Film Studies

Say hello to my little friend, the gangster movie

Anonymous — Fri, 26 Jan 2024 20:16:36 +0000

Say hello to my little friend, the gangster movie Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/26/2024 - 13:16

Bradley Worrell

In honor of what would have been Al Capone’s 125th birthday, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder cinema researcher Tiel Lundy explains the enduring popularity of gangsters in film and the American imagination

What is the most quintessentially American genre of film?

Some might argue for the Western, but there also is a case to be made for the gangster film, says Tiel Lundy, associate teaching professor with the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts. Lundy should know—she’s been teaching a class on the portrayal of gangsters in film for almost 10 years as part of the Libby Hall Residential Academic Program (RAP), recently rebranded as Creative Minds RAP at Libby.

Movies about gangsters date back to the early days of modern motion pictures, and hundreds of them have been made over the years. In fact, following the success of the first recognized gangster film, Little Caesar, in 1931, starring Edward G. Robinson as a small-town mobster rising through the ranks of organized crime, Hollywood made more than 50 gangster movies the following year.

Tiel Lundy, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder associate teaching professor in the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts, teaches a course on the portrayal of gangsters in film.

With this month marking the 125th anniversary of the birth of America’s most famous gangster, Al Capone, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Arts and Sciences Magazine asked Lundy about the continued popularity of the genre, how it has evolved over the years and what makes for a good gangster movie. Her responses have been lightly edited for style and condensed for space considerations.

Question: Given how many gangster films have been made, it seems fair to say the genre is popular with Hollywood producers.

Lundy: It is. And I think that, much like the genre of the Western, there’s always a question about gangster movies amongst film scholars: Does it continue to be viable, or has it pretty much reached its terminus? But just when people want to pronounce it dead, it finds its next incarnation.

I have some thoughts as to why it remains a really enduring genre. From its beginnings, the gangster film is an American cinematic invention. Other national cinemas have adopted it and riffed on it, but it is an American genre, and the genre itself really was contemporaneous to the history of gangsters in America, like Al Capone. I think that’s part of what explains its continuing appeal—that it’s rooted in actual history. I also think the gangster, as this mythic figure, is kind of the embodiment of this American identity.

Question: It seems like early gangster films focused on Italian-American or maybe Irish-America mobsters, but later films have broadened to represent greater American diversity.

Lundy: You’re definitely touching on something that is core to the genre. The genre is about American identity. And you can’t extricate race and ethnicity from American identity just because of the sort of unique nature and way this country has come together and continues to evolve. So, early films from the 1930s reflected the immigration patterns of the day. If you look at the late 19th and early 20th century, many of the immigrants were coming from southern Europe, and from Italy in particular.

As our questions about American identity become refined and maybe more focused on second- and third-generation Americans, I think they start to become less concerned with immigration status and ethnicity and really more at the intersection of race and class. I’m thinking now about Boyz n the Hood, for example. That is not the classic rise-and-fall story. That is a story that condemns racism and the failures of democracy and capitalism.

If you look at other films that are slightly more recent, for instance, The Departed, they do look at ethnicity, but I think their focus is really more on capitalism.

Question: Do you have any thoughts on Hollywood’s treatment of perhaps America’s most famous gangster, Al Capone?

Lundy: The obvious two films that we would look to would be the original Scarface, by Howard Hawks, and then the remake from 1983 from director Brian De Palma. And they’re remarkably similar in the way that they depict Capone, or in this case, ‘Tony.’ Tony Camonte is the name of the character in the original movie and Tony Montana is the remake with actor Al Pacino's character.

What I think they share between the two depictions, as well as the actual Al Capone, is that this man who is very aware of his presentation publicly and who really has worked to craft a kind of persona and public image of himself. And that’s my understanding as to part of why Al Capone has lived on in our memory, because he was a very good kind of social promoter—almost like an influencer of his day. The gangster’s identity has everything to do with how the public sees him, so he goes to great lengths to create this kind of mythic, larger-than-life impression in the press and popular culture.

John Singleton's 1991 film Boyz n the Hood condemned racism and the failures of democracy and capitalism. (Photo: Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.)

Question: Movie-wise, it seems like the American gangster has gone through several incarnations over the years.

Lundy: You’re right, there are definitely different iterations. And those iterations are a function of the release date of the film as well as when it’s set. They also are very much impacted by censorship.

If you look at the bulk of what we call the classic cycle of gangster films—those films that come out from the mid-1930s to the late 1940s and early ’50s—the content of those and the depiction of the gangsters was strongly enforced by the Hollywood Production Code.

The writers and directors were always somewhat hamstrung by the demands of the Hayes Office and the Production Code. If you were to try and really abide by the letter of the law, you couldn’t have a gangster that was flouting the law or remained sympathetic … because then you are creating a figure who doesn’t exemplify proper values. But, of course, that also makes for a really boring gangster.

So, the directors were always trying to find a way to kind of thread that needle to create a gangster who was charismatic, and was interesting, and who satisfied audiences’ craving for criminality and ruthlessness—but at the same time, that they could get it past the censors and release their films.

So, up until Bonnie and Clyde from 1967, movies were very much informed by the restrictions of the Production Code. By the time you get to Bonnie and Clyde, you have a different set of parameters, and a little bit more latitude as far as how to depict these gangsters.

