Authors — Holly Willis
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Field Trip
Technically, Sara Velas is not an educator, nor does she work for a film school. She doesn’t fret about curricula, teaching styles or shifts in filmmaking technology. Instead, she operates the wondrous Velaslavasay Panorama in the West Adams area of Los Angeles, where, semester after semester, I take groups of students on a field trip to experience old-school immersive media and think about ways in which media forms shift and change over time. Ninety feet in circumference, Shengjing Panorama—the panorama currently on view—features a painting of the Chinese city of Shenyang between the years of 1910 and 1930. Created in […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 11, 2022 -
Still Looking: Gail Segal and Sheril Antonio’s Dramatic Effects with a Movie Camera
In their new book, Dramatic Effects with a Movie Camera, Gail Segal, a poet, filmmaker and associate arts professor, and Sheril Antonio, an associate arts professor in the department of art and public policy, both at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, describe a form of shot-by-shot film analysis that can teach filmmakers the nuances of cinematic storytelling. Recently published by Bloomsbury Publishing, the richly illustrated book is based on an NYU graduate filmmaking course taught more than two decades ago by Segal. “This class was an investigation of film technique,” Segal explains, “with the goal of applying […]
by Holly Willis on Jul 14, 2022 -
Simple Machines: The Inspiring Teaching of Experimental Animator Jodie Mack
“Find the note, and then deviate,” urges experimental animator Jodie Mack. The colorfully clad artist is a third of the way through her antic presentation to the November 2021 Film Friends gathering hosted by the Echo Park Film Center. Now in its second year, the monthly online series this go-around is focused on “simple machines” for filmmaking. Mack has been cheerfully showing some of her own creations, like a bicycle-driven zoetrope, but speedily moves on to her love for singing. “My voice is a simple machine!” she rhapsodizes before breaking into a wide-mouthed croon, one or two notes above the […]
by Holly Willis on Apr 14, 2022 -
Pedagogical City Hopping: the DocNomads Film School
“What if we create a curriculum for a school we’d like to attend ourselves?” That question was the foundation for a group of five educators who gathered in Lisbon, Portugal, in 2011 to brainstorm an entirely new two-year Masters-level film program dedicated to documentary production. The partners came from Lusófona University in Lisbon; the University of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest, Hungary; and LUCA School of Arts/College Sint Lukas in Brussels, Belgium. Vítor Candeias, who represented Lusófona University in designing the program and is a course director as well as a documentary filmmaker, says that the original idea was […]
by Holly Willis on Jan 18, 2022 -
Environmental Storytelling
In August 2021, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a new report on the global state of the environment, highlighting the shrinkage of glaciers, warming of oceans, massive forest loss, extreme heat, devastating drought and more. While the report is crushing, it is also fuel for action. Indeed, the BBC’s climate editor, Justin Rowlatt, suggested that 2021 could be the year for finally making climate change a top priority, citing the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in early November as just one landmark event that could help consolidate action. For filmmakers teaching in universities, the […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 11, 2021 -
Wanda: Film from the Future
Still Life: Notes on Barbara Loden’s Wanda (1970) Anna Backman Rogers 154 pages Punctum Books, 2021 One of the complaints made about feminist films of the 1970s and ’80s was that they were too experimental, too avant-garde, too elitist. They refused the pleasures of pop cinema. They skipped the well-told story and refused the escapism of character identification. And beauty? Forget it! Take Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970: it’s a desolate portrait of what New Yorker critic Paulene Kael dubbed an “ignorant slut” in a film described by Jump Cut’s Chuck Kleinhans as “flat and opaque.” Indeed, Wanda, who is […]
by Holly Willis on Oct 5, 2021 -
Memoria, on the Collapse of Cinema (a Book Review)
Memoria Giovanni Marchini Camia and Annabel Brady-Brown, editors Fireflies Press, 2021 The book begins with the word “memoria” handwritten in gold on the blue cloth cover. The word appears again on the book’s first page, alone, black type on the white page, suggesting with its flourish of vowels a portmanteau of memory, history and cinema and calling to us from another language. “Memoria” is also the second word on the second page, just before the type slips into description: of glimmers, a window, boats, darkness, the cinema. There is a bang, a snap, and the snap of a picture, and […]
by Holly Willis on Sep 8, 2021 -
“Every Shot Has a Beginning, Middle and End”: Conversations With Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens
Conversations With Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens Jacqueline B. Frost Routledge, 2021 “I’m attracted to edgy things,” explains cinematographer Maryse Alberti in a matter-of-fact response to a question posed by Jacqueline B. Frost in a new collection of 23 interviews titled Conversations With Cinematographers: The Eye Behind the Lens. The statement is part of a longer, quite charming commentary by Alberti, who also recalls her arrival in the US as a 19-year-old au pair with almost no exposure to moving images, early work photographing bands for New York Rocker magazine, and eventually shooting Stephanie Black’s 1990 documentary H-2 Worker, […]
by Holly Willis on Sep 3, 2021 -
Beautiful Syllabus Design
Is there any document more compelling than a good syllabus? I have a collection of favorites in a folder on my desktop and often daydream about following a particular professor’s list of screenings, readings and writing prompts to create my own individual class, a kind of private self-improvement gambit or—even better—a venture into some fantastic cinematic territory still unknown to me. A good syllabus is a treasured resource; a great syllabus, though, with its hints and errant connections, exudes the magic of possibility and epiphany. As an example, I remember reading my colleague Priya Jaikumar’s syllabus for a graduate seminar […]
by Holly Willis on Jul 12, 2021 -
Talking about Film
While filmmakers attend festivals to show their work, network and see old friends, film scholars have their own, similar venues; namely, academic conferences. Instead of submitting films, scholars submit proposals to present papers or host workshops; these are either accepted or rejected. Scholars whose proposals are selected not only have more impetus to attend the conference, they also will be able to add the presentation to their CV and activities list for the year. More significantly, though, these presentations often serve as early drafts of book chapters or essays to be published later. As a result, conferences play a vital […]
by Holly Willis on Apr 8, 2021
