V

		offer some advice. After all, the beauty of being in film school is that no one really knows more than anyone else. Specialization has not yet locked anyone in. The boom person can comment on the lighting and the loader may have suggestions for the sound recordist. The lack of organizational discipline inherent in such a free-for-all is more than compensated for by everyone's genuine interest in the project. To shoot a film with your peers is truly exhilarating because the entire crew is composed of amateurs, people who love cinema and are doing what they can to help the creative process. Let us keep it this way. Likewise, the film school should always be a safe place, a place where it is okay to fail. Even if you fall flat on your face, people are not going to abandon you, you will still be their friend.

		To the contrary, professionals, specialists, hired guns, dominate the industry. Technicians are brought in to do one thing only their specialty and they do it well, unquestionably. But their involvement is limited to their own work: the smoothness of the dolly, the sharpness of the focus, the exacting digital removal of wires, etc. They do not question whether the film, as a whole, is bad or that its message is deplorable. It says something about the industry that few of the grips, the electricians, the assistants, the below-the-line people who populate the sets, bother to see the film they worked on when it is finished. To shoot in the industrial mode means that you have bigger toys to play with, the job is more demanding, and you get paid very well. But the entire process is also repressive. Shooting is totally compartmentalized, it is done by the numbers. It becomes a mechanical operation that suppresses the feeling of brotherhood normally present in a communal creative environment. Regrettably, in film schools, chairs and instructors see nothing wrong in perpetuating these malignant values. Even when, in beginning classes, students are allowed to take chances and experiment, it is with the knowledge that, soon enough, they will be lassoed in by the system and forced to perform according to standard studio discipline. For Dewey, this would be all wrong. Indeed, to have any chance at revitalizing the profession, film schools need to rethink their role and come up with a strategy to help nurture an entirely different breed of filmmakers, encourage a brotherhood of minds capable of resisting the Hollywood lure.

		XI

		Although Mitchell Block does not mention them by name, one suspects that the critical studies teaching corps is by definition included among