At the end of the 1970s, Harun Farocki (1944-2014) returned to the Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie in Berlin (DFFB), the same institution that had expelled him 10 years earlier, when he was a student in the first intake year, for his involvement in the student protests of the period. Farocki returned to the academy with a proposal he had been meditating on for some time: introducing image-based pedagogy and thinking as a method of filmmaking and cinematographic practice. “I don’t want to present theories but to make my theoretical production visible”, he wrote in his text What I want to do (1980), which is reproduced in this issue. Volker Pantenburg, a lecturer in film studies at the University of Zurich and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institute, is the author of How Farocki taught, the principal article featured in the fourth issue of the magazine ZINE: Film Research Series, which explores the German filmmaker’s commitment to education, based on research into the DFFB’s documentary archives and conversations with former students. His contribution includes reproductions of hitherto unpublished documents, translated for the first time into Basque, Spanish and English.

This monographic issue, dedicated to research into film education and teaching, also examines two other experiences. Reconstructing ‘Record of War’, written by Brighid Lowe and Henry K. Miller, lecturers at University College London (UCL), explores an experiment halfway between pedagogy and political activism, which was organised in 1939 at the London Film Society by the British filmmaker and teacher, Thorold Dickinson. Dickinson simultaneously screened, alternating different parts of each one, The Path of the Heroes and Abyssinia, two propaganda films pertaining to different ideologies and filmed in 1936 during the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. It was a performance that contrasted one film made by the winning side with another made by the vanquished, which Dickinson gave again in 1969 within the framework of the first film syllabus at UCL, and which the authors of the text recreated in 2017, almost 50 years later, in the very same space.

FLIP BOOK VERSION | PDF

Finally, Demystifying production to return cinema to the people: the mining film workshop (Bolivia, 1983) by Isabel Seguí, a lecturer at the Film & Visual Culture Department of the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), focuses on the film workshop carried out in 1983 in the city of Telamayu (Bolivia). The project aimed to provide mining communities with access to film production, an aim shared by the members of these groups, who sought to prevent their image from being mediated by intellectuals, while at the same time questioning film production from an economic, technological and artistic perspective. The text includes reproductions of fragments of the thesis defended by the Bolivian researcher María Luisa Mercado in 1985, one of the few sources that still exist today for studying this community film experience.

In short, three projects that explore how film has been taught and researched both in traditional educational scenarios and other fields and contexts that have often been overlooked by canonical historiography.

Call for papers

ZINE: Film Research Series is open to contributions from all researchers. Contributions to ZINE are pre-selected by the Editorial Committee and are subject to external peer review. Please send any proposals to: zine@zine-eskola.eus. Proposals should comprise an abstract of between 250 and 500 words and a complete CV of the author. Instructions are available on the EQZE website.

ZINE: Film Research Series is an online academic journal published by Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola, the Basque Film Archive and the San Sebastián International Film Festival (SSIFF). The aim of the ZINE series is to publish original research that contributes to specialised knowledge in the field of film studies, from an interdisciplinary perspective.