Everything’s Coming Together as Everything’s Falling Apart: Radical Hope for Filmmaking Educators

Collaborating on a range of filmmaking curriculum development and investing considerable effort in teaching has prompted reflection on our role as educators. We find ourselves questioning our objectives and contemplating how best to articulate our mission within the constraints of a flawed neo-liberal system. Our aim is to navigate this complex landscape and define our purpose while striving to achieve it, despite the challenges posed by the current educational paradigm.

The questions this paper seeks to ask, in the specific context of filmmaking education, are: 1. What are the alternatives? and 2. how might we go about encouraging a more radical agenda through our pedagogic practice? Few tools seem appropriate to the current climate but there are options that are important to imagine (or better still, to enact!) One of those is the notion of ‘radical hope’. For Bloch (1996), as for our purposes here, a condition of art is hope. Conversely, art is also a condition of hope.
Hjort claims that ‘the priorities and philosophies of institutions devoted to practice-oriented film education have a decisive impact on filmmakers’ creative outlooks, working practices, and networks, shaping not only the stylistic (visual and narrative) regularities that define distinctive bodies of cinematic work but the dynamics of a given film industry’ (2013: p.34). What’s left then, is to consider what impact such radical hope might encourage in educators and our students. We need to readdress, by encouraging others, the ways in which the work educators are doing in higher education spaces, is genuinely shaping the future of art, design, our creative industries and cultures.