Question: Prior to the Production Code, it seems like Hollywood romanticized gangsters a bit, but after the code Hollywood turns its attention to romanticizing law enforcement, correct?

Lundy: During the Great Depression, there was a feeling of disenfranchisement and dissatisfaction with American institutions, and that’s really embedded in gangster films at the time. They (gangsters) are there to challenge those institutions like banks and other institutions that were seen as utter failures that had let people down.

So, in the 1930s the gangster was most certainly romanticized. Those gangsters had qualities that made them more sympathetic to audiences and they had certain vulnerabilities.

Edward G. Robinson starred in Little Caesar, considered the first gangster film. (Photo: Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive)

Once we get into the official Production Code era, after 1934 until about the end of the 1940s, that 15-year or so period is when the Production Code was enforced most vigorously, and as a consequence the gangsters became less romanticized because the code was leaning hard on the studios to make gangsters less sympathetic and make law enforcement more sympathetic.

Question: With the enforcement of the Hollywood Production Code, it seems like movie gangsters were predestined to end up dead or in prison by the end of the movie.

Lundy: Exactly. You could have a gangster committing crimes, but ultimately, he had to be punished for them. So, that’s why you have movies like Little Caesar and Scarface and Public Enemy, where the gangster always goes out in a hail of bullets. He’s effectively ‘punished’ by dying. But it’s a very dramatic, spectacular death that satisfied audiences craving for that kind of action and violence and drama.

Question: Besides being focused on gangsters, are there some general unifying themes in this genre of film?

Lundy: What those movies—especially The Godfather and Scarface—have in common is this ongoing central theme about social mobility in America and the kind of tension between the gangster wanting to move up the social ladder and acquire a certain kind of class respectability—but at the same time never wanting to really fulfill that social contract. He wants to get to the top, but he wants to find the shortcut way to get there.

I think that’s common to some extent across American gangster films. They express that tension between wanting to be accepted in the highest levels, maybe even have political capital, but be able to commit crimes with impunity.

I’ve been thinking more about this recently, and I think that explains why this genre continues to remain vital: It’s pretty hard-baked into the American consciousness, that tension between being a renegade and also wanting to do your part so that we can have a functioning society.

Question: With so many gangster films to choose from, how do you narrow down the list of ones you will focus on in class to a manageable level?

Marlon Brando (right) starred as Don Vito Corleone, the titular godfather, in The Godfather. (Photo: Paramount)

Lundy: Basically, that’s what goes into shaping the syllabus. What can we do in about 14 weeks? If this is the only time that a student is going to watch gangster films, what are the ones they absolutely must see? What are the films that express those key turning points in the genre that express the central conflicts and themes?

I always know where the starting point is going to be. It's going to be the first film, Little Caesar. I don’t always know what the last, most recent film is, because I always move chronologically. But there are always going to be some films that that will never go away, like The Godfather. I would be drawn and quartered by my colleagues if I taught a gangster class and left out The Godfather.

Question: Is there anything specific that you think makes for a good gangster film?

Lundy: Beyond the technical effects, I think what the most endearing films have in common is the scope of the story. These are master narratives with sweeping stories that cover decades in a family’s story. I think that, in part, that’s why The Godfather trilogy is such a favorite.

Movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas offer really broad, sweeping narratives. I think why they work so well and are so appealing is that, with that kind of scope, they can really engage in questions about America and American identity that is always going to be core to the gangster genre. It’s always going to be interrogating Americanism and the promises of America.

Maybe my answer is not so much what makes for a ‘good’ gangster film, but what makes for the most enduring and popular gangster films for American audiences.

Top image: scene from Howard Hawks' 1932 film Scarface, starring Paul Muni (center) as Tony Camonte. (Photo: Bettman Archive)

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Award-winning filmmaker gives persistence, ‘energy’ to next generation

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Jun 2022 22:51:30 +0000

Award-winning filmmaker gives persistence, ‘energy’ to next generation Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/14/2022 - 16:51

Cody DeBos

John W. Comerford, who discovered the power of film at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, arranges major gift to the Brakhage Center for Media Arts

A gust of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ night air washed over John W. Comerford (’90 Psych & Film) like a tidal wave.

The ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder alumnus recalls stepping out for a breath of fresh air after viewing the hard-hitting Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda piece Triumph of Will for a film-studies class.

Looking for a sign of where to take his career, that gust of wind led to an epiphany.

Film can change the world.

Under the wing of legendary experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, Comerford would go on to pursue a career in film and push the boundaries of what it means to tell stories on the big screen.

“I learned that the impact of film is a lot bigger than I had ever imagined,” Comerford says, reflecting on his time at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder.

At the top of the page: As principal at Paradigm Studio, John Comerford has helped produce and write a wide array of films. Above: Comerford hopes the gift he arranged to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder will help inspire young filmmakers to pursue a career in the industry.

He also reflected on a propaganda film from the Spanish Civil War period that Brakhage chose to show in class. The piece depicted scenes of seemingly normal life while the narrator spoke of sickness and suffering among the people. By all appearances, the people were healthy.

“This film demonstrated the power of narrative voice,” Comerford says.

He also pinpoints this as a pivotal moment in his career. He learned early on that film can be powerfully suggestive and that such power could be used to illuminate rather than manipulate.

