Who's there?

Summer. I think.

It's summertime, and while I'm still keeping busy with prep work for a summer residency for our Writing Popular Fiction graduate program, I've started wearing shorts again and doing some creative writing and generally trying to relax. On my agenda: finding ephemeral DVDs and watching obscure films with an eye toward adding something new to my Art of Film course next Fall.

One lucky find the other day was a copy of Short Cinema Journal #10: Chaos in the bargain bin at a local used media place. It includes Electronic Labrynth, George Lucas' student film precursor to THX 1138 (which I've never seen, but now want to). It reminded me of Chris Marker's work. But an even better discovery on this disk was Po Mo Knock Knock by Greg Pak -- a wonderfully comedic spin on Derrida that borrows heavily from Bergman's Persona (a film which is permanently on my syllabus for the film course). While I might not use it for film studies, I'm definitely going to use it in Literary Criticism, to complement the screening of the Derrida biopic and lighten things up a little bit. After all, "play" is a fundamental part of deconstruction.

I love using short films for the class. One of the troubles with teaching film studies is handling screenings, since most films have a running time of 2 hours, and even in a 3-hour course session, it's hard to organize the time. I typically have two screenings of full length features hosted outside of class (often proctored by a work study) -- treating the films themselves as "texts" which must be read as "homework" before we analyze them together in the classroom during regular meetings. Analysis is usually clustered around clips. Since my course is a once-a-week, three hour session, that also gives me time to regularly fit in a short film to study and discuss "live" and these can be the most rewarding experiences of the course since the "short film" genre is rarely known by students going in -- and they're often experimental uses of the medium, playing with camera technique or lighting...or historical documents from before the studio hegemony commodified the viewing experience into two hours.

Here's a list of my favorites (most of which seem to be either humorous or surrealist): Autobiography of a Jeep, Black Ice, An Occurance at Owl Creek Bridge, Un Chien Andalou, Food & Dimensions of Dialogue, Fall of the House of Usher, La Jetee, Meshes of the Afternoon, etc.

There's something thrilling about sharing these movies with students, particularly those who only know film through Hollywood. I'm getting eager to teach this course and summer has barely begun.

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