Arts & Showbiz

To those who still imagine that all you need to be a film-maker is inspiration and instinct to become a producer, ’Fémis’ - or the Ecole nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son, France’s national film school - offers a comprehensive refutation. Here, making films is a job and, like any job, it demands theoretical and practical training with little room for improvisation. Not that the school seeks to stifle the creativity of its students. On the contrary, it aims to bring it out by plunging them straight into a professional environment - a method which has proved itself when you are aware that ’Fémis’ has already trained almost four hundred professionals and revealed talents such as Laetitia Masson (A vendre, 1998), Solveig Anspach (Haut les cœurs !, 1999) or Orso Miret (De l’histoire ancienne, 2001).

Flash-back. In 1943, the film-maker Marcel Lherbier formally opened IDHEC (Institut des hautes études cinématographiques - Institute of Advanced Film Studies) which rapidly earned a reputation as an excellent graduate school. From its ranks, over a period of forty years, emerged film-makers as different and as famous as Alain Resnais, Louis Malle, Claude Sautet, Théo Angelopoulos, Jean-Jacques Annaud and Arnaud Despleschin.

In 1984, ’Fémis’ - which originally stood for the Fondation européenne des métiers de l’image et du son [European Foundation for the Image and Sound Trades] - succeeded it. Under the chairmanship of the scriptwriter and author, Jean-Claude Carrière, the newly established institute moved into the Palais de Tokyo, opposite the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art. It moved to its permanent quarters in rue Francœur, in Paris, in 1998, occupying the former Pathé studios, lavishly refurbished for the purpose.

Rechristened the Ecole nationale supérieure des métiers de l’image et du son, ’Fémis’ won public industrial and commercial establishment status, which had the dual advantage of enabling it to benefit both from State subsidies (and thus charge modest fees to students: 229 euros a year, the equivalent of about 1,500 francs) and from the opportunity to develop a business side. Thus it now produces one hundred and twenty short features each year made by the students, which it can then sell to television companies and screen at numerous festivals such as those of Cannes, Angers and Clermont-Ferrand; like so many business cards making the value of the school’s students known to the "profession". Who will be surprised that almost all of them find a job in the coveted film and audiovisual industry?

Nonetheless, it should not be forgotten that admission to the school is achieved on merit. Like most French ’grandes écoles’ [top graduate schools], competition for entry is incredibly fierce: out of more than eight hundred applicants, just under forty students will be successful in the final round!

The first stage takes place in March when an exploratory study on a deliberately broad subject is written (for example, "darkness"), which tests the curiosity and imagination of applicants. 40 % are eliminated at the end of this stage. In April, the remaining 60% come to Paris for a film analysis. They are judged less on their erudition than on their sensitivity and daring. Thus in 2000, when Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) was set, those who pointed out the importance of the sound track and not just the image, were marked highest.

In June - third stage of this long drawn out contest - the candidates still in the lists take tests related to their specialty. For example, those who have chosen directing have to cut film sequences and are then put into a shooting situation. Finally, as at the Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA), the sixty survivors are summoned in July for the "grand oral" at which a panel of professionals (Otar Iosseliani, Bruno Nuytten, Jean-Jacques Beineix, etc.) fire questions at them for half-an-hour. Nobody will be surprised that the select little band of forty fortunates feel privileged and consider that they have fought hard for the right to spend three years in the magnificent premises of Rue Francœur.

As soon as they arrive, the new students are allocated to one of the School’s seven departments, depending on their career direction: directing, screenplay, camera, sound, editing, set design or production. However, this does not prevent them from taking a common foundation course to familiarise them with both film analysis and the economics of the industry, and to introduce them to directing actors and editing. This first year concludes with the production of a fictional feature in the course of which each student does every job entailed in turn, from writing the screenplay to post-production.

Then comes the time to specialise when, after a long series of practical exercises organised by professionals working in the business, the students acquire more autonomy that they put to good use during the work experience element of their course. The last stage is to bring a project to reality - directing a film or designing a set, editing a film from the archives or a documentary, writing a screenplay, etc.

For throughout the course, the key word is "pragmatism". "Here, the priority is film, practice and learning on the job. Not theory." as expressed by Alain Auclaire, president of the institute. Hence the considerable resources available to students: four sets (one of which was used as the set for Robert Bresson’s Dames du bois de Boulogne), thirty editing suites, a recording studio, three projection rooms equipped for all types of media, a carpentry shop and scenery painting studio.

You can understand why the school, which competes with the most prestigious American universities, attracts more and more foreign students. Conscious of its interest in being open to the world, ’Fémis’ has introduced an international competition and exports its expertise in the form of teaching modules to other countries, from Lebanon to Indonesia, from the Philippines to West Africa and Chile. Each year, it even organises, in partnership with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a summer university which welcomes twelve trainees from developing countries, all benefiting from a scholarship.

Fifteen years after its creation, ’Fémis’, like IDHEC in its day, can pride itself on having trained technical staff capable of going straight into the job, as well as some already recognized (François Ozon, author of Sous le sable, 2001) or very promising (Hélène Angel, director of Peau d’homme, cœur de bête, 1999) creative talents.

A sign of the times is that more than half of the directors graduating from ’Fémis’ are... women, whose first full-length features almost never leave the audience unaffected: Petits arrangements avec les morts by Pascale Ferran (1994), Oublie-moi by Noémie Lvovsky (1995), Peau neuve by Emilie Deleuze (1999) and, very recently, Les Autres filles by Caroline Vignal (2000). As you might expect, we are awaiting with impatience the first full-length feature of Delphine Gleize (who graduated in 1997), whose short films, like Un château en Espagne, have attracted attention everywhere. Her film, whose cast includes among others Chiara Mastroianni and Jacques Gamblin, is to be called Carnages and should get talked about. Look out for it...