First Day of Class

I had my first class today: American Masterworks. It's not all of American film history, because you couldn't really fit that in one semester. So it's 1894 to the 1970s and even that "narrowing down" will still be a survey rather than in depth. I didn't really feel old until he started talking about the films of the 80s being historical but still probably seen by most of the people in the room, and likely we've even all seen Jaws and Star Wars, yes??? He and I might have been the only ones to see it in the theater though. His goal is to pick films we might not have seen or wouldn't necessarily know why they're significant. [So apparently Linda's new tee shirt of the sand people guy doing the John Cusak pose would go over the heads of all my classmates.]

We have 32 movies on our must watch list, most of them I either haven't seen or haven't seen recently enough to remember well. But as this was a class that several people wanted to know what we were going to watch and what we're talking about I figure I'll take it week by week.

Today was a lot of logistics so we only watched a couple of really early films near the end of class. We watched a set of films from the Edison Manufacturing Company, which I'd seen actually because I got the disk from Netflix once that was films from 1895 to 1905. The point of these in terms of class was 1) they were in a way marketing pieces in that the point of them wasn't to make a movie but to demonstrate the cameras and projectors. They weren't selling the films certainly, they wanted people to buy the hardware. 2) they were shown at and had the same look and feel of carnivals and vaudeville.(*) So there was generally very little story, it was all spectacle. They were trying to lure people in to then sell them the cameras and projectors.

Then we watched the Great Train Robbery from 1905 ('03? around there). It was not necessarily the first film to tell a story as lots of people were experimenting with film then. In American film we point to it as first. It was also the first Western, the first Action film, the first film with special effects (hand painted in on the film). It was an epic for its time, running at 12 minutes when people were used to 30 seconds. From a modern sensibility as someone who has watched a lot of bad shorts, it's actually quite good. It's got that melodramatic big acting common in its day, but that's forgivable. It tells a clear story, with clear characters, it has a plot and the plot is easy to follow. All with no words at all, not even the title cards you would see in later films.

I found it interesting to watch these films for what they told us of the people of their day. They weren't in period costume, that was just their regular clothes. What counted as a spectacle for them in the very short ones: a woman dancing, a bodybuilder flexing his muscles, a couple kissing (almost). We didn't watch it, but on the disk was New York City in the snow. I'm sure it's been done, but I would enjoy it if someone went to the same street corner and shot a little film now and played them back to back to see how the city has and hasn't changed. Especially if it being done before means 50 years ago or even 20 and then again now.

We each had to sign up for doing a 30 minute presentation at some point during the semester. He had the topics listed on the weeks they fell in the syllabus. I really kind of wanted to sign up for Science Fiction in the 1970s, but it falls in the second to last week of the semester and I was afraid if I waited to volunteer and then lots of people wanted it I might get stuck doing Woody Allen or Horror in the 70s. And there were a couple of people who raised their hand for SciFi so I think I was right to pick something earlier. So I'll be doing 30 minutes on Haskell Wexler who was a cinematographer in the 60s. Actually he's someone I should know more about anyway so I think it'll be a good choice.

And finally, because a few people asked what do you do for orientation in grad school? We started out with everyone together getting a pep talk from the dean and someone representing the school of communications. It was mostly stuff like important dates, and where to get your ID and you can sign up for classes at the fitness center for free. Then they split us up into departments (mine is TV & Film). We got a pep talk from the chair of the department that was rather short. Then they split us up again into Programs (mine is Film Production) and we went with the professor who is the head of the program so that we could meet our classmates and get some program specific information. There really are only 6 people in my class. One of them wasn't there last night. Four of them are guys who have finished their undergrad degrees within the last year. And me. The professor didn't happen to be on the selection committee this year so he didn't know anything about us so he asked us to introduce ourselves, say what and where we did our undergrad, how long we've been out and what we've been doing in the meantime. When we got to me the professor said, "You're very well preserved, I wouldn't have guessed." We didn't really get to talk that much, but the boys seemed nice enough. Probably should stop thinking of them as boys though. Fellas? Guys?

And now I'm off and running. I should wander back to campus and get my ID taken care of, though it's raining so I might just put that off until tomorrow and instead read my 3 chapters of film history this afternoon.

(*) I wonder if that's true or if I just think they look like carnivals because this is what I know of what carnivals look like.