RICK HERBST, now attending Yale Law School, may yet turn out to be the current
decade's archetypal film major. Twenty-three years old, he graduated last year
from the University of Notre Dame, where he studied filmmaking with no intention
of becoming a filmmaker. Rather, he saw his major as a way to learn about power
structures and how individuals influence each other.

"People endowed with social power and prestige are able to use film and media
images to reinforce their power - we need to look to film to grant power to
those who are marginalized or currently not represented," said Mr. Herbst, who
envisions a future in the public policy arena. The communal nature of film, he
said, has a distinct power to affect large groups, and he expects to use his
cinematic skills to do exactly that.

At a time when street gangs warn informers with DVD productions about the fate
of "snitches" and both terrorists and their adversaries routinely communicate in
elaborately staged videos, it is not altogether surprising that film school -
promoted as a shot at an entertainment industry job - is beginning to attract
those who believe that cinema isn't so much a profession as the professional
language of the future.

Some 600 colleges and universities in the United States offer programs in film
studies or related subjects, a number that has grown steadily over the years,
even while professional employment opportunities in the film business remain
minuscule. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are only about
15,050 jobs for film producers or directors, which means just a few hundred
openings, at best, each year.

Given the gap between aspiration and opportunity, film education has often
turned out to be little more than an expensive detour on the road to doing
something else. Thus, Aaron Bell, who graduated as a film major from the
University of Wisconsin in 1988, struggled through years of uninspiring nonunion
work managing crews on commercials, television pilots and the occasional feature
before landing his noncinematic job designing advertising for Modern Luxury
Media LLC, a Chicago-based magazine publisher.

"You sort of have this illusion coming out of film school that you'll work into
this small circle of creatives, but you're actually more pigeonholed as a
technician," said Mr. Bell, who is now 39.

For some next-generation students, however, the shot at a Hollywood job is no
longer the goal. They'd rather make cinematic technique - newly democratized by
digital equipment that reduces the cost of a picture to a few thousand dollars
and renders the very word "film" an anachronism - the bedrock of careers as far
afield as law and the military.

At the University of Southern California, whose School of Cinema-Television is
the nation's oldest film school (established in 1929), fully half of the
university's 16,500 undergraduate students take at least one cinema/television
class. That is possible because Elizabeth Daley, the school's dean, opened its
classes to the university at large in 1998, in keeping with a new philosophy
that says, in effect, filmic skills are too valuable to be confined to movie
world professionals. "The greatest digital divide is between those who can read
and write with media, and those who can't," Ms. Daley said. "Our core knowledge
needs to belong to everybody."

In fact, even some who first enrolled in U.S.C.'s film school to take advantage
of its widely acknowledged position as a prime portal to Hollywood have begun to
view their cinematic skills as a new form of literacy. One such is David
Hendrie, who came to U.S.C. in 1996 after a stint in the military intending to
become a filmmaker, but - even after having had the producer/director Robert
Zemeckis as a mentor - found himself drawn to the school's Institute for
Creative Technologies, where he creates military training applications in a
variety of virtual reality, gaming and filmic formats. One film he developed was
privately screened for the directors John Milius and Steven Spielberg, who
wanted to understand the military's vision of the future.

"That was like a film student's dream," said Mr. Hendrie, who nonetheless
believes he has already outgrown anything he was likely to accomplish on the
studio circuit. "I found myself increasingly demoralized by my experiences
trying to pitch myself as a director for films like 'Dude, Where's My Car?' "
Mr. Hendrie said. "What I'm doing here at I.C.T. speaks to the other interests
I've always had, and in the end excited my passion more."

In recent weeks, members of a Baltimore street gang circulated a DVD that warned
against betrayal, packaged in a cover that appeared to show three dead bodies.
That and the series of gruesome execution videos that have surfaced in the
Middle East are perhaps only the most extreme face of a complex sort of
post-literacy in which cinematic visuals and filmic narrative have become
commonplace.

Melding easily with the growing digital folk culture, some film majors have
simply taken to creating art forms outside the boundaries of the established
film business. In one such instance, Wes Pentz, a k a DJ Diplo - a 2003 graduate
of Temple University, where film majors are encouraged to invent new career
paths in museums, leisure businesses and elsewhere - broke through with his
trademark Hollertronix, a style modeled on cinematic soundtracks. "I think of my
songs as having a movement, like I would watch in a film, and there's a
narrative feel to them," said Mr. Pentz, who said he had learned to frame music
differently because of his film school experience.

In the public policy arena, meanwhile, students like Yale's Mr. Herbst hope to
heighten political debate with productions far more pointed than the most
political feature film. Even a picture like "Hotel Rwanda," with its unblinking
look at African genocide, is "a soup kitchen approach," Mr. Herbst said: "You're
offered something to eat, but there are no vitamins." Bringing film directly
into politics, he expects to throw objectivity out the window and change minds -
perhaps not an unrealistic aim at a time when, in a bit of what a headline in
The Wall Street Journal characterized as "film noir," the Edward D. Jones &
Company brokerage has entered the fray over the proposed Social Security
overhaul with a highly produced video.

To some extent, such broadening vision is already helping to make economic sense
of film education, which in the past was often a long path to nowhere. "Most
find their way, and the skills they learn from us are applicable to other
careers and pursuits," Dale Pollock, dean of the School of Filmmaking at the
North Carolina School of the Arts, said of his students. "So we're not wasting
their time or money."

Still more, Ms. Daley, the U.S.C. Cinema-Television dean, argues that to
generalize such skills has become integral to the film school's mission. More
than 60 academic courses at U.S.C. now require students to create term papers
and projects that use video, sound and Internet components - and for Ms. Daley,
it's not enough. "If I had my way, our multimedia literacy honors program would
be required of every student in the university," she said.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company