The editors requested that the first article of the film column directly relate to the Bowdoin community. By this request do they assume that there is a Bowdoin film community? Suffer me to ask another question: Why do I hear war drums reverberating beneath this simple observation, which I didn't intend to be accusatory? Why does a college need to be, like a prospective high school senior, well-rounded, diversified and in all categories excellent?
Bowdoin is not a film school. Bowdoin doesn't pretend to be a film school; the administration has expressed little interest in offering a film major. Yet, somewhere between reality and publicity, between the administration's 'no' and its publications' 'yes', the Bowdoin community comes to not only take an informed interest in, but also to actively participate in, every form of art, science, politics, economics and esemplastic theory.
Thus, I'm supposed to drum up the fruits of transient resolve, half-assed efforts and unspectacular personal sacrifices to fulfill the requirement (no longer, if ever, the serious expectation) of a liberal arts school's renaissance breadth. But excepting a handful of summer internships, I've little to report. Once again—this isn't an accusation. Any one "Little Ivy" shouldn't be expected to do everything; but they shouldn't claim to either.
In Bowdoin's defense, there are good reasons not to be seriously involved with film. For instance, professors in the humanities and soft sciences have fun teaching film as an effective vehicle for content and as a refreshing excursion into another form besides the printed word. Reasoning that film appeals to multiple senses in ways which have not yet been comprehensively appraised, they assign papers about these films in which students can refer to cinematically evoked atmospheres as sound bases for arguments that would otherwise take so many quoted passages to corroborate. In other words, these film excursions can be used for brief, excused returns to an 'impressionistic' critical mode. And for this reason students love them.
But add a full film department and what might happen? For one, Professors in the English department might be hedged in with people who 1) speak too much of their own language without having suffered through all that bloody source material and supporting text and 2) might tell them how to use film.
A second reason: Bad film is worse than bad literature. Offer a creating writing course and all students need is a laptop—poetry is a (financially) cheaper way of expressing oneself. Students spend a few hours on a page that costs five cents to print at Hawthorne-Longfellow library and show it only to those like-minded people who signed up for the class.
But apart from the money making film costs, it also requires a lot more of other people's time. And while camera and editing equipment becomes cheaper, the cost of costumes, locations, and copyrights stays the same. Also, cinema, even on a small, affordable scale, always tends to seek a larger audience—at least enough to fill the room at an event known as a 'screening'. Here the students' poor friends and families and the dispossessed townies seeking culture on a Saturday night squirm in uncomfortable theater chairs and wonder if they're really living in unextraordinary times.
Why, of course they aren't! The tragedy is that the unrealistic expectations promulgated by liberal arts colleges, or the expectations we have established for them, sets us up for disappointment that might be falsely attributed to bankruptcy at a larger scale.
A third reason: Perhaps it bodes us well not to understand film. The counterargument is persuasive: Multimedia bombards our environment, and in order to be responsible citizens, we must understand and have access to our environment. But perhaps another kind of citizenship is accessible only through learned misinterpretation, deviant traditionalism and subversive incorporation of new technologies into arcane languages.
Werner Herzog learned about film from a single, outdated encyclopedia entry; otherwise, he did not see a movie until his teens. The hallmark of his imagery stems precisely from this early 'alienation' from certain editing, dramatic, cinematographic genre standards.Maybe he is the type of 'outsider artist' that is more suitable and affordable to foster in a small liberal arts school. The social class of elite college students often forsakes the banalities of television. Why shouldn't it do the same with cinema? Are they more complacent with the industry standards?
But if you do go to Bowdoin and passionately love film, don't feel dismissed. It isn't necessary to identify everything you do with the college campus or to seek resources from it. Small schools like Bowdoin can offer you a broad survey of trendy theories used by academics to find novelty in the old and to legitimize the new. You will learn how to reuse archival material in unexpected ways and learn how to justify the cutting edge with authoritative language. (I am, for instance, making films out of the dramatic narratives latent in ancient pornography.)
If you are self-motivated and self-disciplined and can look in the mirror and honestly claim not to need any formal instruction in the trade you love, you can do well here and come out ahead of those whose minds are forged in the film factories of the West.