{"id":246,"date":"2011-12-11T16:52:09","date_gmt":"2011-12-11T16:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=246"},"modified":"2012-02-02T04:21:26","modified_gmt":"2012-02-02T04:21:26","slug":"november-28-2011-panel-discussion-%e2%80%9cpublic-humanities-documentary-filmmaking-and-the-academe%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/?page_id=246","title":{"rendered":"November 28, 2011 Panel Discussion: \u201cPublic Humanities, Documentary FIlmmaking and the Academe\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Panel Discussion: <\/strong>
\n“Public Humanities, Documentary Filmmaking and the Academe”<\/strong>
\nwith
\nProf Matthew Jacobson (chair of American Studies)
\nLauren Tilton (American Studies, Grad ’16),
\nJoshua Sperling (Film Studies & Comparative Literature, Grad ’15)
\nProf Charles Musser (American Studies & Film Studies)<\/p>\n

I organized and chaired this panel, so what I am providing here is a version of my introduction and then my own comments.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0The subject of this panel\u2013\u2013 “Public Humanities, Documentary Filmmaking and the Academe\u201d\u2013\u2013 is a fraught subject and perhaps a particularly fraught one at Yale.\u00a0 In part, this is because this nexus has a long history at Yale, going back\u2013\u2013at least\u2013\u2013to the 1920s when Yale University Press produced a whole series of historical films, The Chronicles of America Photoplays<\/em>, which were based on a highly successful 50-volume history of the United States, the Chronicles of America<\/em>, published between 1918 and 1921.\u00a0\u00a0 Only 15 of the anticipated 33 films were produced.\u00a0 Although costing more than $1 million, their reception was at best mixed.<\/p>\n

This evening we are not here today to reflect on the long history between the mid 1920s and the mid-aughties.\u00a0 Rather we are here to talk briefly about some trends in what we are now calling the Digital Humanities and Digital Filmmaking as it functions in Academia.<\/p>\n

I am going to let people introduce themselves but I thought I might briefly outline what might\u2014or might not happen.<\/p>\n

Matthew Jacobson, chair of the American Studies Program, has been the pioneering force behind the MA in the American Studies Program at Yale.\u00a0 He is going to talk about Public Humanities in general, and the MA program here at Yale in particular.\u00a0 Matt has been teaching AMST 903a\/HIST 746a, Introduction to Public Humanities<\/em> this fall and has devoted at least two weeks to the documentary work of two of our colleagues\u2014Zareena Grewal and Kate Dudley.\u00a0 Indeed Zareena would be here this evening if she was not still returning from Thanksgiving break.<\/p>\n

Lauren Tilton is in the American Studies Ph.D. Program and is also undertaking the MA in Public Humanities. She received a big NEH grant for a FSA\/Farm Security Administration photo project she began last year in the Introductory Public Humanities course, which was then taught by Laura Wexler.\u00a0 This project, entitled Photogrammar (http:\/\/euler.stat.yale.edu\/~tba3\/fsa\/index.html), is designed to offer a new grammar for how we read photography. Using the FSA-OWI collection, Photogrammar aims to show how to offer extensive photography archives as a searchable, visual and participatory online tool. Obviously this is a very ambitious undertaking.\u00a0 However, the grant meant that this project could not be pursued for school credit and so she is currently making a documentary video in Documentary Film Workshop, which is closely related to\u2014but distinct from– this undertaking.<\/p>\n

In the Digital era, digital documentary and digital humanities inevitably takes on new forms.\u00a0 The mechanics and costs of filmmaking have been transformed.\u00a0 The relationship between theory and practice, between critical studies and creative undertakings can be and should be reimagined.\u00a0 Josh Sperling is a Ph.D. student in Film Studies and Comparative Literature.\u00a0 Both he and Zelda Roland, a Ph.D. student in Film Studies and History of Art, took Documentary Film Workshop last year in conjunction with the joint degree program. Josh\u2019s documentary took as its starting point Loie Fuller, whose serpentine dances were among the most popular subjects of cinema in its first years.<\/p>\n

Finally let me introduce myself, who has had a long career working in various aspects of the Public Humanities\u2014particularly in documentary filmmaking but also working in different capacities for museums.\u00a0 I think it fair to say that my filmmaking and my academic scholarship have been closely related, often to good effect though not without encountering significant skepticism.\u00a0 In any case, for the last several years I have been teaching Documentary Film Workshop in which a number of graduate students from across the university have been making films related to their scholarship.\u00a0 For this reason, thought it would be interesting and useful to bring this group of panelists together for a discussion of “<\/strong>Public Humanities, Documentary Filmmaking and the Academe.”<\/p>\n

