|
Way Cool, Junior by Thom Denick As I loaded my color film into the back of 35mm camera, I called out to my professor, "I just want a flat white background with good light, I'll add color and flair in Photoshop later." It was early in the morning, well, early for student life, 10 AM, in the lighting studio at the Park school. I was preparing to shoot the 24 other students in my class for the Junior Film Festival coming up the next Friday. I had been forcibly volunteered to take the others photos, being one of the few Film/Photo double majors in the class. Professor Curt Louison was helping me set up the lighting, as studio photography was not one of my specialties. We had set up a simple two point lighting scheme against a white background. I set my camera on a tripod, and checked my light meter. I lined up for the first shot of the filmmaker standing before me. His nervous smile and uncomfortable stance with his arms crossed in front of him framed him nicely in my 50mm lens. I held my hand next to my lens popping a new finger out with each count, "1-2-3-" I snapped the shutter open, it closed 1/30th of a second later. "All right, Brady, looks good through my camera." He smiled and went back to class. I'm known among my film comrades as something of a bastard. I adamantly speak out against the way many of the students have created their films, spending thousands of dollars to create mediocre to terrible fiction narratives, desperately trying to make something which mirrors Hollywood style filmmaking, but none of them having the tremendous capital required to hop over the professional barrier erected by that district of L.A.. I have gotten in long arguments with people who ascertain experimental filmmaking is a joke, unimportant, and something only lazy students work on. Being a political non-fiction/experimental filmmaker is often enough fuel to get a fight going with an overzealous film teacher who hasn't read enough theory, and doesn't understand why I am always trying to something different, which challenges the rules they set up for us at every juncture. Often times, I have convinced myself that I hate the "others," those who ignore film theory, and attempt to create films as a sort of allegorical jerk-off to the "masters" they grew to love before they got to film school, Kubrick, Spielburg, Lucas, Hitchcock, and the countless others. For them, they get enough theory by going to Cornell Cinema every other weekend, and watching the films they've loved for years, again. Try to get them to watch something which is from a different culture than White Imperialist, and they say, "Why? I get enough of that in my classes." I wouldn't say I'm hated among my film comrades, in fact most of my friends here at school are film or video makers, but I definitely have my enemies. I find the abundance of ludicrously bad narrative film about Beers, Broads, and Bongs enough to have a strong distaste for others in my class. However, as each student filed in to the large studio to have their, "glamour shot" taken for the film screening's slide show, some of the my "enemies," I noticed something else which I had never noted before among them. They all shared a strong sense of nervousness. "Does this look, OK?" most of them asked, holding themselves in a serious posture, trying to get me to shoot their best side. But the words were not sarcastic, they were genuine. They could already imagine the filled auditorium, their friends and family there to see them, the most important screening of their four years, the silent and personal anxiety as film after film showed, quietly waiting anxiously for their own. Their own spot of nervous triumph. A slide I had shot would go up, displaying their face on a 30 foot screen, and then soon after, the projectors would roll and their film would begin. A semester's work had come to a climactic release in front of a few hundred spectators. I imagined and sensed this in them at the same time. As each new student came in I felt a growing sense of camaraderie with each of them, yes, my film was a passionate political deconstruction of the Patriarchal narrative, but each of these kids with their thin plots and terrible actors, had passion for their films. Or at least a passion to make film, and to have their image projected in front of the masses for consumption. A passion which met if not exceeded mine. Even the few students who chose to not be completely serious in their shot were still serious to make sure that the shot looked OK, they made wanted to make sure that they didn't look like assholes. And now suddenly, a class which I had been highly critical of the entire semester, a class with only three woman filmmakers in its ranks of 26, a class which was 90% made up of narrative filmmakers, had caught my affections. I looked forward to the screening, to sitting through each little celluloid triumph or failure. I felt as though these filmmakers were my comrades and not my enemies for the first time in two years. There is no life lesson I wish to convey with this story, but if there was one, it would probably be here. I have found some, even if it isn't complete, comfort and understanding in why each of us chooses the paths which we choose within the same discipline. I am sure that I will come away from film school with many life long friends, as well as many life long enemies, but I'm not sure if that really matters any more. Perhaps we all want the same thing, to produce our images, our sounds, and have other people hear them. Even if the other people don't like it very much. This doesn't mean I'm going to stop fighting for the areas of film which I believe are worthy of pursuing, but I think now, I have a greater understanding of why other makers are doing what they are doing. You can get to the Junior Film Screening on April 30th at 7 PM in the Park Auditorium. Admission is free. Thom Denick is indeed hated by many, including many memebrs of the Buzzsaw staff. That's mostly a lie. We like Denny pretty good'round these parts. |
