Soon
to Be a Motion Picture Major
Cinema Studies Premieres at Penn
by Randall Couch
Sociology professor Tukufu Zuberi laughs and leans his elbow
on the bar. “Yeah,” he says. “Mos Def is
it!”
It’s
the afterparty for the East Coast premiere of Paramount’s Against
the Ropes, and Zuberi, himself no stranger to the cameras
from his role in the PBS series History Detectives, is listening
to the movie’s producer, Robert Cort, C’68, G’70,
WG’74, talk about his next movie-making project. In
the background, people cluster to compare notes on the film.
Cards change hands. A young director in a black bomber and
a baseball cap positions himself next to the producer while
two reporters lean in, taking notes.
Cort’s newest venture is an HBO feature called Something
the Lord Made, about the 34-year partnership between
white surgeon Alfred Blalock and black lab technician Vivien
Thomas, who together pioneered open-heart surgery at Johns
Hopkins. Rapper Mos Def plays Thomas, and Cort is recalling
some friction with the director. “Mos didn’t
realize this older Italian-American man had been on the
freedom rides and the civil rights marches. Finally the
director says, ‘Okay. Play it however you want.’” In
the disputed scene, Thomas sees a flag being lowered to
half staff, signaling the death of his white colleague
who had received most of the glory.
“ So they start the take,” Cort continues. “It’s
a long shot, and Mos is walking away from the camera. All
of a sudden, his legs give out. Completely collapse. And
he just sits there, with the camera on him, pulling away.
It wasn’t in the script. It came from somewhere in
his own experience, and it was just right. It may be the
best acting moment I’ve ever seen.” Cort’s
listeners nod, composing the shot in their heads.
This conversation is not happening in New York or LA, but
at the Bridge, a movie theater on the edge of campus. Alert
Penn students make up the crowd, along with community members
and faculty like Zuberi, Ira Harkavy, C’70, Gr’79,
director of the Center for Community Partnerships, and Italian
lecturer Nicola Gentili. Moving among the groups, keeping
a watchful eye on the proceedings, is the new director of
Penn’s Cinema Studies Program, Timothy Corrigan.
An English professor and internationally respected film
scholar, Corrigan is the author of several books, including A
Cinema without Walls and New German Film as
well as standard textbooks like The Film Experience and Writing
about Film. To him, events like Cort’s premiere
enrich the learning environment in several ways. Personal
access to a big producer offers students unique insights
into the process and business of moviemaking. The premiere
shows how films are “platformed” for distribution—with
free-preview audiences and release locations chosen for their
likelihood of generating positive buzz. And they contribute
to building what Corrigan envisions as a “dynamic center
of visual culture” at Penn.
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Anchoring
that vision is a rigorous curriculum and a dozen core faculty,
from eight SAS departments and from other Penn schools, teaching
cinema courses. In the spring of 1999, through the efforts
of a faculty committee and the encouragement of College dean
Rebecca Bushnell, a film studies program was formalized with
the offering of an interdisciplinary minor. Millicent (Penny)
Marcus, the Mariano DiVito Professor of Italian Studies,
and James English of the English department directed the
fledgling program. These faculty members, says Corrigan, “don’t
see cinema studies as just a trend they want to support.
They have a real intellectual and academic commitment to
it. That’s why it’s been such a solid program
for the last four years, and why I’m convinced it’s
going to be better than ever.”
Corrigan’s mandate was to consolidate, coordinate,
and focus faculty efforts and student enthusiasm for film.
Plans for a cinema studies major are on track for September,
and Corrigan also intends to develop a graduate certificate.
The history of art department is appointing a full-time cinema
scholar to its recently endowed Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professorship
in Film Studies, further nourishing the program’s roots
in that discipline.
As Corrigan expected, momentum is building quickly. “I’m
learning my way around with the help of Nicola, the program’s
associate director, and Penny,” he says. “I’m
certain the new Jaffe professor will play a large and crucial
role in moving cinema studies forward. Penn was clearly a
place with enormous opportunity. The only question for me
was whether I’d have the energy to direct all this
incredible activity. And my answer is yes,” he laughs, “I
do.”
