one of my blog posts<\/a>, outlining student projects\u2014including those of the Film Studies Ph.D. students, one of whom (TSUNODO Takuya) is making a documentary about the documentary filmmaker MORI Tatsuya\u2014a project not unlike my own on Morris. This encounter has unavoidably provoked a back story to my presentation today.<\/p>\nBeginning with my Sophomore year as an undergraduate, I began to make films and write papers.\u00a0 Initially these were not very integrated but I was beginning to explore the relationship between theory and practice.\u00a0 I began to think of myself as a dialectical thinker\u2014or to be truly dialectical\u2014as a practitioner of dialectics.\u00a0 On one hand writing and on the other filmmaking.\u00a0 If this was the period when I was first and foremost a student, my best teachers as a Yale undergraduate were Standish Lawder and Jay Leyda\u2014both filmmaker scholars. Perhaps the place I learned the most about film, the pursuit of sustained intellectual thinking on a particular topic, and the creative act of producing work of any kind \u2013was working as an assistant editor for two years on Oscar-winning Hearts and Minds.\u00a0 <\/em>Here is one thing I learned: we looked at every documentary on Vietnam that had been made \u2013from Why Vietnam<\/em> to The Anderson Platoon<\/em> to In the Year of the Pig<\/em> and Winter Solider<\/em>. Hearts and Minds <\/em>can be seen as an engagement with those films as much as a response to the war itself. After that experience, I stopped doing student work, at least as a filmmaker.<\/p>\nMy first non-student work was the film An American Potter<\/em> (1976)\u2013a biographical treatment of potter Gerry Williams to whom I had apprenticed in my pre-film life.\u00a0 I watched all of the mostly terrible pottery films in the world and wrote an article about the genre, which was published in The Studio Potter<\/em>.\u00a0 My documentary sought to reconceptualize the genre and won a variety of festival awards in the Fine Arts field.\u00a0 I made my living as a film editor and became interested in the problem of editing \u2013where and when did it begin.\u00a0 Meanwhile I was a part time graduate student\u2014following Jay Leyda to NYU where he would eventually become my dissertation advisor.\u00a0 In his Griffith course, we watched every Griffith film from The Adventures of Dollie<\/em> onward, in chronological order\u2014a process not unrelated to our film research on Hearts and Minds<\/em>.<\/p>\nWith Tom Gunning and others already working on Griffith in a sustained way, and curious about earlier editing patterns, I began to do for Edwin S. Porter what Leyda and his students were doing for Griffith and wrote an essay \u2013\u201cThe Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter\u201d\u2014recently republished in the Wiley-Blackwell four-volume History of American Cinema<\/em>.\u00a0 When it won the SCS Student Award for Scholarly Writing, it both 1) got me accepted into NYU\u2019s Ph.D. program and 2) led to my getting a grant from the New York Sate Council of the Arts to make Before the Nickelodeon: The Early Cinema of Edwin S. Porter.\u00a0 <\/em>What I am trying to do is describe an organic process involving writing and filmmaking, scholarship and what might be called public history.\u00a0 The essay became the blueprint for my film and the centerpiece of my dissertation Before the Nickelodeon: Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company<\/em>, which would serve as the companion volume for my film.\u00a0 The film, which premiered at the New York Film Festival, led to three book contracts and some seven or eight years of sustained research and writing on early cinema.\u00a0 Essentially I stopped being a filmmaker.<\/p>\nFinding my way to Yale as an assistant professor, I was a dutiful academic but also supervised senior projects in documentary and organized these groups of student filmmakers into an informal seminar and then a course, Documentary Film Workshop, which I taught as an overload.\u00a0 When I went on leave, the Provost Office kindly offered some very minimal funding to support the course.\u00a0 D.A. Pennebaker\u2014and then Penny with his partner and co-filmmaker Chris Hegedus\u2013\u2013took over the course for eight years.\u00a0 And when they stepped down, Laura Poitras\u2014known for such films as the Academy nominated My Country, My Country\u2013\u2013<\/em>took over. I always took great pride in the fact that I originated the course that was taken over by three of the outstanding documentary filmmakers of the last 60 years.<\/p>\nThen the university defunded the course.\u00a0 This was supposedly due to the budget crisis.\u00a0 However, the real goal, never quite made explicit, was to separate theory and practice\u2014critical studies from creative work\u2013\u2013and put all filmmaking courses in the School of Art.\u00a0 It was part of the \u201cshared services\u201d mentality being applied to other staff members\u2014of breaking tasks down into discrete, disconnected units.\u00a0 Students don\u2019t understand this.\u00a0 And I don\u2019t buy it.\u00a0 We had a group of rising seniors planning to make documentaries as senior projects.\u00a0 They were going to need curricular supervision and that supervisor was going to be me.\u00a0 Of course, larger pedagogical issues involving the integration of theory and practice were at stake\u2014as well as years of developing a curriculum. In a way I returned to my roots\u2014to first principles but there was clearly a need to embed filmmaking more deeply into the Film Studies Program\u2014to use the momentum of the university against itself, which was possible in part because its administrators never openly acknowledged what they were doing.<\/p>\n