Now, 30 years later, Comerford works as principal at Paradigm Studio, a production company. Comerford lends his visionary eye for the meaning of film to a wide array of projects and experimental pieces.

One of which, Around the Fire, co-written and produced with longtime friend and fellow ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder alum Tommy Rosen (‘90), is slated for its 25th-anniversary re-release this year. The award-winning coming-of-age drama explores topics like adolescence, drug use and the importance of music culture.

Comerford attributes much of his success to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s spirit of discovery.

“I didn’t get a lot of direction from my parents growing up as far as what sort of career to pursue,” he says. “When my acceptance letter from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder arrived, it was actually dated on my birthday, Jan. 18. I thought, well, that’s a sign.”

Comerford’s first on-campus experience is committed to memory.

He reflects, “Coming down 36 and seeing the Flatirons for the first time, I thought, ‘Well this is going to be amazing.’”

Indeed, it was the start of something special for Comerford.

He has helped produce and write a number of critically acclaimed documentary and narrative films via Paradigm Studio, exploring topics from jazz music to gun violence. Themes of late include the environment and media literacy.

Lynch: A History made a splash as an experimental piece. It stitches together more than 700 internet video clips of former NFL running back Marshawn Lynch to form a narrative on race, media and the world of professional sports.

Comerford notes the piece has received praise from athletes at all levels, including from Lynch himself. He says it has also sparked discussions about the media’s impact among players and coaches throughout the sports industry.

Currently, Comerford has several projects in the works. He is producing a narrative feature film based on a true story of the fight to preserve California’s native redwood trees, authored by David Harris.

He’s also working with fellow Boulderite, filmmaker and musician Charles Hambleton on a film titled Kensu Maru. It highlights the search for a Japanese hospital ship laden with gold scuttled in the Philippines during WWII.

None of our productions happen without persistence. ... That persistence, and most importantly the persistence inspired by collaboration, is really essential.”

The story is about more than treasure, though. It is a tale of justice and defeating personal demons.

In recent years, Comerford has been thinking about how to give back. “The first thing that popped into my head was Stan,” he says.

“I did some research, and I thought of the Brakhage Center and the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ. I just thought, ‘Wow, that is the perfect place to return to the world, if you will, the energy and spirit of that gift given to me by Stan.’”

Comerford helped arrange a gift of $30,000 to the Brakhage Center for Media Arts at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. To be rolled out over three years, the gift is one of the largest ever received by the Brakhage Center.

He hopes the gift will help inspire young filmmakers to pursue a career in the industry. Comerford also hopes that students studying at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder will be able to gain a higher understanding of media literacy and its impact on consciousness.

Hanna Rose Shell, assicuarte professor and faculty director of the Brakhage Center for Media Arts, says the gift will do just that: “We at the Brakhage Center are thrilled to have the support and deep engagement from John Comerford, which will help enable students to enrich their horizons in the multiple realms of experimental film and beyond.”

When asked to share a bit of wisdom with those interested in pursuing a film career, Comerford offered two words:

“Collaboration and persistence.”

“None of our productions happen without persistence,” he adds. “Particularly as a producer, where you have the longest relationship with the motion picture of anyone involved. That persistence, and most importantly the persistence inspired by collaboration, is really essential.”

John W. Comerford, who discovered the power of film at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, arranges major gift to its Brakhage Center for Media Arts.

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Libraries, cinema studies win support to teach film preservation

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Oct 2021 20:55:12 +0000

Libraries, cinema studies win support to teach film preservation Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 10/04/2021 - 14:55

Doug McPherson

The $188k grant will help develop curricula to give undergraduates hands-on experiences in film archiving and preservation.

The University Libraries Rare and Distinctive Collections and the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder have won a $187,585 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to create five advanced, “experiential” classes focused on media archiving and preservation for cinema-studies undergraduates.

It will be one of the only programs of its kind in the country for undergraduates, according to Sabrina Negri, assistant professor in cinema studies and moving image arts, and Jamie Wagner, faculty fellow and moving image archivist for University Libraries, the grant’s principal investigators.

They say programs that teach media archiving and preservation skills are limited to graduate students at private universities in major coastal U.S. cities and that ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder would be the only public university to offer this type of program in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain regions.

Sabrina Negri, assistant professor in cinema studies and moving image arts, is one of the grant’s principal investigators.

“It’s important to have a preservation program located at a public university that’s not on one of the two coasts,” Negri said. “It gives access to the profession to a broader and more diverse group of students, and it would provide trained media archivists for smaller archives that aren’t located in big cities.”

Negri and Wagner say advances in technology, especially the transition from tape to digital media formats, have introduced a need for more media to be archived and for more archivists and conservators. “So that means there’s a growing need to teach individuals how to care for and preserve historical materials,” Negri said.

Students will learn the theory and practice of film archiving, restoration, preservation and how to preserve analog tapes—which are actually more endangered than film, Negri said. In addition, students will learn how to archive and preserve digital files and how to manage a media collection.

The program will also include paid fellowships in media preservation for undergraduate students working with the libraries’ moving-image archival collections and digital-media lab.

Wagner adds that the program will also feature a community-oriented internship program that pairs undergrads with under-resourced institutions and organizations that have media preservation needs for their own historical materials.

“Students will use the skills they learn to directly benefit at-risk cultural heritage material throughout the Front Range area,” said Wagner.