As a discipline, cinema studies bridges high and popular
culture, and stands at the intersection of visual media,
storytelling, and cultural and social history. The new major
will not focus on production, screenwriting, or the movie
business, though Corrigan expects some students to follow
those paths after graduation. Instead, like any arts and
sciences major, it will stress research skills, analytical
rigor, and critical interpretation—teaching students
to see, as Bushnell has said, what they have only watched.
An understanding of human behavior and the ability to weigh
and manipulate ideas will take priority as outcomes.
In this, Corrigan has the support of many alumni in the
industry. “Those I’ve spoken with have said—with
students standing there—that if you want to work in
films, don’t get specialized, just get smarter.” Robert
Cort put it like this: “Undergraduate education ought
to prepare you to operate in a world you can’t possibly
imagine. Because wherever you are, it’s not going to
look like that 20 years from now.”
Filmmaker and producer Jon Avnet, C’71, agrees. Avnet
is chairman of the Board of Directors of the American Film
Institute and producer of the forthcoming movie Sky Captain
and the World of Tomorrow. “It doesn’t hurt
to have a good education,” he advises aspiring filmmakers,
including “some knowledge of the history of film, and
critical studies of film, and maybe even certain production
elements” as analytical tools. “It’s our
world today. A movie like Mel Gibson’s Passion will
have a global impact. Wars are being fought on audiovisual
terms. And if you think that it’s only going to become
more important, then it seems to me Penn should be leading
the way with an integrated approach to studying this field.”
If cinema is so important, why have elite schools been cautious
about making it a core subject? The history of literary study
offers
a clue.
It’s easy to assume university students have always
studied Shakespeare, but it wasn’t until the late 19th
century that literature courses were regularly offered. Penn
listed the nation’s first under-graduate course on
the novel in 1889 and did not offer an English major until
1914—three centuries after Shakespeare’s death.
It wasn’t that literature’s importance went unrecognized.
Every cultivated person was expected to appreciate it, but
its evaluation relied on “taste” and modern literature
was viewed as too popular for serious scholarship.
Today, we take it for granted that literary study provides
effective training in critical thinking and cultural awareness.
Cinema, long taught as a craft and long an object of serious
intellectual attention, has likewise come in from the cold
to claim an overdue place as a university major—after
a mere century of existence. Given a strong academic core,
what Corrigan and Avnet expect to distinguish Penn’s
program is the sheer number of things going on: screenings
of classic and independent films at the Bridge; closer ties
with the Philadelphia Film Festival, the Institute of Contemporary
Art, and other film venues; and more contact with working
professionals.
“ Penn has put a lot of people in the film business,” notes
Avnet. “There’s a ‘Penn mafia’—it
runs from executives to filmmakers to writers. It’s
great to bring people of that caliber to [campus], but I’d
like to have something much more integrated with the film
program so students would know how to take advantage of it—as
a learning experience and not just an inspirational moment.”
Junior Wesley Barrow and his friends are there already.
They’ve just organized several Penn entries to the
third Ivy League Film Festival, hosted by Brown. Barrow recently
transferred to SAS from the engineering school and hopes
to be one of the first cinema studies majors. He is chairman
of Talking Film, an organization that consolidates several
student groups. “There’d be one club that was
into making movies,” he says, “and one into showing
movies, one into dissecting movies, and one into getting
jobs in the movies. This way, we can do a better job of getting
our word out, and pool our resources to do more ambitious
programs. It’s also easier for Tim to keep track of
us all.” Talking Film averages 80 attendees for its
events and already has a mailing list of 600.
Barrow and Talking Film are committed to Corrigan’s
vision of Penn as a dynamic center of visual culture. He’s
excited about the progress already made. “There are
so many underclassmen who are gung ho about this,” remarks
Barrow. “There’s a big future ahead. It’s
a good time to be a student interested in film at Penn.”
Randall Couch is a Philadelphia poet, critic, and moviegoer. |