Training in the new communication technologies in Swiss art schools
Since the 1970’s, Swiss art schools, like those elsewhere in the world, have gradually opened up to new technologies. The classical disciplines – painting, drawing, sculpture, engraving, etc. – have lost ground to new methods of producing images. The definitions and end products of art have been radically rethought, new practices introduced, and the areas where a plastic surgeon can use his art have grown considerably. The visual arts have opened up to cinema, video, sound manipulation. This mutation has affected applied arts (design, graphics, visual communication) as much as the fine arts.
Pioneering, the Ecole supérieure des beaux arts de Genève (today known as HEAD – Haute école d’art et de design – Geneva) was the first to offer an audiovisual course which quickly became an education section for the cinema, a cinema school in the full sense of the word. This first cinema school in Switzerland was joined a few years later by the Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne, which, under the influence of the film-maker Yves Yersin, opened an audiovisual department (the DAVI). In the early 1990s, came the turn of the HGKZ (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst – Zürich) which introduced a course in cinema direction, then the HGKL (Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst – Lucerne) which developed courses in video and cinema animation techniques.
From then on, the camera and the computer became omnipresent tools destined to play a growing part in the students’ work in all art and design schools. Video is gaining ground on analogue photography, electronic editing has long since relegated 16mm editing tables to the attic, and synthesised images as well as digital and 3D special effects are now part of the everyday techniques used by art school students.
The education scene for cinema and television jobs and techniques which is being put in place now in Switzerland has some notable points: it is the art schools (both applied arts and fine arts) that are undertaking the provision of these courses instead of cinema schools which can be found in neighbouring countries, notably those where cinema is organised on an industrial level. The training offered is very general: with the intention of training writer-directors, artists who work with cinema methods, people capable of understanding and intervening at any stage in the creative process, from scene-writing to post-production through work on images, sound, staging or production. So there is no specialised training, as can be found in the cinema schools in other countries, offering courses for directors, but also for scrip-writers, operation chiefs, sound engineers, decorators and producers. This philosophy corresponds to the present moment in the history of Swiss cinema, to the reality of the organisation and professional situation and notably to a practice which is more artistic than industrial.
The complete version of this text is available on the French version of this website.