Wagner said what ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder is doing with the curricula, fellowship and internship could serve as a model for other universities around the country.

The director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Crosby Kemper, said the 2021 grant awardees are “responding to the gaps in our society, under-resourced communities, professional development for underrepresented members of our communities, and the programs and services with impact on the daily lives of … people.”

Students will use the skills they learn to directly benefit at-risk cultural heritage material throughout the Front Range area."

Wagner will teach the first class, which is on collection management, in spring 2022. All the other classes are scheduled to be taught in academic years 2022-23 and 2023-24.

The idea to create the curricula came to Negri when cinema studies and moving image arts received a gift of preservation equipment from GW Hannaway and Associates, a Boulder-based imaging and video company.

“Given that a lot of media are in need of preservation, it made sense to think to use that equipment to train new media archivists,” Negri said.

Negri taught seminars in film archiving and preservation in 2018 and 2020 and said they were well received.

“Now with the collaboration of the University Libraries and the grant, cinema studies and moving image arts can expand the project to include the five different classes,” Negri said.

Wagner adds, “We hope we can build a model for a curriculum or a certificate that has demonstrated success and data to inform next steps for the program.”

The $188k grant will help develop curricula to give undergraduates hands-on experiences in film archiving and preservation.

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Cinema Studies is getting rave reviews

Anonymous — Thu, 30 Aug 2018 20:17:16 +0000

Cinema Studies is getting rave reviews Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 08/30/2018 - 14:17

The ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts has made The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the top 25 film programsin the nation.

The department, formerly the Film Studies Program at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder, hailed the recognition by the top trade journal in the movie industry.

“For an academic unit like ours, this is comparable to a mention in the US News & World Report—at least for minor bragging rights,” said Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, professor and chair of the department.

He continued: “This humble feather in our cap joins the list of honors such as the Film Society of Lincoln Center naming in 2010 five of our faculty among most important experimental filmmakers of the last decade, and our naming as ‘Best in the West in Cinematography’ by MovieMaker magazine in 2017.”

Muñoz added, “Yes, we came in at #25 among the ‘Top 25,’ but we’ll take it.”

In June, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Board of Regents voted to rename the Film Studies Program and to grant it the status of a department.

Acevedo-Muñoz said the move made de jurewhat is already the de factoplace of the unit in the College of Arts and Sciences.

At the time of the vote, he added, “Our students are better served graduating from a department rather than a program, which might be erroneously perceived as having somewhat lesser standards or rigor.”

The ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts has made The Hollywood Reporter’s list of the top 25 film programsin the nation.

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Biochemistry and cinema studies now have department status

Anonymous — Fri, 22 Jun 2018 16:17:52 +0000

Biochemistry and cinema studies now have department status Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/22/2018 - 10:17

At its regular meeting on Thursday at the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder campus, the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Board of Regents voted to approve a new online Bachelor of Arts degree in interdisciplinary studies and two new departments for the Boulder campus.

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#StopTheCrazyTalk aims to change words, attitudes

Anonymous — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 01:24:36 +0000

#StopTheCrazyTalk aims to change words, attitudes Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/25/2018 - 19:24

Clay Bonnyman Evans

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder students create PSA to illuminate language that stigmatizes mental illness

Boulder resident and former ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder art student Lisa Solheim watches Andrew McGraw (film studies, '19) interview Micah Salazar (MCDB, '18) in the lobby of the Roser ATLAS building. McGraw and Meagan Taylor (Jour, '02) made a PSA on combating verbal stigma surrounding mental illness. Salazar discussed his work as a pharmacy technician in a mental-health centered pharmacy, while Solheim discussed her experiences with schizophrenia. Photos by Meagan Taylor.

Consider the following comments you wouldn’t be surprised to overhear in a coffee shop:

“She’s so bipolar! One day she’s happy, and the next she’s completely depressed.”

“Yeah, that guy is completely schizo, totally unpredictable.”

“Man, I’m so OCD about what shoes to wear.”

Each one makes colloquial use of a word or shorthand phrase related to a mental-health diagnosis—bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, obsessive compulsive disorder. All are not just imprecise and misleading, but also have the potential to stigmatize people with mental illness.

“Why do we casually insult others with mental health labels such as ‘psycho’ or ‘insane’?” asks Meagan Taylor, a 2002 journalism graduate who is now studying integrative physiology at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder. “We will never get rid of stigma unless we can change our underlying perceptions of mental illness, and that begins partly with how we use our words.”

So, she decided to do something about it. Tasked with creating an outreach project for her abnormal psychology class, Taylor worked with Andrew McGraw, a film studies major, and Lisa Solheim, a former ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ art major who is now a mental-health advocate, to create a short public-service video to highlight the problem of stigmatizing language. That video was published this week.

“We don’t go around saying ‘that’s so gay’ anymore, or calling people ‘retards,’ because we realized that the way we used those words could be harmful to people who overhear them,” Taylor says. “Our underlying attitudes need to change, so language has to change, and bringing attention to this is a start.”

Taylor and McGraw—who met while working for ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Emergency Medical Services—recruited volunteers to talk about their experiences with language that stigmatizes mental illness. After conducting pre-interviews, they sat conducted on-camera interviews on April 13.

