A group of us are thinking through the problem we have in defining the work we do – its underpinning, fundamental, deep lying principles. A functioning, one sentence definition of ‘film education’ is pretty much a holy grail, and has been for as long as academics, teachers and cultural bureaucrats like me have been around the field. I wonder why we don’t just give up.
But at a meeting in Brussels yesterday, there was some useful discussion about the notion of ‘translatability’ – the idea that the defining feature of film education is how it can be translated into different contexts: across platforms, like Youtube, cinemas, mobiles, galleries, and in classrooms – each time subtly changing what film literacy is required and made possible. But it also translates across subjects (it’s in English, modern languages, Citizenship, Art, ICT), as well as across different social purposes and impacts. Film is itself a translation, and synthesis, of different artforms (music, speech, drama, visual design etc).
So yesterday, Patrick Verniers, of MediAnimation in Brussels responded to the ‘translatability’ question by asking whether ‘transferability’ or ‘portability’ might not be a better, clearer expression of the same idea. And I said I didn’t think so, for two reasons:
First of all, translation is itself a fundamental principle of European culture – a culture whose foundation myths were (and continue to be) imported from outside. In the Centre Albert Borschette yesterday, with its six booths for translators – French, English, Spanish, German, Italian (and Esperanto?), this was made very tangible. Translation is something Europeans live with – maybe less so the English, but certainly everyone else. For the English, the seductive possibility of a single, definitive, proposition is hard to let go of, while for other Europeans, the reality of translated culture is a daily, routine one, especially in our field..
Second, related.. Patrick asked why not ‘portability’. Well, portability suggests to me the carrying of something from one place to another – across a border, perhaps – in a suitcase, or in one of those Greek haulage trucks with ‘Metaphor’ on the side – ‘metaphor’ being Greek for ‘to carry’. The thing about this kind of haulage is that the thing being carried doesn’t change on arrival at its destination. No translation happens. This is fine if you’re transferring tomatoes, or chairs, or moving car parts from one Renault factory to another – where the thing carried has to remain the same in order for it be useful. But if you’re transferring culture, then the objects will adapt, or be adapted to, their new home.
Now this line of thought clarified a couple of things for me : my resistance to the notion of ‘transferable skills’, and my awe and wonder at the work of the Leyton Cobbler. The Leyton Cobbler (on Francis Road) can fix any shoe. He was trained as a shoemaker, he told me, not a shoe repairer. His apprenticeship consisted of taking apart brand new shoes and putting them back together, with new parts, so they still looked fresh from the factory. He’s a talker – you have to be prepared to put aside 30 – 45 mins with him – but he’s an explainer, and the time is worth it for what you learn about your shoes.
Anyway, a skill, I reckon, is a context specific operation – by definition. The Leyton Cobbler can’t transfer his considerable skills with shoes and leather into another context – like plumbing, or carpentry, or playing the piano. To become skilled in either of those arenas, he would need to invest the requisite 10,000 hours of practice (it’s in Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman). Which means that those attributes that don’t have to be learned in a specific context (they call them ‘soft’, or ‘transferable’ skills) can’t really be skills, can they? Sennett does say that there is evidence that the folk who have to learn physically embodied skills – sportspeople, craftsmen and women, musicians – are better able to retrain in other skills, or craft areas, than people who have no physically embodied craft skills. Plumbers, he says, find it easier to retrain as computer programmers, than do PR people. There’s something about training the body and brain in repetitive physical processes that makes both body and brain better able to pick up other embodied practices.
So what are these soft, transferable skills? Do they amount to anything more than sitting in meetings, drinking cappucinoes, writing to-do lists, and saying ‘going forward’ and ‘stakeholder engagement’ a lot? I wonder whether ‘transferable skills’ is actually a contradiction in terms, evolved as a way of compensating a class of white collar workers divorced (alienated?) from physical labour, who miss the pleasure and satisfaction of producing physically tangible outcomes, rather than 100 emails a day, the majority of them beginning ‘Re:’
The discourse of transferable skills puts a higher premium on them than on the opposite – ‘hard’, ‘limited’? skills. But their very softness, and the absence of tangible outcome, makes them prone to subjective appraisal. (‘Could you make your out of office message just a little more.. user friendly’, as a colleague said – or rather emailed – to me once.) Soft skills might be no more than facets of personality – teamworking, communication, self-starting, and relentless cheerfulness. Still, obviously work to do taking this beyond irascible prejudice..
Mitchell Reids in America 