Special: Berlinale Talent Campus — Day 30

“This is a bit of an unusual posi­tion for me as a cin­e­matog­ra­pher,” says Slawomir Idziak, renowned Polish cin­e­matog­ra­pher and fre­quent col­lab­o­ra­tor of both Krzysztof Kieslowski and Krzysztof Zanussi, as he stands in the spot­light, an unusual place to be for a per­son of his pro­fes­sion. Thus begins his talk on the cur­rent state of film­mak­ing in the world as well as the pos­si­bil­i­ties the future holds in col­lab­o­ra­tive film­mak­ing. Collaborative, you say? But isn’t film­mak­ing already a col­lab­o­ra­tive art with its crews of thou­sands, etc.? Hardly, accord­ing to Idziak. With 40 years of expe­ri­ence work­ing as a inter­na­tional cin­e­matog­ra­pher in nearly 70 films, Idziak is noth­ing if not a suit­able fig­ure to dis­pel his obser­va­tions on the devel­op­ment, or lack thereof, in film­mak­ing. Although cin­ema has been an art form for more than a cen­tury, Idziak believes that the cre­ation of the cin­e­matic arts can still be “more inter­ac­tive, more cre­ative.” He begins his talk by describ­ing the life of young sce­nar­ists, or cin­e­matog­ra­phers. For aspir­ing film­mak­ers in Poland, the fate of their devel­op­ment as film­mak­ers can be incred­i­bly daunt­ing as 50% of stu­dents are expelled from Polish film schools after their sec­ond year. This cruel and some­what unjus­ti­fied form of judg­ment against cre­ativ­ity is fol­lowed by the equally shock­ing fact that upon leav­ing film schools, many of Idziak’s “sim­ply could not find a place in the exist­ing (film indus­try).” The com­pe­ti­tion in the film indus­try is incred­i­bly com­pet­i­tive, with the first pro­duc­tion they’ve worked on being either their call­ing card into the indus­try or a sig­nal for their unem­ploy­ment. This is not an entirely new sit­u­a­tion in the world of film­mak­ing as film grad­u­ates in my coun­try, Singapore, suf­fer from these sit­u­a­tions as well, though only 10% of stu­dents get kicked out of my film school and not 50%. However, this is still a very unpromis­ing sit­u­a­tion that film schools have cre­ated due to their obvi­ous defi­ciency in sup­port­ing cre­ativ­ity. Idziak has learnt that a pri­mary prob­lem in film­mak­ing is the lack of encour­age­ment of artis­tic cohe­sion in both the film schools and the film indus­try. The direc­tor was, and still is, widely con­sid­ered to be the pri­mary auteur of the film. The auteur the­ory that gov­erns this judg­ment has hurt the cre­ative fruition of many film­mak­ers. Why should only one per­son decide the vision, shape and tone of a film? What is the def­i­n­i­tion of a film­maker? Better yet, what is the def­i­n­i­tion of a direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy? In Poland, not only is the direc­tor con­sid­ered an auteur, but so is the direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy. A direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy is the artist behind the cre­ation of the images we see on the screen, though the deci­sions of what is put on screen may not be entirely his. But a cre­ative input is def­i­nitely present. Based on his expe­ri­ences work­ing in Hollywood, with work there rang­ing from Andrew Niccol’s Gattaca, Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the new Harry Potter film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, a direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy is a per­son who lights the scene, noth­ing more. Film schools, he believes, “should be a place that allows for fail­ure and exper­i­men­ta­tion.” His expe­ri­ence as a teacher at a the Lodz has allowed Idziak to wit­ness the pain and frus­tra­tion of film stu­dents in their strug­gle to define who they are as artists because of their fear of fail­ure and exper­i­men­ta­tion, which is, as he says, “an invi­ta­tion towards dis­as­ter.” Students in film schools are trained to excel in spe­cific pro­duc­tion roles, not encour­ag­ing an under­stand­ing of each pro­duc­tion role. This is a sit­u­a­tion that I will have no prob­lem iden­ti­fy­ing with next year as I ven­ture into my third and final year in film school. After three years of film edu­ca­tion, each stu­dent is expected to either par­tic­i­pate in a short film pro­duc­tion or gain indus­try expe­ri­ence as an intern at film com­pa­nies. However, each stu­dent is allowed to choose only one aspect