The Art of Education: Film Education on Film

December 10 to 13, 2008

 

Cinema has created a genre which generally receives little attention, despite its wealth of material. One might call it "Film Education on Film" – when cinema is being taught and reflected upon within the medium itself. The genre does not limit itself to the usual boundaries between formats and disciplines; film education on film can be found on TV, on DVDs, in experimental cinema and in specific art contexts. The goal of this research project is to assemble and study these films, to annotate them in a database, and to present them to the public via screenings, essays and panel discussions. The audience addressed by the project includes not only cinephiles, but filmmakers, TV editors, school teachers, critics, and film scholars. The material that is being compiled can be utilised in various professional areas.

 

The Vienna screenings look at three different geographic, cultural and historical constellations. In West German TV, film critics and editors have been developing outstanding audiovisual essays on the cinema since the early 1970s. In France, where film appreciation has long enjoyed a prominent status, some of the most far-reaching educational work in the past decade has been proposed in the DVD medium. In Austria, the “educational” films-about-film mostly derive from the avant-garde – a domain of radically poetic research into the historicity and the basic elements of the film medium. The programme includes 35 films from all over the world – and it will give a special focus on the work of the two participating artists and educators: Alain Bergala and Gustav Deutsch.

 

A project of Entuziazm (Michael Baute, Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, Stefanie Schlüter, Erik Stein), supported by the German Federal Foundation for Culture.