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The article presents information on the conference, entitled "The Invitational Conference Workshop on Film/Video As an Artistic, Professional, and Academic Discipline," that held during August 16-19, 1978. The study of film has become one of the most popular activities for students in universities throughout the United States. A number of teaching programs have been established as discrete academic departments, while others are fragmented as sub-units of many other areas of study, including education, language, psychology, social sciences, art, radio-TV, and journalism. Surprisingly, many of the conference participants did not seem to understand what was going on in these various programs across the country, and the conference accomplished much in the sharing of information and debating the programs' approaches.

The article focuses on the shortcomings of the Copyright Act 1976. The two specific issues which the said law explicitly fails to address--and which are the two most important problems being faced by film research and teaching--are: one, the legal restrictions on using individual production stills or frame blow-ups from whole films in publications; and two, the legal restrictions against owning prints of copyrighted films for classroom teaching or scholarly research.

The author in this article comments on the views of film critics David Pincus and Stanley Cavell on filmmaking. If any film is to be made or studied in universities, there seems to be no reason why animated film should not be made. Yet the line of argument that Pincus develops, and the procedures he envisages, seem to exclude on principle the making of such film, perhaps even to deny it the status of film by definition. While Cavell envisages only the study of movies, and would presumably exclude animated film on the grounds that cartoons are not movies.

The article critically examines the film culture in the U.S. The state of moving image scholarship is both shameful and wonderful. On the other hand, the scholarship is confused, partial or derivative in its theory, impressionistic or absolutistic in its criticism, and misdirected and either anecdotal or merely (unreliably) factual in its history. The texts--the films themselves are in disastrous condition. There are only a handful of complete and authentic items in the canon and those are available to only very few scholars.

The article states that graduate film study seems plagued by a form of ideological schizophrenia. There is unilateral enthusiasm for the proliferation of graduate educational programs and degrees, yet widespread suspicion of the methodology which the academic setting implies. Thus the study of film is expected to be serious without being academic. It is supposed to engage the student in a valuable learning experience without availing itself of such traditionally valued educational tools as established credentials of expertise, areas of specialization or the development of a precise critical vocabulary.

The article focuses on issues related to establishment of a discipline for film studies. The author discusses questions raised at the March 1976 Conference on the Teaching of Film. According to the author, critical approach to film study can be used in any context-department or interdisciplinary center, filmmaking or history and aesthetics, independent cinema or documentary, "pure" cinema or literary adaptation. The author also describes some specific ways in which film can be studied within a literary context without sacrificing the integrity of the cinematic medium, while going beyond the conventional literary adaptation classes.

The article presents the meaning for film of the technological breakthroughs that defined what came to be called cinema verit&eacute, and the possibilities this opens for film production at the university. Certain verbs describe physical states, while others describe mental states. Scholar Franz Brentano proposed a criterion to distinguish the two sets of verbs. A word should be said about the use of the word "photographic" in writing about film. Because of the similarities in the technology, there is a tendency to exaggerate the relation between film and photography, even when people understand film in the narrow sense of cinematography.

The article discusses a cinematics model for film studies in higher education. An important, thoroughly independent, and personal art cinema exists, despite the conspicuous absence of a viable language through which this cinema could be discussed and thereby be more deeply understood. Because the cinema, as documentation, sociology, entertainment, or art, normatively involves a "communicative" function, it is not surprising that metaphoric phrases such as "language of film," "grammar of film," and the like are appealing.

The article deliberates on course content of the film studies. The question whether film should be taught and studied seriously becomes less easy, and more edifying, when it is raised as a matter of curriculum. Since, film is an art, film deserves the curricular attention of universities. Such an argument in any case, is unlikely to convince those for whom argument on these issues is required. No one will suppose that everything called teaching and learning film can, or should, happen only within an academic curriculum; any more than one will, or ought to.

The article states that the 1975 "Guide to College Courses in Film and Television," published by the American Film Institute, listed 791 universities and colleges offering courses or programs in film and television. It listed 3,875 courses in film being taught to 9,515 students specifically pursuing a degree in film studies or production. The figures are remarkable for what they do not measure. The American Film Institute survey is notoriously and unavoidably incomplete. It is quite possible that these results represent less than half (far less, perhaps) than the actual number of course offerings, programs, and students in American universities today engaged in the study of film.

The article focuses on issues related to close cinematic analysis. The method of close cinematic analysis concentrates on locating cinematic features in films and discusses the ways in which these features relate to a film's content. This method rests upon the assumption that it is the integration of the cinematic features with the content itself, which makes a film function in the way. Nobody seriously interested in cinema as an art form can claim that a scholarly film analysis can be done by the mere viewing of a film, followed by a haphazard discussion about the meaning of a film's narrative.

The article focuses on the study of films through soundtrack. Many of students in fact pay better attention to a soundtrack than do their more thoroughly trained film instructors, precisely because they have not yet fallen prey to the unbalanced critical heritage. The basic question is how to concentrate on a film soundtrack and direct students to study it intelligently. A fruitful approach to teaching the soundtrack is through film history. Preparation for such a unit of a general film course, or for an entire course treating the evolution of the sound film, should involve an introduction to the technical aspects of sound recording and reproduction.

The article discusses social implications of regarding a motion picture as communication. Film study and instruction in production has, by and large, been concentrated in the arts and humanities in most U.S. universities. Once a film is placed in a communication framework that contains articulated sign-events constructed and organized by filmmaker, which includes film as art, other perspectives are revealed which suggest that film can be utilized in different ways within the social sciences.

The article presents information on a pilot program integrating theory and practice in the study of film. The pilot program had three fundamental aims--to exercise and give form to the action of integration itself; to cultivate an articulated sense of the basic elements of the film medium, a "practical aesthetics." and to engender in film students a capacity for the natural alternation or combination of format and intuitional approaches to their work. The first phase of the program focused on familiarization with the cinema process through screenings, readings, and discussion of individual contributions of writer, director, actor, camera and sound people etc.

The article presents information on the National Ad Hoc Forum of Film/Video Schools and its conferences. The Forum an organization of seventeen university film/video departments concerned with film/video as an artistic, professional, and academic discipline. The genesis of the Forum took place in August 1977 when a small group met at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, to consider the possibility of starting an orderly self-examination of film/video schools in disciplinary terms. To address this need, the group recommended a structured conference/workshop, which took place in August 1978 at the University. The discussion was focused on commissioned position and rebuttal papers that dealt with three broad categories: diversity and scope of the field; academic processes; and, supportive resources.

The article presents information on the nineteenth international congress of Centre International de Liaison des Ecoles de Cinema et de Television (CILECT). CILECT is an international organization of schools of film and television; primarily but not exclusively those concerned with the teaching of professional filmmakers. Its nineteenth congress was held at Airlie, Virginia on September 11-18, 1978. The theme of the conference was "The Influence of the World Cinema Heritage on the Education and Training of Film/Television Directors and Communicators." There were five commissioned papers, delivered by delegates from the United States, Mexico, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and Japan.