Who is afraid of film schools? From Nazi Germany to SRFTI

Film schools have never been only about teaching people how to make films. At different points in history, they have also been places where states have tried to shape the way a generation sees the world—and, in authoritarian regimes, to decide which stories can be told and which cannot.

Fascist governments understood this particularly well. After coming to power in 1933, the Nazis began dismantling independent film institutions in Germany. Fascist Italy took a somewhat different route: instead of simply destroying film schools, it brought film education under increasing state control. In France, the Vichy regime followed a similar path. Yet there is an irony running through this history. Institutions created or controlled by authoritarian regimes did not always produce the kind of obedient cultural workers those regimes wanted. Some of them eventually became spaces for critical thinking and resistance.

That history becomes relevant again in India today.

In Nazi Germany, the assault on independent film education was blunt and violent. In 1930, Jewish filmmaker Hugo Döblin established the Tonfilmschule Döblin, considered Berlin’s first sound-film school. On 1 April 1933, only months after Hitler came to power, Nazi paramilitary forces vandalised and destroyed the school. Döblin was later expelled from the Reich Chamber of Theatre.

The Nazis did not stop at destroying institutions. They also built new ones to replace them. On 4 March 1938, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels laid the foundation stone of the Deutsche Film-Akademie Babelsberg. The academy came directly under the Propaganda Ministry. Its purpose was clear: to train a new generation of filmmakers after Jewish and left-wing filmmakers had been banned, forced out or driven into exile.

Students were required to prove their “Aryan” ancestry. The curriculum also included a compulsory course called Weltanschauung, or “worldview”. Film education was thus placed within a larger ideological project: the state wanted not only filmmakers, but filmmakers who would see the world through the lens of Nazism.

Italy followed a different path.

Rather than dismantling film education altogether, the Fascist government sought to reshape it from within. In 1934, Count Galeazzo Ciano created a Directorate-General for Cinematography, bringing the country’s film affairs under a more centralised system.

Luigi Freddi soon argued that Italy needed a new generation of trained filmmakers. The existing school was dissolved in 1935, and the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (CSC) was established in its place.

Classes began in October 1935, covering areas such as acting, optics, sound, scenography and production.

And this is where the story becomes complicated.

The CSC had been created within a Fascist cultural system. Yet under Chiarini, it also became a place where critical intellectual currents could survive. Teachers such as Umberto Barbaro introduced students to filmmakers and thinkers including Sergei Eisenstein and Béla Balázs. The institution that was expected to help produce Fascist cultural workers instead became, in the words used by some historians, a space for resistance.

Luchino Visconti was among the important figures associated with this world.

Documents preserved in the Duke University archives describe Chiarini’s Centro Sperimentale as having, ironically, “became a center for anti-Fascist intellectuals”.

France offers another example.

IDHEC—the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques—was established in 1943, during the Second World War and under the Vichy regime. The filmmaker Marcel L’Herbier was its founder and later served as its president.

French historian Caroline Moine has written about how IDHEC developed after its establishment during the Nazi occupation. The institution eventually became associated with left-wing cultural life, with students taking part in France’s wider political and social debates. Some later used their media skills in support of the Algerian independence movement.

The historical irony is difficult to miss: institutions created within authoritarian or compromised political circumstances could, over time, become places where students learned to question the very structures that surrounded them.

India has its own chapter in this history.

In June 2015, the Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting appointed television actor and BJP member Gajendra Chauhan as chairman of the Film and Television Institute of India. Students objected strongly to the appointment, questioning his credentials and describing it as politically motivated.

The protest began on 12 June 2015 and continued for 139 days. It became one of the most significant student movements in FTII's history. Students held several rounds of discussions with the ministry, but the dispute remained unresolved.

At the time, there were also concerns that Chauhan's political association with the BJP could affect the autonomy and character of the institution. NDTV, among others, reported on these concerns.

One of the prominent faces of the movement was Payal Kapadia, then president of the FTII Students’ Association. Years later, she would win the Grand Prix at Cannes for All We Imagine as Light.

Now, in 2026, the debate over the autonomy of film institutions has returned to Kolkata.

On Sunday, 27 September, an incident was reported at the Satyajit Ray Film and Television Institute (SRFTI). The West Bengal unit of the Akhil Bharatiya Grahak Panchayat (ABGP), described as an RSS-affiliated organisation, had organised an event at the institute's Main Theatre after reportedly paying ₹15,000 in rent.

According to students, the Students’ Association and the wider student community had not been informed about the event beforehand.

Around 2 p.m., students reportedly went to the Main Theatre to put up their own posters. A confrontation followed. Students alleged that members of the organisation physically attacked them and used terms such as “anti-national”, “urban Naxal”, “terrorist” and “cockroach”.

Students also alleged that punches, kicks, bricks, stones and sticks were used during the confrontation. Some students claimed that knives were also used. Women students alleged that they were subjected to harassment.

Several students fled to the library for safety. According to the students, members of the organisation followed them there. The librarian was allegedly assaulted, and the library was surrounded, leaving students and staff inside.

A librarian and several professors were reportedly injured. More than 30 students and two professors were also reported injured.

West Bengal BJP spokesperson Debjit Sarkar subsequently referred to the protesting students as “Dimagi Naxals”. Filmmakers and members of the film fraternity, including Anurag Kashyap and Indranil Roychowdhury, condemned the incident.

The facts and allegations surrounding the SRFTI incident are still part of a contested public account, and the different sides have presented their own versions of what happened. But the larger question it raises is not new.

Who gets to decide what a film school should be?

And what happens when a space meant for artistic education and critical thought becomes a site of political confrontation?

The history of cinema under fascist and authoritarian regimes offers an uncomfortable answer. Governments have repeatedly understood the power of cinema—not simply as entertainment, but as a way of shaping memory, identity and public imagination. That is why film education has often been politically important.

But history also offers another lesson.

Control does not always produce obedience.

The Italian example shows how an institution created within a Fascist system could become a space where critical ideas survived. FTII’s 2015 movement showed how students could turn a dispute over an appointment into a larger conversation about institutional autonomy. And the events at SRFTI have once again brought questions of student freedom, cultural autonomy and political influence into the public conversation.

A film school, after all, is more than its classrooms, studios and auditoriums.

It is a place where young people learn not only how to operate a camera or construct a frame, but also how to look at the world differently.

Buildings can be controlled. Events can be cancelled. Libraries can be surrounded.

But once a generation learns to question, it cannot easily be silenced.

That may be the most enduring lesson in the history of film schools under authoritarianism: attempts to control culture can sometimes create precisely the critical voices that power was trying to silence.