At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate of « snitches » and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school – promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job – is beginning to attract those who believe that cinema isn’t so much a profession as the professional language of the future.
At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is the nation’s oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the university’s 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school’s dean, opened its classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie world professionals. « The greatest digital divide is between those who can read and write with media, and those who can’t, » Ms. Daley said. « Our core knowledge needs to belong to everybody. »
From The New York Times.
