The Elite

Over the staircase connecting the lobby and basement floors of the Tisch
School of the Arts is a plaque announcing the members of the Honorary Board of Directors,
a roll call of Tisch alumnni who’ve distinguished themselves. The list ranges from the widely
respected (Ang Lee) to the widely reviled (Brett Rattner), with no sense of discrimination between
the two. The school’s attitude to successful directors it has unleashed is akin to Chuck
Klosterman’s description of how a small town’s bulletin board will post news of both its serial
killers and Nobel prize winners: “it’s just nice to see somebody doing something.”

The snarky, leaden-irony thing to do here would be to write something like “It’s strange
that what’s generally hailed as one of the country’s best film schools should have produced so
few of its leading art-house sensations.” But it’s not actually that surprising; NYU does not so
much dictate to its audience as reflect it. Because film is a big, profitable business, an American
film school cannot afford to indulge in foibles and eccentricities the way, say, Denmark
could afford to nurture an enfant terrible like Lars von Trier; smaller countries with smaller
industries and profit margins have less at stake. It would make sense that, at best, America’s
film schools generally produce talented commercial artists like M. Night Shyamalan and Steven
Spielberg, whose innate understanding of cinematic technique can exceed their intentions
for it. American independent artists tend to forge their way up from the margins, which
is, all things considered, probably OK.

It is not, therefore, innately very surprising or distressing that NYU’s criteria for “successful
director” is primarily financial. Remove the word “innately,” however, and it’s actually kind of
disturbing. In no other allegedly creative sanctum is this kind of naked emulation of financial success
encouraged: English departments don’t teach Tom Clancy, art schools don’t offer seminars
on Thomas Kinkade, etc. An anecdote – bearing in mind that one Professor does not a school
make: in my first screenwriting class at NYU, I encountered an embittered Hollywood hack who
taught us to write for money first, with rewrites-on-demand as our primary tool. A veteran of 3
screenplays which had been bought but never made, his crowning achievement had been the
story of a mediocre boxer who discovers he has the makings of a jump-rope champion. Written
in the Disney family film mode, it was subsequently re-written multiple times to fit in with whatever
had scored at the box office that weekend (once in Dodgeball style, etc.) but still never left
development hell. “There’s hundreds of writers out there who refused to change their words,”
he told us. “Fine; don’t eat. One time I wrote a movie about a relationship and they told me ‘Take
it to France. It’s too adult.’” Lessons learned: there’s only one system to make your movies in,
and you better learn its rules. Wasn’t art supposed to be about something more than the pursuit
of commercial success - which, don’t get me wrong, is nice, but to close off all other avenues of
expression in its pursuit? The idea that business and aesthetics are hierarchies which have no
overlap, and should be privileged accordingly, is absurd. In a medium where huge amounts of
money have real repercussions, being responsible about money is an ethical as well as practical
proposition, and Claire Denis’ admonition to find a budget that matches your film and vice-versa
should be observed.

To be fair, this teacher represented an anomaly at NYU insofar as he was blatantly obsessed
with money, and fired after one semester. The problem isn’t the school’s overweening commercialism,
but rather that it doesn’t impose any kind of coherent guidelines. The production
department has pockets of avant-garde dissension, proud ex-hacks, moderate best-of-bothworlds-
types in the middle, and no unifying approach to any of this. I’ve been simultaneously
blasted with Maya Daren and told that Oliver Stone’s Wall Street is one of the best-structured
films ever. Thankfully for me, I’m far too arrogant and opinionated to listen to anyone anyway.
But what about those who are a bit more impressionable? Sure, the counter-argument is that
breadth of influence, rather than depth, will allow students to encounter various philosophies
and find one that suits them best, but cinematic ideology is not akin to finding the right pair of
jeans at the Gap. It is something that is nurtured, something that develops over time.

Assuming idealism trumps financial pragmatism for the moment, let’s work with a few
assumptions, namely that my tastes are unapologetically skewed to the art-damaged, and
that this is a good thing - as endorsed, for example, by the Cannes Film Festival, the closest
thing we have to an annual international quorum on the best of new international film. Receiving
the Palme d’Or is notoriously the frequent kiss of commercial death for subsequent US
release (although in recent years the jury’s politically-motivated endorsement of Fahrenheit
9/11 proved an exception). So let’s assume that the generally acknowledged arbiter for What
Is Good In Film Today is pretty much at least 80% at odds with the prevailing American cinematic
climate, even as said climate admits that Cannes is The Elite, The Few, The Proud and
should be respected - and then left alone.

Is it, in that light, so unreasonable to ask that The Nation’s Leading Film School unapologetically
endorse the elite? Apparently so; film production teaches only technical skill, rarely
attempting to endorse aesthetic criteria. That’s a crude generalization; attempts are generally
made to mold students into understanding that form and content are somehow related, that
framing matters, and that editing is more than the stringing together of your best takes. What’s
missing is the sense of any film history other than what students bring with them: often, what’s
reinforced is the idea that the films the ambitious would-be director came in with are the only
ones that matter. I’ve taken classes where whole days were spent on overrated phenomena
like Requiem for a Dream, The Usual Suspects, and the other flashy regulars. The sense that
older, seemingly irrelevant films matter is a matter for each teacher to decide, and many of the
teachers know less than the students.