My Own Comments<\/strong><\/p>\n

My thanks to my fellow panelists for their thoughts and comments.\u00a0 I have moved back and forth between filmmaking and academic scholarship my whole adult life now though I also have been a programmer and curator.\u00a0 There had been a hiatus in my filmmaking for almost 25 years in there but the convergence of circumstance has changed that now and I don\u2019t think it will change again anytime soon.\u00a0 When I was an undergraduate, my teachers here at Yale were filmmaker-scholars.\u00a0 This includes Standish Lawder, who was an important experimental filmmaker and taught Film Studies in History of Art; Jay Leyda, who taught film in several departments and had worked on several important documentaries while his film A Bronx Morning <\/em>(1930) is on the National Registry at the Library of Congress; and Michael Roemer who still teaches both critical studies and creative courses in cinema.\u00a0 So filmmaking and critical studies tended to go hand in hand.\u00a0 When I left Yale and ended up working for two years on Hearts and Minds<\/em>, a documentary about the Vietnam War, I think the public humanities aspect of documentary became clearer to me.\u00a0 From the point of view of today\u2019s panel, a key moment for me was my work on early cinema and the making of my one-hour documentary Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter.\u00a0 <\/em>The idea for the film had come out of a graduate class I was taking with Jay Leyda at NYU.\u00a0 (He\u2019d moved there from Yale and I followed him to a degree.)\u00a0 I had give up on funding the film but when my essay for his class, entitled \u201cThe Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter,\u201d won the SCS Student Award for Scholarly Writing, interest in the project mushroomed and I received some funding from the New York State Council on the Arts.\u00a0 The resulting documentary, not easily done, ended up premiering at the New York Film Festival and took me around the world to a number of festivals.\u00a0 It received its worst review from the New York Times<\/em>, but Carrie Rickey of the Village Voice<\/em> considered it one of that year\u2019s best documentaries.\u00a0 So what about this formative moment? Certainly it opened up many opportunities in the academe.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. First, I went from being NYU\u2019s most problematic graduate student to being its top graduate student.\u00a0 The transformation took about 5 minutes\u2014the amount of time necessary to fully digetst the fact that Before the Nickelodeon would be one of the featured films at the New York Film Festival.<\/li>\n
  2. \u00a0As a graduate student I ended up with three book contracts\u2014one for my dissertation Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company<\/em>,\u00a0 another for The Emergence of Cinema<\/em>, which had funding attached, and a third for a book on Lyman H. Howe and the history of traveling exhibition with Princeton\u2014also with some funding from the Pennsylvania Humanities CouncilThe upside for this was obvious.\u00a0 The downside was that by the time the books were written and published I was out of filmmaking and deeply enmeshed in scholarship.<\/li>\n
  3. Vis a vis the question of Public Humanities, many more people have seen the film Before the Nickelodeon<\/em> than ever read the book.\u00a0 It was a way of communicating key ideas in a powerful, direct visual way.\u00a0 I have to say, however, that some of those basic ideas are still not widely understood or accepted, but it isn\u2019t from lack of trying.\u00a0 Anyway, the film was and is the public humanities face of my academic scholarship even as it enabled me to publish a more ambitious book than might have otherwise been possible. I might add the book references the film\u2014an appendix listing all the complete films in Before the Nickelodeon<\/em> (there are 18) and also the sources for the quotations in the film.<\/li>\n
  4. Importantly, doing research for my documentary ended up benefiting my scholarship and the dissertation\/book.\u00a0 That is, in looking for visual material, I found photographs, political cartoons and so forth that I could use not just for that book but for some of the others.\u00a0 In a few instances, this material was absolutely crucial.\u00a0 So I am suggesting there is a feedback loop here in which documentary and academic scholarship are mutually beneficial.<\/li>\n
  5. Making documentaries has given me a much stronger and intimate understanding of cultural production in general and film in particular.\u00a0 One looks at work differently and with greater humility.\u00a0 One learns about process: For instance, as a filmmaker and as someone working for other filmmakers, we always looked at everything that had been made on our subject.\u00a0 Likewise, one learns that little appears in these films by chance though there is certainly a way in which filmmakers lose perspective on their work.\u00a0 One reason why Carrie Rickey loved Before the Nickelodeon<\/em> was because it shows American cinema was all about sex and violence from the beginning.\u00a0 She is right and I now say this about the film, but I did not see it until she said it.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    ******<\/p>\n

