As a number of recent articles by Scottish teachers have discussed, now that film education is finding a secure foothold in schools - through the dedicated efforts of a small, energetic group of individuals and organisations - there is increasingly a question of where exactly the basis for that film education comes from.
Until the recent emergence of Queen Margaret University’s ”Introduction to Film Education” course, neither film nor any other moving image media had played any significant role in Scotland’s initial teacher education programmes.
Film is still a relatively youthful medium, just over a century old, and the sort of settled pedagogical approach that has evolved around more established subjects such as English, modern languages and the sciences is arguably yet to take shape.
That same question we are starting to ask ourselves in Scotland is also being asked by other European nations who are similarly looking to bring film education into school curricula: to where and to whom should we look for the sort of knowledge and deep experience that might serve as the foundation for film education?
Teaching film and cinema in schools: where do we start?
Is it to experts in film history, theory and criticism who have been asking questions about what a film is, how cinema works as a medium, and what might be considered valuable in film since the early days of cinema? Or is it to filmmakers themselves, who can give us a living sense of how a film is constructed from the inside, and how we bring together its many different parts?
Or, indeed, is it to those teachers and practitioners who - despite film education on a national level being in its relative infancy - have nonetheless been teaching film in one form or another, both inside and outside of school classrooms, for quite some time?
The fifth edition of the Scottish International Film Education Conference, taking place online and for free from 16-17 June, draws on all three of these perspectives. We have discussions led by academics, by teachers and by film education practitioners both from Scotland and elsewhere in the world (in particular through a panel exploring the brilliant work of Filmlab Palestine).
The Catalan project Cinema en Curs uses the word “transmission” to talk about film education, to mean something that is being passed across, whether that be an idea, a perspective, a craft or simply a sense of energy and illumination.
And, crucially, we will have a series of keynote discussions with some of the world’s leading filmmakers: John Sayles (director of Lone Star, Matewan and The Secret of Roan Inish), Mike Figgis (director of Leaving Las Vegas, The Sopranos and Timecode), and Michelangelo Frammartino (director of Le Quattro Volte and Il Buco).
There is a popular saying (sometimes attributed to the composer Gustav Mahler) that “tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”. Film education is in itself a tradition, albeit a dizzyingly diverse and heterogenous tradition.
When considering where we should look to provide the basis for our fledgling approach to film education in Scotland and beyond, it would seem important to consider how we can hold on to that sense of a living fire drawn from film culture - from the global excitement of film as an ever-youthful medium - and pass it on to learners.
Involving some of the world’s leading filmmakers in discussions about what film education has been, is now and could be in the future allows for a key moment when that living energy of film culture can be passed from a filmmaker like John Sayles to Scottish schoolteachers - and onwards from there to young learners in Scottish schools and beyond.
The 2022 Scottish International Film Education Conference (16-17 June) is all online and free to attend. Find tickets here.
Jamie Chambers is the founding editor of the Film Education Journal (@filmeducationj on Twitter) and a film lecturer at the University of Edinburgh