Jacques Rivette has decried the “idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced
if you see too much. Actually, it’s when you see too little that you run the risk of being influenced.
If you see a lot, you can choose the films you want to be influenced by.” Unfortunately,
Tisch’s lack of dedication to cinematic history for production majors - unlike its plans for cinema
studies majors - runs the risk of producing a batch of kids who all think that Aranofsky
and Tarantino are the last word in the means of expression. And while it’s true that a true
talent like Tarantino can always transcend their influences, online cinephile Theo Panayides’
speculation of what might have occurred if he had gotten “obsessed with Bergman and Antonioni
rather than Bruce Lee and Sonny Chiba, back in that long-ago misspent cinephile
youth” is enough to show what’s wrong with this haphazard approach.

Drilling production majors in technique only without stopping to get them to think about
a) why they like what they like b) whether what they like represents the entirety of what they
might be interested in is sort of like training business majors without a hefty dose of ethical
thinking attached about whether or not the most expeditious way to make a profit is morally
OK or not. Which is exactly what’s wrong with big business in the first place, but I digress.
Cinema is too vast a medium to be left to the comic-book geeks, the indignant anti-elitists who
insist that to Have Fun is the ultimate goal of film and that all else is raw pretension.

Why does it matter? Because while what’s popular is sometimes excellent (Tarantino) and
sometimes blatant trash (My Big Fat Greek Wedding), what’s missing is the critical facility to
distinguish between the two, and not all the innate talent in the world can restore taste and
discrimination where it’s never been cultivated. To appreciate film is, to a certain extent, to be
exposed to a lot of it. Take Requiem for a Dream, a jaw-dropping technical feat wrapped around
the endlessly repeated message that Drugs Are Bad. Its widespread appreciation by potential
future auteurs is deadly, because it sends the message that technical achievements in the service
of a 5th-grade understanding of the world is acceptable.

None of these thoughts are new. What’s surprising, then, is that they haven’t come up
at Tisch. The production department has a lot on its mind - foremost, perhaps, upgrading
from an antiquated 16mm-understanding of the world to an entirely digital understanding of
production - but thinking about non-production aspects seems to have slipped off the radar
entirely. Maybe the cordoning off of cinema studies from production is the mistake here: the
very idea that criticism is a method of production and vice-versa has disappeared.

In the spirit of not being a complete enfant terrible, some suggestions for reform:

1) While it may be the inherent nature of academia to be fractious - disputes build careers, after
all - the film production department at Tisch seems completely unaware of and/or indifferent
to its alternate components. Different teaching voices are obviously to be encouraged, but not
to the point of incoherence. In keeping with the pro-film-history slant of this piece, might I
suggest unification at the level of “Language Of Film”? This class generally attempts to meld a
basic understanding of visual language with an introduction to film history, and the selection of
works to be screened is left entirely to the instructor’s discretion, sometimes inadvisedly. Some
standardized required viewing - hopefully extending beyond groaningly obvious, over-parsed
works like Rear Window—would at least help lay a common foundation.

2) A course on film-criticism as a supplement seems essential, perhaps as one of the required
3 History credits. Most students are unaware that critics can act as anything other than consumer
guides; while “Language of Film” encourages students to study mise-en-scene, editing
schemes, etc., it doesn’t provide them, ironically enough, with the “language” to discuss it
properly (aside from the Bordwell textbook, whose usefulness is limited).

3) The credits requirements seem to be composed with the idea that film students are inherently
idiots and will fail utterly at any non-film classes; outside of Tisch classes are a rarity.
Upping the required quotient exposes students (especially those who do little outside reading)
to new ideas; if film classes teach them how to make, other classes can open them up to new
possibilities as to what to make. This solves the 8 1/2 problem of students eternally working
from themselves, often without the requisite sense of distance or objectivity to pull this off.

4) None of this is intended as a clarion cry to drive out people who enjoy and want to work
with mainstream storytelling conventions. Nonetheless, it seems unfair to force students with
different intentions to take the same screenwriting classes; there is room for different voices
in every production class, but the screenwriting classes, as currently taught, pretty much
demand formula. In an effort to appear open-minded, the department has forbidden teaching
the formulas of Syd Field but allowed the formulas of Robert McKee; needless to say, this
makes no sense. Bring back Field and McKee if need be, but try early on to determine, voluntarily,
which kids are interested in alternative screenwriting methods (a whole book on which
has been co-authored by the department’s own Ken Dancyger) and arrange for them to be
taught by someone actively interested in films whose narrative methods are unconventional
(e.g., unconventional beyond the profitable if fascinating work of Charlie Kaufman or the temporal
ellipses of Tarantino). It may degenerate into creative writing chaos, but it’s a chance
worth taking. It can’t be argued that this discriminates against mainstream writing methods,
because they’re inescapable. “I have always wanted to write a novel with no people in it,” the
Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has said, and what could be fairer than that?