“There is really a desire in the market to tell these kinds of stories, to challenged people’s reality and use of language,” says McGraw, who began making films for YouTube in high school. “I like telling stories that make a difference, make people question their world and challenge them to do better.”

Besides their student volunteers, Taylor and McGraw also turned the lens on Solheim, who has served on the speaker’s board for the nonprofit Mental Health Partners.

Mental illness isn’t the same as someone who’s just screwed up. The guy in Las Vegas who shot up all those people? There was no evidence of mental illness.”

“A lot of times, somebody says ‘schizophrenic’ and they mean somebody who’s just having a hard time or something,” Solheim says. “But mental illness isn’t the same as someone who’s just screwed up. The guy in Las Vegas who shot up all those people? There was no evidence of mental illness.”

But tossing out “mentally ill” any time someone does something harmful or anti-social is surprisingly common, says Solheim, and that can reinforce harmful stereotypes. Solheim recalls the time she sat down for an interview with a man who was renting a room in his house. After he told her he was an alcoholic, she decided to open up about her diagnosis.

“I thought, ‘Wow, we’re admitting our foibles here,’ and said, ‘Well, I’m schizophrenic,’” she says. “His immediate reaction was to say, ‘You aren’t going to come kill me in the middle of the night, are you?’”

Polls have found that 60 percent of Americans believe people with mental illness are “likely” to act violently toward others. While some studies have found a slight correlation between certain specific diagnoses and violence, more refined investigation has found that other factors, including substance abuse, childhood abuse and family history, are more important.

The 2005 MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study at the University of Virginia, for example, controlled for substance use and other environmental factors and found no significant difference in the rates of violence among people with mental illness and other people living in the same neighborhood.

Taylor, who plans to become a physician’s assistant, said her work as a volunteer at a hospital and working in emergency services increased her compassion for people with mental illness. She hopes the PSA will be a small step to help change the way we use language.

“The mental-health community and their allies need to stand up for proper use of terminology, stop casual labels, and promote language empathy if we want people with mental illness to be culturally integrated,” she wrote in her proposal for the PSA.

“We’re not talking about political correctness or policing language,” she says. “We’re talking about being sensitive human beings.”

Abnormal Psychology, PSYC 3303, is taught by Professor June Gruber.

[video:https://youtu.be/T9UdXCeP-aw]

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder students create PSA to illuminate language that stigmatizes mental illness.

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Filmmaker alums tackle nuclear weapons buildup

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Oct 2017 16:23:08 +0000

Filmmaker alums tackle nuclear weapons buildup Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 10/19/2017 - 10:23

Jeff Thomas

'We want to broaden the discourse and dialogue to talk about the lingering effects,' Eric Stewart says

The nuclear weapons buildup and the protests against it were for many simply the news of the day, but for two filmmakers from the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder it may turn out to be a provocative theme for a historical documentary and multimedia oral-history archive.

“There’s the popular idea that danger from the nuclear buildup kind of stopped with the end of the Cold War,” said Eric Stewart, who received his MFA in filmmaking from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder in 2016 and now works as an assistant professor of photography at Adams State University in Alamosa, Colo. “But we want to broaden the discourse and dialogue to talk about the lingering effects.”

Eric Stewart at work in the field. Photo courtesy of Eric Stewart. At the top of the page, an image inside the protected area of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant in 1978. The buildings in the foreground include 984, 992, 991, 989, and 968. These buildings made up the Building 991 complex. Building 991, Plant D, was the first operational building on site, constructed in 1951 as the final assembly and shipping and receiving building. To the north and northwest of Building 991 are the underground vaults and tunnels used to store weapons components. Photo by U.S. Department of Energy, Legacy Management.

Over the past two years Stewart and fellow ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ filmmaking MFA Taylor Dunne (2014) have been working to create the feature-length experimental documentary “Off Country,” a project they hope to have completed in the next two years. Dunne is a former ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder and Naropa University instructor who is now an assistant professor in mass communications at Adams State, and who also happens to be Stewart’s partner in life.

Ending up in Alamosa has turned out to be a blessing for the pair—beyond the fact they are both now tenure-track professors—in that it puts them within easy reach of their locations in New Mexico, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ and Nevada.

“We’ve been spending a lot of time in the Trinity location (site of the first atomic bomb test) in New Mexico, so that’s really convenient,” Stewart said. The project as a whole examines Southwestern locations, including the former Rocky Flats Plant, the White Sands Missile Range and the Nevada Test Site.

Stewart said he has always been attracted to stories about working for change through civil disobedience, and the Rocky Flats protest history was the initial draw to the research. Here he has been assisted by former ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder faculty member LeRoy Moore, a founder of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center.

The project examines the effects of the entire industry, from uranium mining, plutonium production and weapons building and testing, but Stewart said Flats activists here were actually a lot more successful than in other areas of the Southwest.

“Even if it wasn’t a perfect outcome at Rocky Flats, communities in central and northern New Mexico haven’t seen the same kind of results and change,” he said. Moore was instrumental in getting the pair started on the history and getting them in touch with anti-nuclear peace activists.

Dunne noted the test areas are largely populated by Hispanic families, so the film will be bilingual. That deepens the involvement for herself, Dunne said, in that they are “underrepresented histories” that the film documents.

“We are trying to tell a story through the perspective of the people's history,” she said. “This film is an extension of my previous work, where I have focused on stories about women and Indigenous people.”

