Contents Nº 5

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Nº 5 PEDAGOGIES OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS

Editorial. Pedagogies of the Creative Process
Gonzalo de Lucas

DOCUMENTS

The Goodwill for a Meeting: That’s cinema
Excerpts by Henri Langlois, Jean-Louis Comolli, Nicholas Ray

FILMS UNDER DISCUSSION. INTERVIEWS

Sharing the Gestures of the Creative Process

ABSTRACT

The article considers key issues in order to develop an analysis of creation in different formative fields. It bases the approach on empathy with the creative process of the filmmaker, the comparative viewing of excerpts, and rejection of the scholarly and academic deconstruction of films for analysis. Based on experience, the author presents some of the methodologies that he has developed for the training of teachers and as professor at La Fémis. For those teachers to transmit cinema from the heart of the cinematographic creative process, he considers it fundamental that they experience practice. In the case of the cinema school and its students, it is essential that they are able to consider cinematographic issues through the comparative viewing of a range of films, the first-hand and in-depth accounts of filmmakers and the analysis of their own practices. The author ends by outlining the risks posed by academicism in cinema schools as opposed to the experience of artistic creation.

Alain Bergala

Filmmaker-spectator, Spectator-filmmaker: José Luis Guerin’s Thoughts on his Experience as a Teacher

ABSTRACT

José Luis Guerin reflects on his teaching experience in relation to his filmmaker work. Firstly, in order to show the forms of a film, to transmit the desire, the emotion related to cinema and its processes of implication, he contextualizes the choice of the film fragments thus encouraging his students to the experience as spectators within the classroom. Furthermore, regarding the documentary workshops he imparts, and particularly based on the one held in The Escuela de Cine de San Antonio de los Baños (EICTV), he points out the benefits of establishing restrictions to stimulate and to accompany the creative processes. Lastly, through his painting workshop, he reflects on the reversible look of painting and cinema.

Carolina Sourdis

ARTICLES

In Praise of Love. Cinema en Curs

ABSTRACT

The article exposes some of the methodologies of Cinema en curs, a film pedagogy program developed in schools and high schools with students between ages 3 and 18. The first part of the article argues two of the program’s main principles: 1) the importance that the discovery of cinema lies in a creative approach, and, therefore, as a means and mode of knowledge, thought, emotion; 2) the commitment for a film transmission that awakens the joy and love for cinema. The second part of the article describes some of the processes and approaches that Cinema en curs practices to stimulate the students in this approximation and appreciation towards film: 1) the approach to cinema from the place of the filmmaker, considering the different issues of creation and enjoying the cinematographic emotions; 2) the importance of ‘learning to see’; 3) discovering cinema through film excerpts of important filmmakers, organizing this discovery through different cinematographic concerns; 4) the close relation between the viewing and the practice. The text concludes by highlighting the value of cinema as a way of being in the world.

Núria Aidelman, Laia Colell

A Daring Hypothesis

ABSTRACT

The author begins the article by reflecting on his involvement in film transmission based on his experience and commitment as a filmmaker. He then narrates about his experiences in his first Cinema en curs documentary workshop and exposes the workshop’s development in all its phases. He highlights a few fundamental elements in each one of them, particular several discoveries throughout the creation process: documentation, by means of texts and photographs; screenings of excerpts and how to awaken sensibility, appreciation, and capture beauty; a script built by means of consensus; teamwork and the magical and revealing moments of shooting the film; editing and the infinite possibilities of film writing. Cinema becomes part of life and the experience is highly transforming for students and everyone involved in the project. In the article’s final part, the author emphasizes in the importance of teamwork between filmmakers and teachers, and the value of the teachers in the project, highlighting their profound understanding of film and their decisive role in the transforming and revolutionary entrance of cinema in schools that Cinema en curs brings to play.

Jonás Trueba

To Shoot through Emotion, to Show Thought processes. The Montage of Film Fragments in the Creative Process

ABSTRACT

In the project Cinema en curs, viewings of film fragments, selected and interrelated to stimulate students creative processes, generate a methodology of comparative film revolving around ideas of how to film an emotion and through a cinematic emotion. The choice of shots through which an aesthetic tension is created between the camera and what is being filmed brings about a recognition and montage of common gestures running through the creative process that don’t compartmentalize eras, styles, or places. The student’s increased awareness, his opening up to the world, and his aesthetic experience, is encouraged through the viewing of fragments without the cultural filter that are usually activated in film schools. In this way, they are taken in as artistic events, reflecting upon the external and internal thoughts materialised through them in hindsight. The last section of the article uses the comparative commentary of three specific fragments from To Our Loves (À nos amours, Maurice Pialat, 1983), Badlands (Terrence Malick, 1973) and They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) to talk about how emotions are created through the editing of a shot.

Gonzalo de Lucas

The Transmission of the Secret. Mikhail Romm in the VGIK

ABSTRACT

This paper describes a particular episode of the VGIK school –the oldest filmmakers training centre of the world– to study the soviet cinematographic tradition based on the figure of Mikhail Romm, his direction workshop held in the fifties and sixties, and the disconcerting and cyclonic encounter with his students. Furthermore, the long and interrupted process that implied the articulation of the subjectivity of the filmmaker in Soviet cinema, and which connects the work of Romm with that of Tarkovski, is outlined here through the analysis of the montage of Ordinary Fascism (Obyknovennii fashizm, 1965), where Romm inscribes his reflexive voice in first person. Finally, the history of the VGIK is read both as a chain of transmission and tradition between generations of filmmakers, and a place to confront the political and personal positions great filmmakers such as Einsestein, assumed when they were mentors at the Institution.

Carlos Muguiro

The Biopolitical Militancy of Joaquín Jordá

ABSTRACT

Joaquín Jordá’s work suffers from a material precariousness that contrasts with an exceptional reception by different collectives, which periodically reinforces the actuality of the films. Beyond its cinematographic qualities, the trajectory of this filmmaker represents the transit between a classic militancy and one of a biopolitical order. The paradigmatic case is Numax presenta… (1979). This militant film broke the patterns in which a labour strike should be narrated, to result as an example of a new productivity model according to postfordist ideas. The discursive intensity of the documentaries by Jordá, endorses a new category of the linguistic and dialogical event that would allow their identification as postmedia documentaries. This kind of documentary practice transforms the debates integrated to the film, into acts of biopolitical militancy. The critique to a social democracy governance regime –which has required the paradigm shift– will be held in further tittles such as Monkeys like Becky (Mones com la Becky, 1999) and De nens (2003).

Carles Guerra