"I hope we're here to see the pictures and not to hear my words."
Dr. Cihak lumbers into the second-floor FAMU classroom, a whitewashed lecture space overlooking the quiet Charles River, and says those words in broken English. He is decidedly unprofessorial. Probably in his early 30s, wearing all black, his head framed by a frizzy explosion of brown hair and patchy beard, his eyes bloodshot, his gait awkward and loud, Cihak launches into an introduction of his course.
He teaches Topics in Avant-Garde Cinema, a genre of filmmaking whose style matches his almost cubist appearance. Though he is very different from his colleagues at the film academy and nearby Charles University, he represents the type of Czech professor who teaches in Prague - multilingual, a practitioner in his field and usually passionate about what he does and teaches. These professors are not concerned about getting published or finishing a dissertation, yet most are reputable members of their trade.
I am taking a class called Tools of Movie Image Design with Jaromir Sofr, a Czech cinematographer who has worked in the film industry since the early 1960s. He was the cameraman for "Closely Watched Trains," a classic Czech film. My screenwriting teacher is a professor in the graduate school at Columbia, my Czech art history professor is a noted curator and art librarian (we will go to the opening of his exhibit in the southern town of Cesky Krumlov this weekend) and one of the professors at Charles University - out of her pure passion for the arts and learning - treated a group of us to an evening at the Rudolfinum, home of the Czech Philharmonic.
The professors are great harbingers of education, but the classroom experience in Prague, academic topics aside, is a learning experience in itself. In most of my classes, I am usually one of two or three Americans. The rest of the students hail from Germany, Spain, France, Iceland, New Zealand, Yugoslavia or other corners of the world. But the classes are taught in English, usually by a Czech professor with only an intermediate mastery of the language.
It must be difficult, then, for a French student who only has a basic understanding of English to learn from a Czech teacher whose English is thickly accented. In a class in which all students are expected to be on the same page intelligence-wise, everyone is on a different chapter language-wise. Classes are often conducted very visually, with the professor often pausing mid-sentence for a linguistic consultation with a German student over the exact meaning of a word, or to repeat a phrase for a confused Icelandic student or to correct his pronunciation so that an American can understand it.
But somehow in this web of language, the point of the lesson is communicated, and rarely has learning been a frustration. Collegiate life in Prague is most definitely a network of global classrooms, where there are more lessons than just the stuff in the textbook. Here, the real lesson is the person next to you and the teacher at the front of the room.
In other words, as students both of film and the world, we're here to see the pictures and the words.
