The Servile Arts

Once upon a time, the world of education was divided into three spheres:  Fine Arts, Liberal Arts, and Servile Arts.  Fine (or “Beaux”) Arts means today pretty much what it meant when the phrase was coined.  Think of bohemians in berets on the southern bank of the Seine.  Painters, sculptors, poets, all making beautiful things.

Liberal and Servile Arts perhaps require a bit more historical context.  Imagine a bunch of rich lads in Genoa, drinking wine as they plot to spend their fathers’ fortunes.  Theirs is a gentrified world not unlike Downton Abbey (though predating it by at least six centuries).  Lots of leisure time for the upper classes, but with less indoor plumbing and more church attendance.  The fellows decide – more or less as a hobby – they’d like to know something about mathematics.  They pool a few ducats and pay some monk to teach them a little algebra.  Voila!  The University is born.

The subjects they choose are meant to better the minds and character of free citizens.  Artes liberales – the arts of liberty:  grammar, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, arithmetic, astronomy, and the like.  As Academia matures, these subjects expand to include the humanities and sciences.

Lesser known and spoken of today are the Servile Arts.  These are civilization’s necessary skills, practiced by… well… not free men.  A list of these Artes mechanicae from the ninth century includes weaving, cooking, agriculture, masonry, metalwork, and warfare (the martial art).  I'd argue that the class-informed division of Liberal Arts and Servile Arts persists and complicates instruction in a subject like Digital Filmmaking.

Serfing the internet

Imagine, Rachel, a first-year filmmaker is taught the meaning of the phrase “shooting ratio.”  She writes it on a flash card.  On the back of the card is a terse definition:  “the ratio between a film’s final edited running time and the total footage exposed or captured for the project.”  Her roommate quizzes her on it and other terms from her Cinema Appreciation course.  She recalls it on the final exam and even uses it once in class discussion.

Rachel believes her flash cards prepare her her for a 200-level production course.  The professor hands her a camera and tells to practice a focus pull.  Rachel sets the device on a tripod and twists the focus ring.  The frame’s clarity (and viewer’s attention) moves from the background of her shot to its foreground.  She pulls focus a dozen times during the class, until she achieves a satisfying take.  Rachel surrenders the camera to other members of her group.  The five of them take turns doing what Rachel did.  The ritual is repeated around three other cameras.  At the end of the period, all twenty class members will claim they learned how to do a focus pull.

But they are no more proficient at focus pulls than is a bricklayer who’s laid only a dozen bricks.  Who can say he’s “learned” to lay bricks?  A craftsman who can reliably repeat the action on demand, whose mortar lines are consistently even, whose resulting walls are level and plumb.  In short, the useful skills of the Servile Arts take longer to acquire than the knowledge of the Liberal Arts.

But the current paradigm of “learning” the Servile Arts is a bit like following a recipe.  Tom has limited kitchen experience, but is having a dinner party and wants to bake a cake.  He sifts through the internet, collects ingredients, and combines them as instructed.  He pulls the result from the oven and sets it before impressed guests.  They make appreciative yummy noises. 

Tom is not a chef.  He doesn’t understand which ingredients act as leavening agents and which offer flavor.  He has never substituted kefir for buttermilk.  He has not experimented with presentation or garnishes.

In this way, Tom is like Adam, an amateur editor.  Adam is assembling a music video and wants to dissolve from one shot to another.  He looks through the software’s help menu, then consults a YouTube tutorial.  Now he knows the recipe of function keys that will accomplish a given visual effect.  The result pleases him and perhaps even his audience of Facebook followers.

It would be overstatement to call Adam a learned editor.  Or Rachel a competent camera operator.  They each followed a recipe, a filmmaking tip.  Until they’ve done their tasks so often their fingers can perform without their brains, until they can customize their tasks to create meaning, they are amateurs.  They are walking, but they are looking at their feet.  They are dancing, but their lips still move as they count steps.

Rachel is frustrated.  She did so well in Cinema Appreciation.  But it’s taking her for freaking ever to prep for the camera quiz.  Her prof’s asked her to submit five well-executed focus pulls, five smooth pans, and five tilts – all while obeying composition’s Rule of Thirds.

Some of her frustrations arise from the sixteen-week term, the fifty-minute class period, the mythic ratio of “two hours outside class for every one hour in it.”  The Academy’s trusted timetables are better suited to acquiring the Liberal Arts.  Even basic competence in the Servile Arts requires more hours of practice.

Yet the pressure is on to increase the usefulness of a college degree.  Parents in this economy, fearful of considerable student debt, always question their child’s employment prospects.  They do not ask “What will Johnny know when he graduates?”  Rather, they ask “What can Johnny do with his degree?”  These customer inquiries are shoving the Servile Arts into the Liberal Arts mold – frequently to the consternation of students and teachers.