While the documentary deals significantly with oral histories, Stewart said he and Dunne are still fundamentally experimental filmmakers, so the piece will not come out looking like a television documentary. “There’s been an opportunity to do this with more mainstream media, but we’re committed to make a non-traditional film,” he said.

Taylor Dunne at work in the field. Photo courtesy of Taylor Dunne.

“What I’m against is direct didactic narrative, I don’t want to tell them (the audience) what to think,” Stewart said. Instead, he said, the audience should interpret film much as they would have to any piece of art.

“This leads the viewer into a more engaged experience in the material. The viewer has to make up as much as the artist. Where do we go from here? Where does Boulder County go? How do we go on showing solidarity with communities in New Mexico and add to the accountability there?

“Working with these long landscape shots has been a challenge; we’re not going to cut in film of nuclear bombs going off,” he said. “We’re weaving these interviews with these shots of beautiful places in the West, and dichotomize these with a less than gorgeous history and less than gorgeous impacts.”

The project was initially supported by the fund named for the founder of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Film Studies Program, the Virgil Grillo Memorial Award, and has also received funding from the Puffin Foundation. With perhaps two years left of filming and editing the pair is still about $7,000 short of its $10,000 goal on KickStarter funding at http://bit.ly/OffCountry.

Locals invited to help document anti-nuke/peace movement

Filmmakers Taylor Dunne and Eric Stewart are inviting Boulder County residents to participate in an effort to document the anti-nuclear/peace movement that centered on the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Facility here, by joining in a discussion in Nederland from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 28 at the Art House of Nederland, 171 E. 2nd Street.

Dunne noted that the work goes far beyond the feature-length documentary the pair is filming, and will include an oral history archive.

“I make research-based films, and what goes into the final piece is only the very tip of the iceberg,” she said. “It is really unsatisfying to leave out so much, so we are putting all of the complete interviews in an archive so the history will be available to anyone. Adams State University, where we work, has offered to house the archive to get it started, but we are hoping it will be expanded and (also be housed) in New Mexico or Utah.”

Their project focuses on anti-nuclear and peace activists engaged in direct action and civil disobedience. The archive will document and catalog a diverse chorus of voices whom history has neglected to be a tool for researchers, historians, and activists, to learn not only about history but the human stories of people resisting environmental contamination and political oppression.

Their work was started with a small grant from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Film Studies and has gone on to receive support from the Puffin Foundation. They are fiscally sponsored by Basement Films, an Albuquerque-based media nonprofit, and are currently raising funds through a KickStarter campaign.

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Emmy winner honed storytelling skills at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ film program

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 17:16:53 +0000

Emmy winner honed storytelling skills at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ film program Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 12/05/2016 - 10:16

Lara Herrington

Producer of The People Vs. O.J. Simpson talks about editing and storytelling

Two-time Emmy-winning producer and University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder alumna Alexis Martin Woodall (BFA-film production, BA-film studies ’02) says ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s film-studies program gave her the power to craft compelling stories on the editing floor.

Alexis Martin Woodall

Most recently, Martin Woodall won Emmys for The People Vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story, about the trial that galvanized the United States.

Although her projects tend to feature horror and violence, Martin Woodall believes good film doesn’t need to shock. It just has to work.

“Everyone in film school feels like they have to be tormented to be successful, but they don’t,” Martin Woodall says. “If I believe in my story, it’s going to make everyone interested in it.”

She made successful angst-free films at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder: a documentary about her parents and a “1950s educational film about the year I gave my sister a Christmas present that didn’t quite please her.”

Martin Woodall credits ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder’s film professors Melinda Barlow, Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz and Phil Solomon with her successes. But she learned one of her most valuable lessons about film from Stan Brakhage, who died the year after she graduated.

“He taught me not to be a film snob,” she says. “I remember one day he came into class, and he had had the most delightful weekend. He saw three films: one was an art-house film, one was a (big-budget) film, and one was the Santa Clause 3, and he enjoyed them all equally. He saw the joy in everything. He taught me that it’s OK to like what you like. For all the perceptions of what film as art should be, at the end of the day, we should be storytellers, and we should have fun.”

I disappeared for three days in the creepy Macky basement to edit (her BFA) film. This was right before cell phones, and I would play the radio just to hear commercials to connect me with the outside world.”

As executive producer, Martin Woodall spins her magic on each episode of television before sending it to show creator, Ryan Murphy.

Martin Woodall makes decisions like, “What story are we telling? Does it make sense? Does it work?” If not, she recuts, re-tones, reworks music cues, and ultimately re-spins the story.

Though the writing process is vital, she says that to tell a compelling story, the editorial side of things is just as important.

“I’m always remembering that we want to tell stories that move people. I´m always assessing how effective we are (at that),” says Martin Woodall, who has also worked on projects including Glee, American Horror Story, and Nip/Tuck.

When she first moved from Boulder to Los Angeles in 2002, she was out of work for her first 10 months there. Then she started as a post-production assistant for Nip/Tuck, where, she says, “I worked my face off. I was the only 23-year-old production assistant dressed in heels lugging bags around.”

Alexis Martin Woodall enjoys a moment at the Emmy Awards.

Because ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder´s film program focuses on the experimental, she had to learn all aspects of the filmmaking process and how to keep a film budget on the job.

