Making, Explaining, Teaching Cinema. Didacticism and Epistemology of Film Creation

Abstract

The relationship between theory and practice in academic film studies depicts a state of segregation and distancing which turns out to be, at the same time, cause and effect of a deep crisis of understanding between academics and film makers. Nevertheless, this crisis cannot be faced, in the first place, from the assumption of that intellectual dichotomy between them and we ―wherever this otherness may be located in the approach—, neither from the observation of any radical conflict between both professional cinematographic environments, since that conflict, at least in an explicit manner, doesn´t exist. What kind of epistemic or didactic perspectives bring this situation to the film and cinematographic studies? How can cinema be taught under these circumstances? In this article, we analyze this controversial situation and we stress the necessity of breaking that dichotomy to relocate the focus of attention onto the necessary and existing conditions to explain and to be able to transcend, under an epistemic and substantially didactic perspective, that apparent distance between two sides of the same coin we call cinema.