On what film school teaches and what it cannot teach.

Film school teaches the vocabulary: the names for things, the history of where the names came from, the technical procedures for achieving specific effects. This is genuinely useful. You cannot have conversations about cinema without the vocabulary, and the vocabulary is not self-evident.

Film school also teaches a specific body of canonical films, which produces a community of reference: when a film school graduate references the depth of focus in Citizen Kane, other film school graduates know what they mean. This is also genuinely useful. Canon is a form of shared language.

What film school cannot teach is instinct: the quality of sensibility that makes one filmmaker's response to a subject different from another filmmaker's. Instinct can be refined by education but it cannot be created by it. The film school graduate who had good instincts before film school has better instincts after. The film school graduate who had no instincts has technical skills but no specific vision.

The most dangerous product of film school is the film that knows all the right references and uses them correctly but has nothing to say through them. Technical facility in the absence of vision produces competent cinema, and competent cinema is the thing that makes you wish you were watching something else.