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.

UFVA 2012

Chicago Stillness

Though the spacing of Columbia College's buildings isn't exactly what I'd call "chummy," my semi-sequestered week in Chicago at the annual conference of the University Film and Video Association was not entirely the fault of an urban campus.  Last year, my named peppered the Boston program:  a film screening; a panel presentation; a peer response.  This year – depleted by two overloaded semesters and the (as-yet fruitless) job search for a teaching partner – I brought nothing.  I was quiet.  I was still.  I was an observer.  An audience member, not a performer.

I felt guilty.  A transplanted Southerner, I have recently contracted the Midwestern work ethic.  Apparently these Scando-Germanic folk fear being caught idle by the returning Christ.  Even Sabbath here is understood as a time – not of rest – but of scheduled leisure activities.  “Play as hard as you work,” I’ve been told.  So to sit, and to listen, and to watch – can be hard.

The Price and History of Guilt

I came to Calvin from one of the many Christian colleges that teeter on solvency’s brink.   There, research and networking were decried as a dean’s “fetish.”  There, any member of the faculty fortunate enough to attend even a regional conference might well “waste” 10% of the school’s entire professional development budget in a single weekend.  Devaluing the collegiality of professional scholars fomented an atmosphere of miserly resentment or listless despair.  Why bother applying for limited funds to attend a conference – only to be told “no”?  Why does that department – and not mine – merit travel money again this year?

But if professors there were denied the means to share their scholarship and improve their pedagogy, they were not exempted from the demands of peer review.  The college’s external accrediting agency – not to mention its internal mechanism for granting promotion and tenure – expected evidence of scholarship: publications, gallery showings, presentations, membership in professional organizations.  Administrators wanted proof that the wheels of intellect still turned in the mind of its professorate, but wouldn’t (couldn’t?) support it with travel funds, release time, or grant-writing assistance.

The vicious vise amounted to an unfunded mandate.  If scholarship was to be done, it was to be done on a teacher’s own time.  If scholarship was to be presented, it was to be presented on a teacher’s own dime.  Perhaps that would have been an acceptable bargain had salaries been atypically high.  But I taught there for a dozen years and never grossed as much as $40K.

Despite appearances, I’m not really ragging on that school.  There are too many like it.  And professors at them are often quite willing to sigh and endure, having accepted appointments that are, in their minds, the equivalent of postings to the mission field.  Indeed, they may interpret (or court) privation as evidence of a faithful life.  I know I did.

A World Without Academic Conferences

I was a newly minted scholar.  I believed what senior faculty and administrators around me taught me about academia.  I believed it was normal to teach 21½ hours in a single semester (yes, you read that right).  Why wouldn’t I believe those things?  There were no counter-examples in my life.  I was the school’s lone Communication professor.  And I never set foot off the island to compare my life with others in the discipline.

I appropriated without question that college’s definition of “scholar,” partly because I was trained in false pride.  “We are a teaching college, not a research institution,” we beamed in unison.  We cast a superior sneer toward other schools that had “sold out.” They valued the cool steel and glass of new microscopes, the omniversity’s icy ivory spires, the tainted influence of sports club boosters.  We – lovers of Jesus all – we valued accredited hours of "seat-time," undergraduates taught by tenure-track faculty members (not graduate assistants or adjuncts), and mentoring relationships with our students.

And I believed it.  I swallowed it whole.  As if friend-making and pedagogical idea-swapping within the broader Academy ever detracted from the classroom experience.  As if broadening my own mind and influence ever equipped me with less to share with others.  As if reflecting deeply about my motives or skills or aspirations or interests as a communicator ever made it more difficult to articulate those things as a teacher.

What a Calvinist Deserves

Thus loudly sings the voice of guilt:  I do not deserve lonely Chicago.  I cannot justify my presence here.  I must not enjoy hors d'oeuvres at a new media reception, a picnic on Northerly Island, a banquet at Adler Planetarium.  I cannot endure the extravagance of traveling to hear how others structure curricula or replace obsolete technology.  Working harder, I can improve the student experience of group learning on my own – without spending Calvin's money on Amtrak fares from Grand Rapids. I can watch a documentary about the history of the banjo on YouTube from home – without hearing the director speak in person about production decisions that shaped the film.

