millimeter film was eventually used to duplicate on a small scale what was happening in the studios, the program remained lecture-based, with almost no hands-on experience. This of course made little teaching sense. Back in 1922, Peter Milne, in a book on directing, had already warned that "to teach the craft through the printed page is just as impossible of accomplishment as instructing a steeplejack in his trade through correspondence school." 25 Not every student enrolled in the technical classes even completed a short film of his or her own. Mainly, one was lucky to rotate positions whenever any project was being shot. Afterwards, graduates found employment outside the industry, mainly in educational filmmaking, public relations films, and industrial films.
IV
The film school phenomenon thus had to wait till the late fifties, early sixties to develop a full curriculum of courses. Three distinct circumstances were responsible for the advancement. First, there was at the time an influx of students who felt a special kinship toward motion pictures as a means of communication. Whereas the previous generation had remained connected to the power of the written word, this new group was entranced by the magic of the moving image. George Lucas is very clear about this:
One of the things we tapped into not just Steven [Spielberg] or I, but our whole '60s generation is that we didn't come from an intellectual generation. We came from a visceral generation. We enjoyed the emotional highs we got from movies and realized that you could crank up the adrenaline to a level way beyond what people were doing when they treated film as a more literary medium.26
Second, the counterculture movement made it suddenly possible for these students to break away from the Hollywood model. Personal experimentation with images and sounds rather than conventional filmmaking became the thing to do. Public screenings of such films on campuses and at midnight shows in regular theaters were met with wild enthusiasm at a time when Hollywood was floundering badly. Third, this new approach to filmmaking was certainly helped by the arrival on the scene of super 8mm which made it financially feasible for students to produce a number