    \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Now I\u2019d like to jump ahead roughly 10 years when I found myself at Yale as a first-year assistant professor. One of the things I did was supervise senior projects in documentary and this included an historical stiudy of a Black community in Detroit that had been obliterated by urban renewal and other socio-cultural factors.\u00a0 Later efforts included one on the building of Morse and Ezra Stiles colleges at Yale.\u00a0 Documentary Film Workshop became an official course in the late 1990s, which I taught as an overload.\u00a0 Fortunately the university enabled me to hand it over to D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.\u00a0 They were succeeded by Academy-nominated director Laura Poitras who taught it before the budgetary crisis forced me to take up the course once again.\u00a0 In order to do so, I had to take up filmmaking again since so much had changed.<\/p>\n

    So there are two inter-related considerations, here.\u00a0 First, a personal one in terms of my own work.\u00a0 Second, my teaching.\u00a0 Although I have considered a number of different subjects for documentaries, the one that took off was part of an established public humanities pattern\u2014the documentary on Errol Morris, which I will be showing this evening.\u00a0 First, although I had known Errol Morris since about 1990, when I wrote a long article on The Thin Blue Line<\/em>.\u00a0 I became much closer to him when I taught a course entitled \u201cErrol Morris and Contemporary Documentary.\u201d\u00a0 We discussed the syllabus together.\u00a0 My class also went up to Cambridge and saw a cut of Standard Operating Procedure<\/em>.\u00a0 We met with Errol afterwards.\u00a0 This relationship is what made the documentary that I am showing tonight possible.\u00a0 It also gave me a reason for making the documentary: in our classroom session, Errol was adamant that Standard Operating Procedure<\/em> was his best work.\u00a0 Errol Morris was being demonized by the press and by many of my fellow scholars.\u00a0 I felt that this was unfair\u2014something that had happened so many times to filmmakers in the past\u2014Orson Welles, Buster Keaton, and so on.\u00a0 So I wanted to challenge that conclusion through my portrait of Morris.\u00a0 My point here is simply that my scholarship and teaching established a framework for the film.\u00a0 The film has also led to more traditional academic papers on Morris as well\u2014presentations which have again made use of what I learned, and could have only learned, through the filmmaking process.\u00a0 And although it is not on the top of my list at the moment, I can see the possibility of publishing a small book on Morris and having the DVD inserted into the back cover.<\/p>\n

    In terms of Documentary Film Workshop.\u00a0 Returning to this course meant thinking about it in a new way.\u00a0 There were all sorts of reason why this needed to be the case.\u00a0 I was no longer teaching it as an overload, I was a tenured professor, Film Studies had a graduate program and American Studies had a new MA in the Public Humanities.\u00a0 So the course, while still a place for seniors in both Film Studies and American Studies to make documentaries as senior projects, also has a graduate constituency\u2014and it has been roughly 50\/50 this year and last.\u00a0 Undergraduates are also often making documentaries that have a public humanities aspect.\u00a0 Presca Ahn, a senior English major, made a documentary about Yale College going co-ed.\u00a0 Entitled, The Arrival: Women at Yale College<\/em>, it can be seen on the Broad Recognition website.\u00a0\u00a0 Without exception, graduate students are making work that is tied to their education in the Humanities and elsewhere.\u00a0 Valarie Kaur, a third year law student, produced a documentary on ICE and the ordeals of Illegal Immigrants entitled Alienation<\/em>, which is a prominent effort of the Yale Visual Law Review<\/em>. Another student Jonathan K. Smith, who was getting a Master\u2019s in the School of Public Health, made a documentary about TB and HIV in the Gold Mines of South Africa.\u00a0 Entitled They Go to Die<\/em>, it won a major award in the field of public health, the Tuberculosis Survival Prize with an awards ceremony in Lille, France.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 And if you Google \u201cThey Go to Die\u201d\u2014it will pop up at the top of the webpage.<\/p>\n

    The era of digital media has changed so many things: one thing it has done in particular\u2014I am convinced\u2014is to make it much more possible for students and faculty to pursue both documentary filmmaking and their scholarship in creative ways.\u00a0 In this respect, public outreach\u2014the reaching of broader publics is more feasible even has it has become more necessary.<\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n

     <\/p>\n


    <\/p>\n
    \n
    \n

    [1]<\/a> Recent graduate’s film project garners global health award, Yale News, 3 November 2011,<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Panel Discussion: “Public Humanities, Documentary Filmmaking and the Academe” with Prof Matthew Jacobson (chair of American Studies) Lauren Tilton (American Studies, Grad ’16), Joshua Sperling (Film Studies & Comparative Literature, Grad ’15) Prof Charles Musser (American Studies & Film Studies) I organized and chaired this panel, so what I am providing here is a version […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/246"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/246\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}