Authors — Holly Willis
-
Gale Force Cinema: Studying with Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson
On September 26, I flew from Los Angeles to Atlanta, then drove north toward Rabun Gap, eventually turning west on Bettys Creek Road to find the sprawling 600-acre campus of the Hambidge Center in the heavy rain preceding the arrival of Hurricane Helene. I had signed up for a workshop called “Cinema From Scratch: From Camera Obscura to Handmade Film,” with Brooklyn-based artists Luis Recoder and Sandra Gibson, and the urge to meet the pair, whose work with the materiality of cinema I’ve loved for two decades, overrode this Angeleno’s terror of foul weather. Carefully tracking what was being called […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 16, 2024 -
The Intersection of IRL and the Digital: In Media Res: Expanded at the Torrance Art Museum
I’m peering into a small pool of water held in a shallow, roughhewn clay bowl suspended from a bar held aloft by two ladders, and I see moving images of a child’s face, hands, a woman, flowers, the blue of cyanotype, a strawberry. And then a drop of water disrupts the image with a sudden wave of concentric circles, and I am brought out of the image to the water’s surface, to a second layer of experience, realizing in a kind of minor epiphany all the effort I’m expending to see one thing while ignoring all the rest. Looking again, […]
by Holly Willis on Nov 27, 2024 -
Waste Not: The Green School Alliance
Like many film school instructors, Kent Hayward, an associate professor of narrative production at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), has also freelanced in the industry. While working on a variety of productions over the years, from Lifetime shows to The Dark Knight, he’s noticed an unfortunate fact. “At the end of the production, when wrap time comes, there is always a mad dash to the dumpster to get rid of everything,” he says, speaking from this year’s University Film and Video Association annual conference, which met at Cleveland State University in early August. “It’s tremendously wasteful to see all […]
by Holly Willis on Sep 18, 2024 -
Loving Cinema, Frame by Frame: The Art of Cathy Lomax
Every now and then—winter break, summer break—I purchase a new notebook at the local Blick intending to take up drawing, a practice far from my discipline of cinema studies. This notebook need is not driven by my usual academic hubris, which asks smugly, often with a shrug, “Really, how hard could it be?” but by something more feral and fervent. Like, if I could put pen or pastel to paper, something pure would pour forth, heart to hand to drawing. There would be color and expression and the ineffable, all in a scribble. And if you think I’m exaggerating: There […]
by Holly Willis on Jun 27, 2024 -
How to Ace a Film School Admissions Interview
I turned in this column way late this quarter. My excuse? Admissions. Like film faculty across the country, my colleagues and I in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California are reading dozens of applications for a wide variety of undergraduate and graduate filmmaking, screenwriting and media arts programs, and sorting through personal statements, work samples, grades, letters of recommendation and more, trying to sense who might be best for our program and how our program might best suit potential applicants. There are more applications than ever, even though recent analyses suggest that students consider the […]
by Holly Willis on Mar 18, 2024 -
Lessons from the AI Filmmaking Rabbit Hole: Holly Willis on Teaching During Rapid Technological Change
I recently found myself sitting between three tech bros on my right and three cinephiles on my left. The film festival panel was meant to be a discussion about AI in the film industry; instead, it was an exasperating—if entertaining—demonstration of the radical gap in knowledge separating people who have some technical understanding of AI and those who don’t. There were tone-deaf proclamations about “generating content” and “optimizing workflows” on one side. And there was shouting, swearing, table-pounding, finger-pointing and (almost) tears on the other side, culminating in the announcement, “We’re very afraid!” I get it. AI has been foisted on […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2023 -
The Art of Angling: The Making of Rose Troche’s Classic Microbudget Lesbian Love Story, Go Fish
1994’s Go Fish, Rose Troche’s smart, punked-out work of guerilla filmmaking, combined a playful take on lesbian dating with discursive dialogues around gender politics and the cultural history of gay female representation. Part of the late ’80s and early ’90s low-budget boom of what critic B. Ruby Rich dubbed New Queer Cinema—films such as Poison, Swoon, The Hours and Times, Born in Flames and The Watermelon Woman—the Chicago-set Go Fish finds hip college student Max (Guinevere Turner, also the film’s screenwriter and producer) in a romantic rut and set up by friends with a hippie-ish older lesbian, Ely (V.S. Brodie). […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2023 -
Crash Course: A Professor Quickly Learns about AI
Earlier this year, as ChatGPT, Midjourney, Runway and a long list of other AI tools ignited a national conversation about artificial intelligence, many of my colleagues in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California shuddered in horror over the displacement of human craft and creativity by visuals created through simple text prompts. Published in The New York Times in February, columnist Kevin Roose’s description of his creepy conversation with Bing added gasoline to the fire, prompting a desire to prohibit the use of all AI across all of our programs. And what about plagiarism?! The general […]
by Holly Willis on Jun 27, 2023 -
Paradigm Shifts: TV-Focused Curriculum Changes at Three Film Schools
A couple of years ago, I was chatting with writer Jack Epps, a colleague of mine at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. We were marveling over the rise of the limited series as a format, and he explained that it allows for an expanded second act. “You can really develop the relationship between a protagonist and antagonist,” he said, using Killing Eve as a great example. I was intrigued by the idea that new formats could allow different aspects of storytelling to emerge so, for this issue’s column, I asked the heads of three […]
by Holly Willis on Mar 16, 2023 -
Daydreaming, Neuroscience and Screenwriting: The Imaginative Teaching of Mary Sweeney
“I have always had a hard time explaining my creative process to people,” says Mary Sweeney, a professor of screenwriting in the John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Sweeney boasts a long list of filmmaking credits but may be best known for her collaborations as a producer, writer and editor with filmmaker David Lynch. In particular, Sweeney edited Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, two deliriously dreamy films that highlight a form of poetic cinema and a creative process that Sweeney hopes to share with students. […]
by Holly Willis on Dec 15, 2022
