Video 1B
Cinema Studies: New York Times article
14 Points (2 points each question)
For this assignment you will need to answer questions on an article recently printed in the New York Times. You should find the answers as you read the article. The title of the article refers to an M.B.A., which is a Master of Business Administration degree. This is a degree earned by some people after they have earned a four year college degree. The article discusses how a background in video and multimedia production is valuable to people interested in business and public policy because it is the “professional language of the future.”
Please write-out (do
not type) your answers to the questions below on a full sheet of binder paper
with your name, period, and date printed at the top.
1. What did law student Rick Herbst say about power structures and how people influence each other?
2. How many colleges and universities offer film studies and related programs?
3. How many jobs are there for film producers or directors?
4. Which university has the nation’s oldest film school?
5. According to Elizabeth Daly, where is the greatest digital divide?
6. What did DJ Diplo say about his songs?
7. How many college courses at USC require term papers to include video, sound and internet components?
____________________________
Is a Cinema Studies
Degree the New M.B.A.?
By
New
York Times
RICK HERBST, now attending
current decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he
graduated last year from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied
filmmaking with no intention of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw
his major as a way to learn about power structures and how individuals
influence each other.
"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and
media images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to
grant power to those who are marginalized or currently not
represented," said Mr. Herbst, who envisions a future in the public
policy arena. The communal nature of film, he said, has a distinct
power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his cinematic
skills to do exactly that.
At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about
the fate of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries
routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not
altogether surprising that film school - promoted as a shot at an
entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract those who believe
that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional language of
the future.
Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs
in film studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily
over the years, even while professional employment opportunities in the
film business remain minuscule. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, there are only about 15,050 jobs for film producers or
directors, which means just a few hundred openings, at best, each year.
Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has
often turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the road
to doing something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a film
major from the University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled through years
of uninspiring nonunion work managing crews on commercials, television
pilots and the occasional feature before landing his noncinematic job
designing advertising for Modern Luxury Media LLC, a Chicago-based
magazine publisher.
"You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll
work into this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more
pigeonholed as a technician," said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.
For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job
is no longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique - newly
democratized by digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to
a few thousand dollars and renders the very word "film" an anachronism
- the bedrock of careers as far afield as law and the military.
At the University of Southern California, whose School of
Cinema-Television is the nation's oldest film school (established in
1929), fully half of the university's 16,500 undergraduate students
take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because
Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its classes to the
university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that
says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie
world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who
can read and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said.
"Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody."
In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.'s film school to take
advantage of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to
Hollywood have begun to view their cinematic skills as a new form of
literacy. One such is David Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after a
stint in the military intending to become a filmmaker, but - even after
having had the producer/director Robert Zemeckis as a mentor - found
himself drawn to the school's Institute for Creative Technologies,
where he creates military training applications in a variety of virtual
reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he developed was privately
screened for the directors John Milius and Steven Spielberg, who wanted
to understand the military's vision of the future.
"That was like a film student's dream," said Mr. Hendrie, who
nonetheless believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely to
accomplish on the studio circuit. "I found myself increasingly
demoralized by my experiences trying to pitch myself as a director for
films like 'Dude, Where's My Car?' " Mr. Hendrie said. "What I'm doing
here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests I've always had, and in
the end excited my passion more."
In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD
that warned against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to show
three dead bodies. That and the series of gruesome execution videos
that have surfaced in the Middle East are perhaps only the most extreme
face of a complex sort of post-literacy in which cinematic visuals and
filmic narrative have become commonplace.
Melding easily with the growing digital folk culture, some film majors
have simply taken to creating art forms outside the boundaries of the
established film business. In one such instance, Wes Pentz, a k a DJ
Diplo - a 2003 graduate of Temple University, where film majors are
encouraged to invent new career paths in museums, leisure businesses
and elsewhere - broke through with his trademark Hollertronix, a style
modeled on cinematic soundtracks. "I think of my songs as having a
movement, like I would watch in a film, and there's a narrative feel to
them," said Mr. Pentz, who said he had learned to frame music
differently because of his film school experience.
In the public policy arena, meanwhile, students like Yale's Mr. Herbst
hope to heighten political debate with productions far more pointed
than the most political feature film. Even a picture like "Hotel
Rwanda," with its unblinking look at African genocide, is "a soup
kitchen approach," Mr. Herbst said: "You're offered something to eat,
but there are no vitamins." Bringing film directly into politics, he
expects to throw objectivity out the window and change minds - perhaps
not an unrealistic aim at a time when, in a bit of what a headline in
The Wall Street Journal characterized as "film noir," the Edward D.
Jones & Company brokerage has entered the fray over the proposed Social
Security overhaul with a highly produced video.
To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make
economic sense of film education, which in the past was often a long
path to nowhere. "Most find their way, and the skills they learn from
us are applicable to other careers and pursuits," Dale Pollock, dean of
the School of Filmmaking at the North Carolina School of the Arts, said
of his students. "So we're not wasting their time or money."
Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that
to generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's
mission. More than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students
to create term papers and projects that use video, sound and Internet
components - and for Ms. Daley, it's not enough. "If I had my way, our
multimedia literacy honors program would be required of every student
in the university," she said.