ideas into a concrete form. It is only when graduates are equipped with both craft skills and the ability to assert their ideas that they stand a real chance.
For what is it that the market expects of film school graduates? It is certainly not the ability to reproduce the kind of work already being done by broadcasters, production firms and agencies. In such cases, it is entirely understandable if the customer’s response is: “That is all? We have been producing this sort of material for a long time and can do it much quicker than you, so we’ll rather do it ourselves. Goodbye and thank you”. The market expects more from film students than exact reproduction. It wants a new idea, fresh aesthetics, courage, risk-taking, and unexpected quality that goes beyond the ordinary. By giving graduates an opportunity, the market wants to invest in its own future, and not in the present.
The numerous collaborations of the Filmakademie with public and private broadcasters and a range of companies which are part of the advanced curriculum (3rd and 4th years) can only promote creativity and success because their participant believe in them. This is demonstrated by a number of success stories, such as the “New Documentary Film” series of debut films which is the result of a collaboration between the public broadcaster Suedwestrundfunk (SWR), the MFG Film Funding and the Filmakademie (now in its tenth year, the series has won a large number of awards); numerous high-quality feature film co-productions with the broadcasters SWR, WDR, BR, and ZDF/”Kleines Fernsehspiel”, ARTE, and ProSiebenSat.1; the involvement – unique in Germany – of broadcasters ProSiebenSAT.1 and the UFA in the Series Production program of study; a range of externally funded productions with partners from business and culture; the UFA’s support for the subject area Interactive Media; and the ZDF’s involvement in the subject area Business and Science Film. The countless national and international awards that our students and graduates won are yet another indication for the fact that the Filmakademie is on the right track with this approach.
That is why we would like to thank all of the Filmakademie’s partners for recognizing and actively fostering the quality of this institution as a forward-looking laboratory and a workshop for creative and experimental ideas. It is only this kind of learning environment that enables students to express the diversity of their ideas and apply their energies in a way that constantly offers surprises due to its innovative quality.
To this end, the Filmakademie needs to ensure that, in the initial phase of the curriculum (1st and 2nd year), students and their teachers can involve themselves in a process that is intense, uninterrupted, open to experimentation and independent of market interests. In order to promote the internal development of prospective filmmakers, it is essential that during this initial phase practical results are sometimes regarded as secondary, failure within a protected academic environment is permissible, boundaries are crossed in order to make boundaries acceptable in the future, so that future projects with partners from the film market will be of high quality. For this reason, the education process requires trust, patience and a budget that makes it possible to employ the best teachers and provide them with adequate time to individually consult with students.
We therefore would like to expressly thank the political officials of the Baden-Wuerttemberg state government responsible for the Filmakademie. They have not only recognized this need but have provided and will continue to provide the funding for this technically ambitious and cost-intensive curriculum. The funding provided by the Baden-Wuerttemberg Foundation’s “Future Offensives” program and by the federal and state economic stimulus package for financing new HD, 3-D and other digital technologies proves that the world of politics can be an international role model in the field of cultural and creative education.
Teaching in this field requires a difficult balancing act between utopia and reality, between artistic freedom and the actual opportunities offered by the market. The time-consuming conflicts and creative processes characteristic of this endeavor are often hard to understand for outsiders. The fact is that we are training people for professions that are themselves full of contradictions and conflict, and this must somehow be taken into account in the education process. Thus, our educational approach encourages a certain level of egocentrism, without which successful films cannot be made. Yet we also make it clear to our students that filmmaking is based on teamwork. Or, to give another example, we may present students with a model of cinematic dramaturgy while at the same time arguing that interesting, surprising films are sometimes created by filmmakers breaking all the so-called rules and consistently ignoring what we have just mapped out as the correct approach. There are, indeed, many wonderful examples of this. Film, it must be said, is not mathematics, where two and two always equals four.
Dealing with all the contradictions of our profession and tolerating them requires a particular attitude. In my opinion, attitude is actually the key word, it is the basic requirement placed on us all. A recognizable attitude (responsibility, morality, ethics) on the part of the documentary filmmaker towards his or her real protagonists is just as indispensable as that of a director or screenwriter towards his or her fictional characters.
Such an attitude is also essential for cinematographers, sound technicians, editors, soundtrack composers and set designers. After all, every focal length chosen, every camera movement, every sound, every pitch, every cut, every note, as well as the color of the wallpaper in the foreground or background of a scene, whether real or digitally generated, is always based on a decision. All of these elements comment upon what is being shown in the film at that moment and characterize the people appearing in a film, whether they do so as actors or as real persons.
We have to teach our students how to develop an attitude and communicate it in film. Making a film involves two simultaneous aspects: developing an inner, personal approach and expressing it through an external, photographic approach.
What filmmakers show us, the extent to which they are able to articulate cinematically what they think and feel, also tells us viewers something about ourselves. At the same time, viewers learn something about the filmmakers and their responsibility towards a reality – whether it be an invented, fictional reality or an existing, non-fictional one. Furthermore, film and television makers should also tell us something about their responsibility towards the media, their audience, and the society they are part of. In my opinion, the desire and technical ability to do so is the central imperative for each and every creative product in this industry.
In my view, accident and arbitrariness have no place in this process. We are concerned here solely with the dramaturgically motivated interplay between content and its external form, and as a viewer I want to be able to understand, or even better, to sense and feel - at the latest by the end of the film – why something has happened and who was responsible for it.
This is why it is not sufficient to train students to be at the top of their profession in terms of technical skills only. We also need to teach them to cinematically articulate dreams and utopias during their training. Above all, we must impart to them the importance of continuing to believe in these utopias after leaving the academy and confronting the practical realities of the market. On completing their studies, our graduates need to leave the academy as open, communicative individuals. They must have the strength of character needed to make the best of the opportunities open to them using their own creativity. They should be able to assert their own ideas and establish a trademark style, a “genetic finger print” in filming, to ensure that they do not merely satisfy other people’s interests.
All this requires a great deal of energy and motivation from all concerned, particularly from all the professors and lecturers who have been willing to take time off from their own successful careers to explain to our upcoming filmmakers the range of possibilities open to them for expressing and asserting themselves in the profession they are learning. Based on many years of teaching experience, I can confirm that this requires a great deal of energy and idealism and a certain readiness to make sacrifices, without which the vitality of the Filmakademie’s teaching structure would be inconceivable.
I will gladly contribute to perpetuating the Filmakademie's success by working tirelessly to bring together people who are prepared to share this positive energy with us. As I understand it, creativity – and that is what we are dealing with here – can only develop when people come together to communicate with each other and to concern themselves with one another so that something productive, a product, can emerge.
All this requires that we constantly look forward. If we are to maintain a forward-looking and internationally oriented education program, we must continue to rely on our extensive collaboration with television broadcasters, film funding bodies, exchange programs with foreign film schools, producers, politicians, patrons and sponsors from the business world, as well as our supervisory board and the advisory council. We must all invest ideas, patience, time and energy, and some of us, of course, also money. We must be prepared to subordinate our egos to this shared task. And if we succeed in this, I have no worries about the upcoming generation of filmmakers, the future of German film and television and none whatsoever about the future of the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg.