By the third season, she was promoted to her current role of executive producer.

“Making a TV show is like a giant version of film school,” Martin Woodall says.

“My 8-millimeter film class gave me a really safe space to be creative and find my voice,” Martin Woodall says. “I had to shoot light and cut the film myself. You get to wear a lot of different hats since you´re not allowed to have a crew until senior year.”

This gave her more control over her work and taught her that “the only way to have singular vision is to have complete control.”

Her ability to see the big picture allows her to collaborate with the fashion and makeup departments as they complete their part of telling the story.

Working on her BFA, Martin Woodall got to audition all arenas of filmmaking. She found that holding a camera and shooting scenes is not for her. Instead, she loves editing and making decisions.

“I disappeared for three days in the creepy Macky basement to edit (her BFA) film. This was right before cell phones, and I would play the radio just to hear commercials to connect me with the outside world.”

Editing, she learned, gave her closer proximity to storytelling.

Storytelling is not just technical, Martin Woodall says. “It’s also very artistic.” When she edits, she asks herself, “How can we take the audience further?”

An example of this is evidenced in episode nine of The People Vs. O.J. Simpson. In it, the court and TV viewers have to hear the Mark Fuhrman tapes in which he says the n-word. This is the climax of both the trial and TV series.

Martin Woodall says the scene was “horrible and moving, but not enough.” So she decided to take out the score.

“I wanted the audience to not be pulled through by the music, because it feels very naked to have to listen to this stuff without it,” she says.

The resulting effect emphasized the starkness and strength of the word, and intensified the dramatic arc.

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Noted filmmaker joins ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ film studies faculty

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 07:00:00 +0000

Noted filmmaker joins ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ film studies faculty Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/17/2016 - 00:00

Kenna Bruner

Associate Professor David Gatten became fascinated with cinematography after watching Star Wars at age 7, so it’s no surprise he became a filmmaker. What is remarkable is the work he’s spent his career making and for which he’s widely acclaimed: experimental films using 16 mm film.

Considered one of the foremost filmmakers of his generation, Gatten joined the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder Film Studies’ faculty in 2015 as associate director for graduate studies.

David Gatten

“I am making work that is more in the tradition of visual arts rather than in the tradition of Hollywood cinema,” Gatten said. “Film doesn’t have to be in service of information or entertainment. It can be a way to explore the world. It’s cinema as exploration.”

His journey to a career in experimental film began after he attended a workshop to learn how to process film. The workshop was held on a farm a few hours outside of Toronto. The dark room and processing equipment shared space in the barn with the chickens and cows. Since there was no running water in the barn, participants laid out their film on the ground and rinsed off the processing chemicals with a garden hose.

And the zany experiences didn’t stop there. Gatten’s film was chewed on by the farm dog; it got dirty, and it was stepped on. Though discouraged that his film was ruined, he nevertheless discovered something magical when he processed the film: He loved the visual effects resulting from the wear and tear.

Not only did the film contain the photographic record of what Gatten had shot, but it also bore the impressions of the film’s journey in the world. The dog’s teeth marks were visible, and where Gatten had accidently stepped on the film while the emulsion was wet, the pattern of the barn board was embossed into the film itself.

It all added texture and interest to the film.

That revelation inspired Gatten to start thinking about the surface of the film as analogous to the surface of the human body, which shows one’s life’s journey.

“I’m interested in confusion,” he said. “You can’t have discovery or epiphany if you don’t start from a place of confusion or not knowing.”

I’m interested in confusion,” he said. “You can’t have discovery or epiphany if you don’t start from a place of confusion or not knowing.”

For his next project, Gatten wanted to “let the ocean make a movie.” To accomplish this, he put 100 feet of loose film into a crab trap, tied one end of a 50-foot rope to the trap and the other end around his ankle. Then he jumped into the ocean.

The chemical reaction of the salt water with the emulsion and the physical interaction with the waves, sand and fish introduced an experimental quality into the film.

Because 16 mm film is an optical sound format—all sound information is encoded in pulses of light on the film strip—the chemical and physical reactions extend to the sound track. A projector makes the sound based on what happened under the water. No microphone was involved.

Since the projector reads the optical sound, the ocean truly did make the sound as well as the image.

“I continue to be interested in the way materials interact when placed in proximity to one another,” said Gatten, “to have a visual exploration of the properties of a moving image, moving toward something abstract, to have a conversation with the world and with the medium itself.”

16mm frame still, scanned at 2K from By Pain and Rhyme and Arabesques of Foraging (2012) a David Gatten film. Image courtesy of David Gatten.

Gatten earned his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Prior to joining the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder Film Studies’ faculty, he taught film at Duke University. Since 1996, his work has been shown in more than 60 solo exhibitions and screened in more than 1,000 group shows throughout the world.

He is a 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, and his work has twice been included in the Whitney Biennial (2002 and 2006) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where his work is also in the permanent collection.

Using non-traditional film processes, his work often blurs the boundary between language and image.

Gatten credits two film-studies faculty members with helping launch his career—the late Stan Brakhage and Phil Solomon. Brakhage is considered one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental, contemporary film. Solomon is an internationally recognized filmmaker whose work has been screened throughout the United States and Europe.

“I met them both 20 years ago,” said Gatten. “It is thanks to them that my work was first shown in New York in 1996. So it’s quite moving to me that 20 years later, here I am at The Brakhage Center in the Film Studies Program.”

