MSE Symposium Unspools Tuesday at Shriver Hall

At 100, Why Do Movies Matter?


Mike Giuliano
-------------------------
Special to The Gazette

     Not that turf-conscious professors need worry about one of
the main campus buildings being converted into a nine-screen
multiplex theater, but the movies have arrived on the Homewood
campus in a big way.

     Most immediately, the Milton S. Eisenhower Symposium,
"Framing Society: A Century of Cinema," opens this week to
examine the roles of the motion pictures in American society. Its
undergraduate co-chairmen, Matt Gross and Chris Aldrich, are no
strangers to the subject of film. Each is involved in film
classes, student film organizations, film production, screenings
and a just-launched magazine. All of which, considered together
with the symposium, they hope will provide a new frame of
reference at Hopkins for the only art form that proceeds at 24
frames per second. 

     Lest anyone still harbor the prejudice that movies should be
accompanied by popcorn and not term papers, young filmmaker Gross
is quick to defend the academic worth of their symposium
offering.  

     "Chris and I always felt it was an appropriate topic for the
symposium," he says. "It wasn't so much deciding whether to do it
as how to do it. We want to explore how cinema fits into our
culture. Can a particular movie or stream of movies change things
in society?"

     By way of example, he dips into film and political history
for the famous anecdote about President Woodrow Wilson's
proclamation that D.W. Griffith's controversial 1915 film Birth
of a Nation was "like history written by lightning."

     Gross says, "It's a historical fact that Wilson was one of
the first people to give legitimacy to film. Since he went to
Hopkins, he's like this guy sitting on top of the ivory tower
saying this is a way of reporting history. That legitimizes film
as a historical pursuit. And the 100th anniversary of cinema is
an opportunity to look back on film in a cultural and
intellectual way."

     Gross adds that a visit to Paris reinforced his sense that
the French, whose visionary LumiŠre brothers began showing movies
commercially in 1895, have a much keener sense of film history
than do Americans. 

     "It's not just that Americans don't have a grasp of film
history. There's not a good grasp of history among the American
people," he says.

     There's yet another reason why Gross believes movies haven't
always received the respect they deserve in this country.

     "Also, possibly, the business of film has gotten in the way
somewhat," he says. "Because it is big business--it's a product--
some people may not feel it's worth looking at" in an academic
forum, he says.

     Gross looks on this year's symposium as a springboard for a
broader discussion, both on campus and in the larger community,
of the role played by movies.  

     "The symposium is a way to get everybody who is interested
together in one place to talk about movies. Beyond the symposium,
we're trying to create at Hopkins a kind of cinematic culture.
And we need to expand so that the Baltimore public knows about
what's at Hopkins," Gross says. "Being on campus for four years,
everything feels so isolated. Many students know a lot about film
but not always about what's going on off campus, and people off
campus in Baltimore know about film but not about what we have
here. 

     "We'd like to integrate Hopkins into the Baltimore community
at large. We want to be a regular part of the movie scene. So we
want the symposium to act as a catalyst for everything else," he
says.

     One impact the symposium will have on and off campus will
result from the outfitting of Shriver Hall with a new 38-foot
screen.

     "The old screen had been subjected to The Rocky Horror
Picture Show and other things," says Mary Ellen Porter, special
assistant to dean of students Larry Benedict. The film is noted
as much for its campy content as for its cult following, who make
viewing the film an interactive experience replete with
vegetables and other substances tossed at the screen. 

     Also added were 35mm film projectors, and there are plans to
add "surround sound" equipment next year. These technical
enhancements will make the 1,174-seat hall the largest and
potentially one of the best movie theaters in the Baltimore area.

     Existing film series such as the long-running Reel World and
Weekend Wonderflix will look better on screen. Porter says the
booking of preview screenings and other special programs "will
give us a chance to reach out to the greater community in a way
we don't now."

     Better campus screening facilities can enhance both a
weekend date for the latest Die Hard movie and a student taking
notes on the mise-en-scŠne in a Renoir film.

     "In terms of facilities, film is a machine art and machines
are a part of it," notes Richard Macksey, a longtime Hopkins
professor of humanities and film and an active member of
Baltimore's cinema culture. He cites the upgrading of 110 Gilman
several years ago as an instance of how film courses prosper when
projection moves closer to state of the art.

     Indeed, the cinematic zeitgeist on campus seems healthy.
Last summer saw the birth of yet another film series, The Snark,
which offers classics and avant-garde fare. Also recently arrived
on the screen scene is the Animation Club.    

     The recently established Johns Hopkins Film Society and its
magazine, Frame of Reference, promote film culture at Hopkins,
including criticism, theory, history and production. Mardi Gras
Baltimore, co-directed by Gross and 1995 graduate Gil Jawetz,
will premiere at the symposium at 8 p.m. on Nov. 15.

     Gross hopes the diversity of symposium speakers will provide
the insights and inspiration to support and nourish the
confluence of Hopkins' film-related activities.   

     For example, James G. Robinson, founder and CEO of Morgan
Creek Productions, will talk about the business of making movies.
Veteran screenwriter Millard Kaufman and young director Rose
Troche will each talk about their place within that industry.
Critic Molly Haskell will talk about the role played by women in
filmmaking and criticism. And Thomas Cripps, among the world's
leading scholars of black film history, will add his reflections
on the representation of blacks in the movies and the social
effects of those images.

     It's a lineup that has won over at least one initial
skeptic.

     "Frankly, I was a little skeptical of it at first because a
lot of money goes into [the symposium], and I didn't want to see
speakers who'd stand up there schmoozing and then vanish into the
night," says English professor Jerome Christensen, who directs
the Film and Media Studies program. 

     Established in 1991, Film and Media Studies is a cooperative
program of the departments of English, French, German, Hispanic
and Italian Studies, Writing Seminars, Humanities and Philosophy.
Presently, students may minor in this area, but Christensen
expects that the eventual addition of a film production course
will enable students to major in Film and Media Studies. Although
he says Hopkins "will never be a film school" on the scale of New
York University or the University of Southern California, it is
taking its place with other academic pursuits at Homewood.

     "I'm glad [Gross and Aldrich] have used [the symposium] in a
way that will be educational," Christensen says. "I'm hoping the
symposium will demonstrate the range of opportunities both in
terms of careers and the intellectual challenges that
contemporary film represents. It also gives us a push to do other
things."

     Christensen suggests the symposium visit of Indian filmmaker
Girish Karnad will likely figure into classroom discussions in a
course on Indian film being offered in the spring. Undergraduate
internships with Robinson also are under discussion.

     "My aim is to have some institutional pay-off to these
things," he says.

     "Film is especially adaptable to an interdisciplinary
approach and it's used for so many pedagogical purposes now,"
says Macksey of the Hopkins approach to teaching film. Having
mentored such future Hollywood talents as Walter Murch and Caleb
Deschanel during their student days in the 1960s, Macksey has
been a constant advocate for film studies on campus.

     And what would the students like to see on the classroom
screen scene in the semesters ahead?

     "I'd like to consider how the film study is done at New York
University, Columbia, USC and elsewhere and then find a different
and original way to go at it at Hopkins," Gross says. "Many of
those film schools examine how movies are made and not as much
attention is paid to movies as literature. That's something
Hopkins can do."