Students enroll in film school because they want to make films and believe a college or university education is the most effective way to help them do just that. What most of them do not realize at that stage of the game is that cinema is far from a settled field of study, that filmmaking is a cultural battleground as well as an economic one. And even when students are vaguely aware of a fundamental difference between, say, a film by Jim Jarmush and one by Steven Spielberg, they do not suspect that a film department reflects these conflicts as well, that it too is an area of struggle between competing schools of thought. Jacques Derrida made this very clear when he stated that "everywhere where teaching takes place, there are influences representing the contending forces, the dominant as well as the subversive ones," and that consequently "there will be conflicts and contradictions . . . within its very walls." 1
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On the most basic level, the different viewpoints fighting it out in film education today echo the nineteenth-century battle between the traditional humanists and the reformists for the soul of the American university. Then, the supporters of a liberal education believed that the curriculum should
