The Most Valuable Lessons: Filmmakers Remember Their Iconic Instructors

Teaching is a complex act, but most of us standing in front of students in film classrooms have never been taught to teach. Instead, we recall the teachers who impressed us, then try to repeat some part of that practice and hope for the best, often never quite realizing the impact we are in turn having on our own students. Here, three current faculty members recall iconic instructors from their college experience, and the lasting effect of key ideas and behaviors. Cauleen Smith on Lynn Hershman Leeson and Trinh T. Minh-ha Interdisciplinary artist Cauleen Smith earned a BA in creative…  Read more

Breathe Deep

“I prefer placing the perceptual, intuitive, emotional and spiritual growth of the student at the center.”  That’s the succinct teaching statement of Pablo Frasconi, a soft-spoken, thoroughly grounded filmmaker and faculty colleague of mine in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He has developed a three-course sequence that helps students engage in a form of creativity based on quieting the mind. “Mindfulness and meditation are central,” Frasconi explains. “It is where these classes begin: by looking inward to discover the ’moving visual thinking’ and ’song of the cells’—as Stan Brakhage called these experiences—that is our…  Read more

Expanding Horizons: How Film Schools Are Adjusting to a More Diverse Future

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Reboot By The Sea

It might be hot. There are several quarries for swimming. It might be cold and rainy, and we’ll be in a non-heated, non-air conditioned barn. There will be mosquitoes. So began a long list of somewhat unsettling particulars describing conditions for the six-day DesignInquiry residency that took place at the end of June 2018 on Vinalhaven, an island halfway up the coast of Maine. I had applied six months earlier, intrigued by the year’s theme, “Rewrite,” and was delighted when I was accepted. I was stepping down from a decade-long leadership stint, having cocreated and chaired a new department in…  Read more

In 1993, I was a graduate student in a Critical Studies Ph.D. program studying independent, avant-garde and feminist film and video, figuring out how to write about them, and thinking about what it meant to write at all. I adored high theory—the thickness of it, the heady political ambition, the philosophical complexity. But I liked zines and the wild world of alternative publishing, too, along with the community of readers eager for experiments that these publications augured. My advisors discouraged involvement with Filmmaker—a career-killer, for sure—and when I was offered a short-term job at Variety one summer, they rolled their…  Read more

A few months ago, one of my students tried to kill himself. He took a handful of pills and got into bed. Luckily, he mentioned what he had done to someone else, and a little while later, the campus police showed up at his dorm door. They took him by force to the hospital, and then — a day later, again by force — from the hospital to a lockdown facility on the edge of Los Angeles. And so, late one Friday night, I found myself handing over my keys, cell phone and identification to a stern guard inside a…  Read more

Traditional Teaching Ends Here

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25 Sentences

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Posthumous Experimentation

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Paradigms of Change

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