From 27-30th August 2018 brand new ECFA member the Austrian Film Museum will host the 12th Summer School with the theme “film education and pictorial politics” in a four-day Teachers’ Seminar, getting familiar with methods of film education and reflecting on their political potential.
From teachers there is better integration of media and film in the classroom expected. In educational agendas, getting to know the medium of ‘cinema’ often becomes another competence that should be measurable and retrievable.
With the Summer School, the Austrian Film Museum tries to offer a different approach towards the medium. Alejandro Bachmann: “For us, film education is not limited to simply presenting key moments in film history, film genres or the correct use of terminology. Rather, it is about sensitising one’s own perspective, as a starting point for developing and designing your own educational strategies.”
Questions about film perception get little attention in schools. What happens in a film screening (both in the projection and with the audience in the theatre), film being a deeply personal experience, leaving room for uncertainties, is often ignored in order to discuss the film’s clear content as part of the curriculum. Thus, films simply feed us with topics to be discussed, analytical approaches crammed together in formal analyses.
The Film Museum’s Summer School seeks for approaches towards film perception in which the learning of film educational concepts is of secondary importance; while the personal experience and the relationship with the moving image can be a foundation for a renewed, open education, in which films articulate as many nuances as there are voices in the crowd.
“Film is the most important art form since 1895. Film is the most important historical document since 1895.” With these two sentences, the cornerstones of the Film Museum were outlined by its founders Peter Kubelka and Peter Konlechner. The Summer School for Teachers is oriented along these two poles. Between “film as art” and “film as a document” questions, perspectives and experiences occur that offer multilateral clues and starting points for many school subjects, from visual education and media studies to languages and philosophy, history and political formation.
With the support of the Federal Ministry for Education, Art & Culture, the Association of the Film & Music Industry, the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna and the Vienna Pedagogical University.
All information in German version.
Contact Austrian Film Museum: Alejandro Bachmann, a.bachmann@filmmuseum.at, www.filmmuseum.at.