I should be in the office.  I should be writing syllabi.  I should be in the classroom.  I should be teaching.  Always teaching.  Shouldn’t I?

No.  I will be in the office next week.  Not now.  I will teach in September.  I will bring Chicago to my students.

Everything

The title of last week's address, "Everything You Need to Know About Filmmaking," was chosen on my behalf by members of the Covenant College Film Club. Saying everything that can be said about filmmaking in one hour (to the extent it's even possible) would be like filling a thimble with a fire hose. Panicked by the aimless hopelessness of the task, I thought of a time when folks said to Jesus "Tell us everything." He said, "Okay, here's everything you need to know about the law, everything you need to take home from the prophets: love God. Hard. Hard like 'throwing-yourself-full-speed-against-the-wall hard.' And here's another thing that's kinda like it: Love even the folks you're inclined to hate as if they were your neighbors."

If those two great commandments constitute everything you need to know about life, then maybe everything you need to know about filmmaking is how to love God and neighbor with camera, microphone, and editing software. Easier said than done, of course.

Consider a not-too-recent shoot of a variety show episode. Our musical guest had, the night before her television appearance, suffered an acne outbreak of biblical proportions -- this in our studio's first semester after an $800,000 upgrade to High Definition. Now acne in standard def and acne in high def are two totally different things. My students sensed this and immediately huddled in the control room, asking "how do we use lighting, lenses, and shot size to love our neighbor and tell the truth?"

Many definitions of godly filmmaking are oversimplified contrasts of virtue and vice as regards a movie's content. "A godly movie doesn't have gratuitous sex, violence, or crude language," some might say. But choosing virtue over vice is milk. The acne incident represents a deeper, smarter, meatier faith-walk on the tight rope between one virtue and another.

Such walks are legs on the lifetime journey to "Everything."

Try

Phone calls punctuated last night's dinner as students discovered the file server intranet had crashed the night before projects were due in two of my classes. I sensed an educational opportunity in the tide of panic and sent the following e-mail:

Yes, o my children. I have heard your lament, rising like incense. No matter how many chickens you sacrifice on the altar of technology, ye cannot revive the ethernet. Verily, I say, follow ye in the way of the parable:

Once there was a servant tasked to split logs for his master's hearth. But when the servant came to the woodpile, he found the axe handle broken in twain. "I cannot chop wood," he said aloud to any who would listen. Yet secretly, the servant was glad in his heart, for he dreaded wood chopping more than all the chores of the farm.

A second servant -- wise and much beloved of her master -- found the same broken axe and used it as a hatchet to size smaller twigs for the fireplace. When the master returned in the evening, no logs were split, yet there was still warmth for his home.

Just because you cannot do all... it does not follow that you cannot do any. Media production is problem solving. Go thou and do likewise.

It strikes me that honor students (easily spotted thanks to bumper stickers on the minivans of soccer moms everywhere) are ill-prepared for inevitable failure. They have little practice taking responsibility for incomplete tasks in ways that are honorable. They are not trained to ask forgiveness; they seldom offer drafts or other paper trails as proof of industry and process.

For goodness sake, attempt something.

Teaching as Learning (Again)

Too often I forget that teaching is the best way to learn.

I'm trying to be particularly transparent with a small crew of filmmakers who will be accompanying me on a three-week shoot near New York in January. To that end, I've set up a private blog wherein I'm deconstructing the process of film making. Recently, I wrote about a long shower during which I considered the composition of interview footage and the purpose of a "B" camera. It shouldn't surprise me by now (but it always does) that the act of explaining my ideas gives me even better ideas. As I blogged about the emotional intensity that a "B" camera's extreme close-ups might convey, it occurred to me I might mount the "B" on the jib we're hauling to NYC. I know I'm not the first person to think of putting a "B"camera on a jib. Even so, it might add a rare and distinctive lilt to the footage.

The lonely shower is a fine and reliable an incubator of good ideas. But perhaps it's not the greenhouse. Perhaps the necessary transparency of a master explaining (even justifying) himself to apprentices improves the creative product and process of both.