Kenna Bruner is an editor at the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Office of News Services. See related story here.

David Gatten became fascinated with cinematography after watching Star Wars at age 7, so it’s no surprise he became a filmmaker.

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Big donation of archiving gear boosts film studies

Anonymous — Wed, 17 Feb 2016 07:00:00 +0000

Big donation of archiving gear boosts film studies Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 02/17/2016 - 00:00

Kenna Bruner

‘What we want to do is to help build people who will actually have big job offers before they even leave ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ,’ donor says

While the film studies program at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Boulder has a long history of making and teaching edgy, experimental and contemporary films, the program also teaches narrative and documentary films. The program has 10 tenured or tenure-track faculty and two instructors who bring rich and diverse experiences into all areas of film. (Related story here.)

With the recent gift of more than $3 million worth of professional preservation and archiving equipment from Wyndham Hannaway, a visual-effects specialist, film studies will be adding film preservation and archiving to its offerings. Hannaway’s Boulder company, GWH&A, has been a leader in creating innovative professional imaging for film and media services for more than 35 years.

With this equipment in place, the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder Film Studies Program is looking at adding a certificate and perhaps a professional master’s degree in preservation, restoration and archiving.

Meet “Thumper,” the 16mm and 35mm Film scanner used on “Babe Pig in the City” and other productions. The scanner is a modified Oxberry Optical Printer consisting of a Projector Movement and A liquid Cooled 4K Camera Head. Each Film frame is scanned 4 times at a 4K resolution in Red, Green, and Blue, as well as Alpha Channel for dust removal. This design is crucial for film preservation and color separation elements for storage. Photo by Andrew Busti.

Film studies is now poised at the forefront of this promising area of growth, making ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder one of very few universities in the country with a preservation and archiving program, according to Professor Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz, director of film studies.

Paradoxically, transferring from digital to 35 mm film for preservation purposes is the wave of the future, because digital formats can degrade at an astonishing speed or simply become corrupted, Acevedo-Muñoz says, noting that this reflects the need to back up data files.

“So, in order to ‘preserve’ any visual image originated in any digital format, the only way to ensure that is to make aphotographic negative on film, from which copies can be made (even if it’s to reconvert them to digital),” he adds.

Hannaway, who is renowned for his expertise, concurred. “One of the huge failings of our wonderful digital world is that we’re currently depending on long-term storage of most data on either magnetic media or flash drives.” he said. “Magnetic is fragile and flash is very expensive.” He also adds that digital media’s deterioration, specifically on magnetic tape, is “shocking.” Digital tape media can be copied onto new tape media every five to 10 years, but this is expensive and does not eliminate the possibility of data corruption.

“And so the problem remains for all of us—whether it’s credit cards or IBM or the government itself—how do you store stuff economically and reliably?”

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ data or images on film is an “incredibly durable, multi-hundred year medium,” Hannaway said.

As proof, Hannaway cites a woolly mammoth. “A wooly mammoth was found Siberia and some parts were made of collagen, similar to what some film is made of. His collagen was just fine 10,000 years later.”

“Film” can record analog images and also digital data. “If you take modern media and convert it to digits and place the digits on film, you’ve kind of got the best of both worlds. It’s digital, but it’s on a medium that doesn’t require remastering every five or 10 years,” Hannaway said.

“Even hundreds of years from now, whatever they use as cameras could still recover imagery from either film that held pictures or film that held bits,” he said, adding, “That’s one of the huge potentials of what I’ve donated.”

Hannaway said he would like to work with the university to create an endowed chair devoted to digital curation. One intention is to “use me while I’m available to begin to train others to understand all these old video formats, to enjoy the benefits of the multiple machines I have in every format, and to get a grasp of the maintenance and repair of the machines.”

“What we want to do is to help build people who will actually have big job offers before they even leave ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ. If someone can claim that they’ve been trained in my work, then the Getty (Museum), the Library of Congress and other archival organizations would be ecstatic to have somebody that’s on that threshold between film, television, and digital media, their archive and their formats and the future digital systems.”

“I’ve got the deep experience… but now we need to train some people like me.”

“Unlike the 97 other people out of 100 who want to be movie directors and writers and producers, the three who choose to work in media archives will be employed before they leave ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, and the others will be waiting tables on Pearl Street.”

For those who are interested in archiving and curation, “there are great opportunities and you can get large salaries for working in what I call ‘digital curation.’ I want ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ to be a leader by having what may be the first department in the country to train more people in that work.”

“On the surface, it doesn’t sound very creative, but when somebody brings you (media from) the Hindenburg or the moon landing, it suddenly becomes a little more relevant.”

Acevedo-Muñoz concurred: “Restoration and preservation are essential to all visual media, but in particular to film. More than 90 percent of the film material that existed before 1928 has disappeared. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ our film heritage is preserving American history.”

Kenna Bruner is an editor at the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Office of News Services. Clint Talbott contributed to this report.

With the recent gift of $2 million worth of professional preservation and archiving equipment from Wyndham Hannaway, a visual‐effects specialist, film studies will be adding film preservation and archiving to impressive list of offerings. Hannaway’s Boulder company, GWH&A, has been a leader in creating professional imaging for film and media services for more than 30 years.

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