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The Gift of the International Class
To the student and the teacher
Teaching was something I never wanted to do. Never. But when I found myself on the faculty at a world-renowned film school, working with students at graduate level, and as I became head of the directing program there, I discovered along the way that I could not have been more wrong.
I should have wanted to teach.
I was lucky. America was full of international students. At least then it was. And this was then.
I hadn’t left my native England until I was nineteen when during my university’s summer break I worked on the roads in Baden-Württemberg with the gastarbeiter, together with a German friend, then vacationed in Rome with the proceeds.
This liberated me from my childhood conviction that I was destined never to travel abroad. (Apart from wars, nobody in my family ever had.)
Even then, I could never have imagined that many years later I would come to live in the US. It was my career in film that made this happen, and it was this that subsequently led me to the classroom.
To begin with, I thought my task was to disseminate wisdom from on high. Problem: what was this wisdom supposed to be? Whatever it was, I didn’t know it. So I was terrified.
In other, more respectable, responsible disciplines such wisdom surely exists but in filmmaking…? Sure, there’s film grammar, a system of supposed “good behavior” rather than a function. There’s the structure and process of production, which was coming from other faculty and which I didn’t want to conflate with the creative aspect of filmmaking as I see it. Then there’s the manual of assumptions and dogma, the do and the do not stipulations so often peddled by filmmaking “educators”.
I didn’t wish to “teach” any of that.
So what was I to do if I was to keep my position? If I was to perform the task entrusted to me? Upon consideration, I realized I had to start listening to my students and reflecting on their questions and comments, their thoughts, perspectives, and above all to their uncertainties.
There were few Brits in the years I taught at the school and of those maybe one or two shared my working class background so I felt quite a degree of isolation and—let’s face it—vulnerability. Indeed, when I started, most of my students were American and it was these generous young filmmakers who helped me through the first following years as I learned to teach. Even given what I’m going on to say here, I’m indebted to them for what they taught me.
Year after year, though, the class became increasingly international. Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Taiwanese, Malaysian, Afghan, Indian, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Polish, Belgian, Austrian, Swiss, Russian, Irish, Hungarian, Mexican, Venezuelan, Cuban, Colombian, Brazilian, Peruvian, Chilean, South African, Canadian, Argentinian, Australian, Iranian—and I’m remiss in not remembering others…
So many ethnicities, all genders, sexual orientations — a glorious diversity, even if we would have benefitted so much more from the presence of African filmmakers among us.
I witnessed the rewards accruing to these directors from different countries through their interaction with each other and with similarly international production designers, cinematographers, and editors. They benefitted not so much by working with those who thought like them and shared their sensibility but with those who did not, those who saw life and movies differently.
Much of the filmmaking education here in the States, if I may say so, seems to me to have more to do with cultural nationalism than with cinema itself. Protagonists have always to be active, characters must overcome their circumstances, there’s an emphasis on conflict (rooted in our adversarial individualism) rather than friction, tension, or simple precarity, every scene has to move the story on, unmotivated camera moves are not permitted, three-act structure is all, and so on — so the oxygen of a broader humanity and vision afforded by the filmmaking melting pot of these classes I was privileged to teach was a sight to behold. It broadened and enriched our understanding of cinema—and of ourselves.
But what about me? What about my own cultural nationalism? Because I wasn’t exactly lacking in flawed assumptions myself…
I remember, after I’d screened Jean Renoir’s 1951 The River, set in what was Calcutta — a favorite film of mine and more to the point, of Martin Scorsese — that one member of the class, Shuchi Talati from India, winner of this year’s John Cassavetes Independent Spirit Award for her vibrant first feature Girls Will Be Girls, offered a comment I have never forgotten.
This is a very European perspective.
In that moment, I had the sense of just how constrained my world view was. Just how Eurocentric I was. More than that — and this had started to strike me in my teaching — just how white Anglocentric I was.
Born in the wake of Empire, in a nation steeped in colonialist complacency, arrogant in the insularity of a militarist, mercantile, imperialist history, I saw myself as being somehow charitable to my students by teaching them. It was as though, because of my background, I was doing them some kind of favor.
But it was not my charity that they needed. They wanted no favors, I came to realize.
Time to wake up, I thought. And here was my opportunity, facing yearly twenty-five or so remarkable graduate students from across the globe in the classroom’s raking rows before me, the higher rows of which, I would be looking in every sense up to..
If I’d long since ditched the notion of the guru handing down “wisdom”, seeing myself instead as working with each class, I hadn’t kicked that — let’s face it — supremacist thing. My parents, despite their modest education, were great and had taught me from my earliest years respect for and mutuality with people whom we did not look like—but all the same the cultural DNA and memes of my native country ran deep, and there they were, I could see, alive and unfortunately all too well within me.
Here’s the paradox, though: with the humility I now did all I could to cultivate came a new sense of belonging. I could be part of the same humanity as my students. I could listen to them as an equal of theirs and so appreciate them all the more. And my acculturation need no longer be the means of some kind of assumed dominance but a canvas I could reflect upon critically and that I could offer with respect and humility to those in my charge as just one among the many perspectives of us all.
Symbiosis, not instruction.
Not teaching from on high, but participation.
Not cultural distance but the proximity of humanity.
Not the confinement of nationality but the freedom of the world.
I often reflect that it is the student who teaches and the teacher who learns. With my international students and their Brit teacher, myself, that certainly held, as it still does…
I just hope they learned half as much from me as I learned from them.
Peter Markham
April 2025
Author:
- The Art of the Filmmaker: The Practical Aesthetics of the Screen (Oxford University Press) 10/23
- What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
