Tacit anticipation among film students: an ethnography of making movies in film school

In this ethnographic study of aspiring filmmakers working together to make movies in film school, in the backyard of the film and television industries, I argue that students undergo a “dialectic of professionalization.” Using participant observation, interviews and grounded theory, I found individuals enter film school with varying “factors of individuality,” such as ambition, restraint, and aesthetic subjectivity. Interfacing with curricular requirements to make films, they undergo a tentative, messy yet social process I term “resocialization”: they need to repeatedly ‘fit with’ film crews considered as temporary organizational structures {Chapter 2}. Once resocialized as crewmembers, they exhibit a variety of “tacit knowing,” not only of filmmaking roles, hierarchies, and routines, but also of story, emotion, and characters, thereby “socially making” their reputations even as they discover “artistic discourse” {Chapter 3}. Simultaneously in the classroom, students find themselves embedded in a “cacophony” of conflicting pedagogical discourse about industrial norms, and vacillate between resistance and appropriation in order to extricate their own “authorial” voice. As they form particular reputations and make particular films, they take on the “posture” of “tacit anticipation,” a perpetually alert ‘shape-shiftiness’ that does not fully embrace but cannot fully ignore the call of industry {Chapter 4}. I theorize these changes as “dialectic,” building on philosopher G. W. F. Hegel’s ontology {Chapter 5}. I submit that student filmmakers are not fully socialized in film school as future labor for media industries. Since they have undergone resocialization, practiced tacit knowing, discovered film as formal story, and “hustled” for work, they leave school having been, in various ways, “made productive.” That is what “professional” finally looks like: the more self-reflexive mode of tacit anticipation. Future media production studies must adequately theorize their subjects’ relationships to “work”, “career,” “knowing” and craft “form,” before they can write them off as mere neoliberal “labor.”