Dr Terry Bolas - part I
Terry Bolas recalls the development of film study and screen education at the BFI and SEFT over the decades:
“During one of the periods of expansion in higher education during the 1970s a Private Eye spoof article advertised the ‘Professorship of Applied Pornography at the University of Old Compton Street’. From the periodical’s own base in adjacent Greek Street in London, Old Compton Street at that time might well have suggested itself as a suitably inappropriate home for a university, even one intending to offer an alternative curriculum. In fact Old Compton Street in the 1960s and 1970s provided bases for both an embryonic and an alternative ‘academy’.
“During the 1960s the British Film Institute’s Education Department was based at 70 Old Compton Street. While it was there and under the leadership of Paddy Whannel, it had become an ‘academy-in-waiting’ for film study. Indeed Whannel, when reporting to BFI Governors, had referred to his staff as functioning like a university department, a perception that would cause great alarm in the Board Room round the corner at the BFI’s Dean Street headquarters.
“In the 1970s, following the sudden departure of Whannel and five others from the Education Department, the development of the serious study of film was effectively franchised out by the BFI to SEFT (Society for Education in Film and Television) which had become based in Old Compton Street, where it would play a continuing and significant role in developing the study of media. SEFT, first at number 69 and then at 23, produced two journals: Screen and Screen Education. Many of those involved in the production of these journals would go on to form the basis of the first cohort of film and media academics in the UK. Meanwhile the BFI’s renamed Educational Services Department (now almost an academy-in-exile) took refuge at 62 Dean Street.
“During the 1950s the BFI’s contribution to film study had been productive though less contentious under a succession of Film Appreciation Officers. The decade that had begun with the publication of the Home Office Report on Children and the Cinema - where the BFI’s role was marginalised - ended with the influential National Union of Teachers’ 1960 conference, Popular Culture and Personal Responsibility, where the contribution of BFI educational personnel was dominant.
“In researching my PhD thesis The Academic Accession of the Abject Art, which I then developed into the book, Screen education: from film appreciation to media studies (Intellect, 2009), I set out to explore how the study of film (and subsequently media) gradually infiltrated the UK educational system from its peripheral origins in the post war secondary modern schools and adult education classes. Screen education subsequently progressed through the comprehensives, the teacher training colleges, further education and the polytechnics finally to conquer the universities.”
Follow the subsequent decade of this history in Terry's latest Researcher’s Tale.
Dr Terry Bolas has been involved with film and media education since the 1960s, when he was active in the Society for Education in Film and Television (SEFT), becoming its Honorary Secretary in 1965 and editor of its journal, Screen, in 1969. From the end of that decade he worked as a Teacher Advisor in the Education Department of the British Film Institute, then under the leadership of Paddy Whannel.
Subsequently he progressed through secondary teaching posts, always ensuring at each career stage that he had the opportunity to teach film and media. He spent the 1990s working in adult education.
February 2010
