Comments on Thanks for the Use of the Hall - Archive: Life in These United States: Film School

Jeanine is the head of the department there. Other...

2007-11-15T15:56:00.000-05:00

Jeanine is the head of the department there. Other current faculty include Scott Higgins (introducing the Technicolor series at AMMI this weekend in association with his new book), Lisa Dombrowski (Sam Fuller book nearing completion), Richard Slotkin (Gunfighter Nation, among others), and Leo Lensing (lots of work on Fassbinder).

I'm not sure how to quantify 'influence,' but her

Jeanine Basinger is the big name there, right? Do...

2007-11-15T15:26:00.000-05:00

Jeanine Basinger is the big name there, right? Does she have a lot of influence?

Dan, I actually think where I went to school might...

2007-11-15T13:08:00.000-05:00

Dan,
I actually think where I went to school might well be one of those places. Most everyone there is neither a 'theory' nor a production person, per se; the focus is on cinema history and does include art films in a serious way. Production is integrated into this neoformalist approach (and doesn't bother with McKee + Field). Studying theory there means Eisenstein and Bazin, not Freud and

Dave - I sort of hovered between those two worlds ...

2007-11-15T12:06:00.000-05:00

Dave - I sort of hovered between those two worlds myself in film school. It was a funny place to be: the production people had a limited interest in cinema history and almost no interest in art films; and the theory people were under pressure to renounce their film-buffery at that point in time. (One classmate told me that he had destroyed his written lists of the movies he'd seen six months

Dan, When I was in college, I straddled 2 majors: ...

2007-11-14T11:24:00.000-05:00

Dan,
When I was in college, I straddled 2 majors: Film Studies, which was something like the practical end of NYU Film School, with more emphasis on watching (older, classical Hollywood) films and breaking them down; and an interdisciplinary humanities program, in which I focused (among other things) on 20th century literature and philosophy. My joint thesis film aimed at being, essentially,