If one is going to teach filmmaking one has to make films.\u00a0 Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch<\/em> was the documentary I ended up making in my return to filmmaking after a hiatus of almost 25 years. It was well suited to perform this function, given its simple production process.\u00a0 Errol Morris was also, in some ways, a perfect subject for me in that my earlier films had been about artists of various kinds and Morris was a subject ideally conforming to the narrow idea of pursuing audio-visual scholarship within the confines of my academic identity.<\/p>\nI had gotten to know Errol back when he made The Thin Blue Line.<\/em>\u00a0 I had published an article on the documentary and later gave a number of presentations on his film work.\u00a0 Then too, I had recently taught the first university course devoted solely to Morris and had worked closely with him on that project.\u00a0 I drove up to his offices in Cambridge and we hammered out a syllabus together. My class attended his last public screening of Standard Operating Procedure<\/em> as a work in progress, and he met with my students for an hour and a half to talk about the work in progress, which he passionately believed was going to be his most accomplished achievement\u2014the capstone of his career.\u00a0 Obviously critics and academics did not choose to see it that way.\u00a0 Errol was upset and above all depressed.\u00a0 I felt there was an almost willful misunderstanding of the film, which I found distressing.\u00a0 It just seemed an effort to cut him down to size, which a certain group of critics were dying to do ever since he made his Oscar winning The Fog of War<\/em>.<\/p>\nFull disclosure.\u00a0 I was probably specially invested in Standard Operating Procedure<\/em>.\u00a0 Amanda Gill had taken my course on Documentary Film and Photography, which I co-taught with Laura Wexler and wrote about the Abu Ghraib photographs.\u00a0 She took that paper to Errol Morris and it became the starting point for Standard Operating Procedure<\/em>.\u00a0 She in fact served as a key go-between for Errol and me since she stayed on as the film\u2019s co-producer.<\/p>\nSo my goal was to create a platform for Morris to respond to his critics.\u00a0 We were going to build an event around his films at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas where I program a weekend of films around a particular theme or individual. Errol would do Q & As, a panel and there would be scholars such as Jane Gaines and Jonathan Kahana who would talk about his work.\u00a0 The goal was to rehabilitate a guy who was being attacked for such terrible things as paying his subjects for their interviews\u2013\u2013something I had always done as a filmmaker and think is ethically important.\u00a0 Errol would also spend a little time with these documentary scholars and we\u2019d start to turn the thing around.\u00a0 My unspoken idea was also to film these events from the moment he stepped out of his car until he returned to Cambridge and see if we might not have a film of some kind on our hands\u2014at least a record of the weekend.<\/p>\n
Errol liked the idea of the weekend events but was concerned that he might have to be in LA to make commercials\u2013-and felt he had to decline.\u00a0 How to rescue this programming idea?\u00a0 I proposed that he would commit to doing one of three things.\u00a0 First, he would come to New Haven for the weekend\u2014and we would pay him $5,000.\u00a0 Or 2) he would participate in a live interview on Skype from Los Angeles or 3) we would travel to his offices and a film an interview\u2013\u2013in the latter two cases paying him $1,000.\u00a0 The last of these options was the one that materialized.\u00a0 By this time I had been to his studio and knew his staff a little bit.\u00a0 I drove up with a filmmaker\/cinematographer\u2014Carina Tautu\u2014who had audited my Errol Morris course.\u00a0 My instructions were to film from the moment we got out of the car until we left.\u00a0 We appeared at the psychologically perfect moment since Errol\u2013\u2013and his staff\u2014just felt terribly guilty.\u00a0 I think he tried to provide a particularly thoughtful interview as a result.\u00a0 And he could not say \u201cno\u201d to our requests.\u00a0 Perhaps it was only under such circumstances that we were allowed to film him conducting an interview with V.S. Ramachandran for his New York<\/em> Times <\/em>series on Anosognosia. One thing I truly admire about Errol is that he is just as ready to place himself in front of the camera\u2014to be interviewed\u2014as he is to subject his subjects to the interview ordeal.<\/p>\nWe also talked to his staff\u2014something that these kinds of documentaries almost never do\u2014see A Brief History of Errol Morris<\/em>.\u00a0 And we made a point of making the documentary in our style\u2014a style that actually Errol had lambasted in the past but is in fact fairly close to the filmmaking style of Hamilton Morris\u2014his son.\u00a0 In any case we left Fourth Floor Productions at the Globe Department Store with enough material for what was the chore of what I am calling a backdoor documentary.<\/p>\nThe experience of making Errol Morris: A Lightning Sketch <\/em>has certainly given me new insights into Morris and his work\u2014something I hope will someday be realized in a book that will accompany this film.\u00a0 A Lightning Sketch <\/em>is a film about\u2013-among other things\u2013\u2013the lifting of depression through the creative act\u2014not just Errol\u2019s depression but my own.\u00a0 And I think it is also a little story about the dynamic between self-reflection and action.\u00a0 Finally it has provided me the basis for teaching documentary production\u2014or audio-visual scholarship–as a practicing filmmaker.<\/p>\nWhere to go from here?\u00a0 My wife Threese Serana and I just started making a documentary about some of our friends who are illegal immigrants in this country.\u00a0 Its working title is The Immigration Project.<\/em>\u00a0 She has actually been filming while I am up here.\u00a0 One thing for sure, I am learning a lot about American life\u2014after all I am a professor of American Studies\u2014and this new project has definitely proved instrumental in lifting her depression.\u00a0 As a journalist who taught political science full-time at University of the Philippines-Cebu, she has found it difficult to use those skills in the United States.\u00a0 Certainly documentary is a form of audio-visual scholarship\u2013\u2013and in this regard it is part of the discourse of sobriety a la Bill Nichols.\u00a0 But it can also be something more\u2014it can be, I believe, a redemptive act for all concerned\u2014those in front of and behind the camera.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A funny thing happened on my way to SCMS.\u00a0 The day before I left\u2014indeed Dudley Andrew was already here\u2014the DGS (Director of Graduate Studies) called a meeting of Yale\u2019s Film Studies Graduate Committee to go over the course offerings for coming academic year.\u00a0\u00a0 The DGS wanted to remove Documentary Workshop, which I happen to teach, […]<\/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\/723"}],"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=723"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/723\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":726,"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/723\/revisions\/726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.charlesmusser.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=723"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}