Panel 5 – School Case Studies
Chair: Marcin Matalyński
Film producer and academic teacher. Since 2015 Deputy Director and Head of International Relations at The Lodz Film School. CEO of the Indeks Film Studio. Producer of three feature films including “Tower. A Bright Day.” by Jagoda Szelc presented at Berlinale Forum 2018. 11:30 - Capturing the Zeitgeist Ginette Harrold (LFS, UK)
Ginette Harrold heads up the Film Archive and Film Festivals dept at London Film School. Ginette has worked in film archives for over twenty years. Previous roles include Film Librarian ETV (Soviet Film Archives), Acquisitions and COI collections Manager at Film Images, Asst. Curator Moving Image Collections, Wellcome Trust, Freelance Film Archivist, Welcome Trust, Manager Clips&Footage Ltd, Sales Manager Footage Farm and Film Archive Manager at London Film School. Ginette has a wealth of knowledge on a variety of topics including film preservation, asset management, copyright, rights management, clip sales and distribution. LFS has welcomed students from around the world for over sixty years to explore filmmaking in the creative safety of a unique workshop atmosphere. The responses of the students as they arrive in London from around the globe is evident in the films they made- of the locality of the school, their own communities, the arts scene, and responses to politics and society, over the decades, brings a unique record of films made by young people from diverse backgrounds, showing their view of a changing world in the second half of the twentieth century. A time capsule of a diverse creative youth, often inadvertently capturing the zeitgeist with their raw unfinished short film works, produced while they are being encouraged to freely explore subjects away from commercial pressures. Subjects include commentary on Windrush, black arts, LGBT, Black and ethnic minorities, feminist animation, aging, mental health, brain surgery, counter-culture, punk, yuppies, gentrification, raving, immigrant communities, experiences of refugees, women’s rights, women and religion as a few examples. Up to the present day, award winning films approach the subjects of a migrant blending into British society, LGBT rights in Arabic countries and exploitation of labour on exclusive golf courses in the post-colonial era. The school retains its film archive, consisting of a rather overwhelming 10,000 items pertaining to around 4000-5000 films, stored in cork lined vaults off site, the earliest from 1960s. Additionally, there are materials relating the history of the school stored in the Bill Douglas Museum in Exeter. Another aspect of this collection is that of the changing pedagogy of filmmaking and methodologies of teaching. At LFS this has always been a dynamic process between student and the school, and the archive records not only how students influenced the teaching but also how the particular style of teaching echoes through the work of alumni as their career progresses.
11:44 - The FAMU VoD project Alexandra Hroncova (FAMU)
Alexandra Hroncová is the Festival & Distribution Manager at FAMU. As well as managing media and communication activities, she mainly looks after festival strategies for FAMU students’ films, deals with distributors and coordinates FAMU SVOD project. Alexandra is in charge of the journey of FAMU student films to local and foreign film screens - she seeks and establishes cooperation with prestigious and diverse film festivals around the world, focuses on festival strategies, has the administrative process of submitting films at a glance, and thanks to her you can see FAMU films for example in your cinema. She has considerable marketing communication & events experience in both higher education and the private sector and has worked as head of communications departments for the Faculty of Science, Charles University, Prague, the Czech Technical University, Eurotel, Vodafone, Philips or an important culture festivals in the Czech Republic. Her tertiary education marketing teams have won a number of awards from bodies such as Art Directors Club and The Academy of Sciences in the Czech Republic. Alexandra had studied Theory and History of Film and Audio-visual Culture at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague.FAMU VOD is a project responding to the events of the last year associated with a global pandemic, as well as to the dynamic changes in audiovisual distribution that have been going on for several years. The main purpose and goal of the project is to present all student films taken at this school during the 74 years of its existence to the Czech, foreign, professional and general public. This requires cooperation with the NFA (National Film Archive) since it is necessary to digitize hundreds of films made between the years 1961 and 1990. An establishment and existence of this platform would be beneficial for the environment of Czech VOD services, which hardly offer student work. It would also be a significant project that would be completely unique in the context of European educational institutions - FAMU would be the first film school in Europe to present such an extensive project.
11:52 - Creating the VSMU Archive Peter Csordas (VSMU)
Peter Csordás works at the Slovak Film Institute as the head of the Digital Audio-visual department. He is responsible for the digitization and restoration of film titles in the SFI film archive. He also works as a teacher at FTF VŠMU. He is a member of the research team of the project Digitization of Archive of School Film Projects Project no. 004VŠMU-4/2021.The Film and Television Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava is systematically taking steps towards the construction and management of its 30-year audio- visual content and digitization of its school film projects archive. The main goal is the gradual digitization of the internal film archive, providing access and use of archival film works for educational, cultural and representative activities of our school. The output will be a complete database of school film projects and a digitized or even restored work. The outputs of digitization will become part of the archive of FTF VŠMU with great variability of use in the teaching process, as some are school exercises and graduate films of important personalities of Slovak film makers, that are also current faculty teachers. The school will use digitized films for promotion and presentation in digital accessibility to the general professional and lay public and various distribution models.
12:00 - The Archive as Educational Tool Mieke Bernink (NFA)
At the Netherlands Film Academy, Mieke Bernink is both Head of Research and Head of the MA-programme ‘Artistic Research in and through Cinema’, which she founded in 2008. She’s also responsible for the Artist in Residence (AiR) programme of the Amsterdam University of the Arts, of which the Film Academy in part.In a world in which all of us, all the time consume and produce images and sounds, the language of knowledge and education is still that of the written word. It’s against this backdrop that the Netherlands Film Academy, some ten years ago, set up its MA- programme ‘Artistic Research in and through Cinema’, dedicated to understand and practice filmmaking as a form of knowledge production. And it’s against that same backdrop that it has now developed its own research archive. Conceived and developed as an audiovisual archive, it’s more than just an archive. It is also an educational tool, to be actively used within the master’s programme as a research method, while it will be further developed to also function as a ‘workspace’ for the next groups of students, a space of ‘collaboration’ between them and others outside of the programme, as well as an ‘exhibition space’ for those same students and our alumni. In my presentation, I will share background, process and first outcome of the project: a working proof of concept of this archival platform that will already be put to use for the group of students starting in September.