of film pro­duc­tion to study dur­ing the third year before actu­ally par­tic­i­pat­ing in film pro­duc­tions. I chose direct­ing stud­ies as my cur­ricu­lum for next year, but I wanted to learn more about edit­ing, cin­e­matog­ra­phy and doc­u­men­tary pro­duc­tion as well. Sure we learnt about these in our first two years, but hardly in a suf­fi­cient man­ner that would prove us to be effi­cient in these aspects of film pro­duc­tion. After my three years have ended, I will be mak­ing my first foray into film­mak­ing. That our job on each film pro­duc­tion is des­ig­nated accord­ing our selected cur­ricu­lum, as a direc­tor, I won­der how I will be able to com­mu­ni­cate with my fel­low crew mem­bers effec­tively? Thus, these cur­rently exist­ing predica­ments prob­a­bly explains the lack of artis­tic cohe­sion that occurs in mod­ern film­mak­ing. People with dif­fer­ent pro­duc­tion roles fre­quently over­look the respon­si­bil­i­ties and expec­ta­tions of other pro­duc­tion per­son­nel, cre­at­ing an unnec­es­sary chaos that hin­ders the pro­duc­tion. Furthermore, many direc­tors believe that because of their label of ‘direc­tor’, they should know what should be done in each aspect of pro­duc­tion, which is untrue as var­i­ous indi­vid­u­als from var­i­ous cre­ative depart­ments would prob­a­bly know how to get spe­cific jobs done bet­ter than the direc­tor does. Their ego sup­ports their belief that they are artists in the, as they believe, sin­gu­lar craft that is film­mak­ing. “Cinema is not a place for artists,” says Idziak, but rather for crafts­men, engi­neers of human emo­tion. It is a firm belief of Idziak’s that a resolve to these predica­ments is for film schools to teach in a more well-rounded, col­lab­o­ra­tive form of edu­ca­tion by giv­ing stu­dents the oppor­tu­nity to take on dif­fer­ent roles in film pro­duc­tion to cre­ate an under­stand­ing of all aspects of film pro­duc­tion. It is through his giv­ing work­ing rela­tion­ship with Krzysztof Kieslowski that Idziak was able to truly under­stand the impor­tance of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Idziak has often been given the oppor­tu­nity by Kieslowski to col­lab­o­rate on the shoot­ing script of his films, of which allowed them to give birth to some of their most cre­ative ideas. The process of pre-production, says Idziak, should be a shar­ing of a wealth of ideas com­ing from peo­ple work­ing in all depart­ments of film­mak­ing, pre­vent­ing the ‘christ­mas tree’ syn­drome he describes as the sit­u­a­tion of hav­ing many crew mem­bers with the unclear moti­va­tion of even hav­ing them on set. Idziak believes that these col­lab­o­ra­tions can lead to the inter­est­ing result of cre­at­ing a dis­tinct style for each film. This ‘christ­mas tree’ syn­drome which Idziak has described is a very com­mon sit­u­a­tion in the Singaporean film indus­try as well, with the stu­dents from my school that later becme interns fre­quently expe­ri­enc­ing work­ing sit­u­a­tions at the film com­pa­nies they work which require them to do noth­ing but serve the direc­tor a cup of cof­fee or buy­ing the crew lunch. If they’re lucky, they get to set up a c-stand or two. It is because of this that I ini­tially though of Idziak’s ideas of cre­at­ing an ideal col­lab­o­ra­tive plat­form for film­mak­ing to be both unre­al­is­tic and fool­ish. Fortunately, “film­spring” says oth­er­wise. “film­spring” is a project devel­oped by Idziak to get film­mak­ers from all over the world to get together to make films despite of their vastly dif­fer­ent cul­tures and lan­guages. A 30-minute film has already been cre­ated from this project, which Idziak is very proud of because it is a film that is, though “no mas­ter­piece”, both emo­tion­ally suc­cess­ful and com­mer­cially viable. The film­mak­ers of this film knew each other before meet­ing in Poland, the meet­ing place for the project’s pro­duc­tions, through the project’s web­site which can be found at www.filmspring.eu In a week’s time, I will be leav­ing Berlin to return to Singapore to begin work on pre-production for my short film. I believe this talk has been truly ben­e­fi­cial to both all the film­mak­ers around the world who were present and myself in learn­ing about the ethics of film­mak­ing as well as the respon­si­bil­i­ties we have as film­mak­ers in cre­at­ing a giv­ing work­ing envi­ron­ment for each other.