Top horrible/stupid things my film study instructor has done
Submitted by Zacharyyy on Sat, 01/16/2010 - 20:09
- said "Authenticity is just discursive; no person or object is authentic. We only put authenticity into signifiers. It is not a quality anything can actually 'have' it is a set of codes and conventions."
- Said "All electronic music is quintessentially inauthentic."
- Said "Is 2 Girls In A Cup[sic] the ultimate expression of the sexual liberation of the 1960s?" (I HOPE HE WAS KIDDING I REALLY DON'T KNOW BUT I REALLY HOPE HE WAS KIDDING OH GOD)
- said "talking about music is never talking about music or the text itself, it is only meaningful in the larger cultural context"
- said that Die Antwoord are postmodern geniuses.
- Compared The Bicycle Thieves to America's Next Top Model.
- said "do we really want artists to be unique? Should we value things that are unique?"
- Is showing Touched By An Angel in a film study class.
- talked about how if any story in any media has characters who have personal problems or any problems that aren't shown as being products of the larger sociopolitical hegemonic problems then it is a "problematic story"
- said "The reason people read FAILblog is the desire for an 'authentic experience'."
- talked about how all rock musicians do not actually write their music or have any creative role-- that every single one of them is just a corporate character manufactured to sell an image. No exceptions whatsoever. Also that the only reason anyone listens to or likes or gravitates toward any type of music is just because it is fashionable for the time.
- one other student was talking about the "characters" in America's Next Top Model and said that something that one character did seemed genuine and the teacher yelled at him and intimidated him because he is "treating them like people; they are just characters" and basically got the class to gang up on him because he was defending one of the girls' actions.
- Said: "There is no subconscious" and seemed pretty anti-psychology in general.
- Said "To say that there's human nature goes against everything I've been teaching this semester [and then proceeds to talk about how people , while not being naturally greedy, are naturally sharing]".
- Him:"why don't you like john waters?"
- me: "the characters are really shallow, idiotic, gag-y, badly acted and one-dimensional"
- him: "haha, if you want badly acted and one-dimensional, you should see cassavetes"
- me: "[INNER SEETHING RAGE]"
- Does not mark any of his own assignments.
- Said: "The idea that we have individual psyches is just a capitalistic ideological idea".
- Talked about "The problem that America's Next Top Model is addressing is one of self-hood" and how it is "quintessentially post modern".
- "the individual is just a capitalist notion" and said something to the effect of that no matter how much a movie might be trying to do something new or express something new or something, if it has a singular individual protagonist, it is just the same-old-same-old reinforcing some kind of "problematic" "capitalist" "ideology".
- Said "The idea of the author just closes down the text and keeps meaning out."
- said "White Trash is a fascinating cultural phenomenon."
- he told a story that was something like this: "i always felt some kind of weird betweenness with my canadian/americanness. i grew up in america then spent my teen years in canada then back to the US for college. the thing that made me know that i was canadian was at this party. i was new in town for grad school and someone told me to go to this party with all the hip liberal types. so we were all drinking, having fun and stuff and then the host or somebody flicked the lights on and off and was all 'slideshow time slideshow time!' and so this couple who were photographers dragged out their slide projector and showed us a bunch of stuff from when they backpacked through latin america. and so they were all 'oh look at this market. look at this expressive face of this native dude. look at this village, so neat! here's another market' then they were gonna go to the next photo and someone piped up and said 'hey, that's you in the picture there? why do you have chicken wire covering your backpack?' and the host said 'well, there's a danger of someone sneaking up behind you and cutting your bag, so i just thought i'd be careful' and THIS WAS MY BIG REVELATION that i am IN FACT CANADIAN and can SEE THE HYPOCRISY OF THAT ACTION and how I, AS A CANADIAN, CAN ACTUALLY SEE THESE COLONIAL ROOTS" (but at least, afterward, he said "but I bet some of you are thinking 'god, what a pretentious thing to say'" and boy howdy was he right about that...)
- Said that Busta Rhymes is "the most post modern thing" and how he rocks because of his inauthenticity.
- said "No country can beat the Afghans!" (wtf)
- Said "What is so great about The Cleveland Show is how devastating it is to the patriarchal order."
- main advice for essaywriting: "Stay away from talking about people."
- said "I am fascinated by Snooki [from Jersey Shore]. Her hair is SO AWESOME. She is just SO AWESOME."
- "There is no formula for a sitcom" (and went on to say that there's no formula or exploited patterns for anything popular at all).
- Used FanFiction as inarguable proof of Barthes's idea of the author being dead to be true.
- in giving the assignment description of the first essay of the class, he spends 3/4 of a five-page document dictating to us exactly how essays should be written instead of saying anything whatsoever about the assignment itself as if we are children who have never encountered essays before (what's more, it's just advice like "all paragraphs must have five sentences, have roughly five paragraphs. make a conclusion to restate what you said in the introduction. this is the only way to write an essay." sort of bullcrap.)
- said "You only need to look at youtube to see your work being effaced"
- him: "[asking class] what does the camera record?"
- random students: "a perspective?" "an individual notion of 'truth'?" [and some other crap]
- him: "no, the camera always records the dominant ideology".
- said "complex characters are just a bourgeois fallacy"
- said "There is no dominant ideology" (said after spending 2/3 of the semester talking about the dominant ideology).
- said "authenticity is just another term for naivete"
- Said: "There is no difference between a want and a need."
- Yelled at the students and sent off some mean emails to ones that didn't attend the first screening (John Waters's Pecker) and suggested that if you don't watch a movie in a class room you're drinking beer and goofing off and not actually watching it... And he cared this much about making sure we watch PECKER "properly"...
- said "The target audience of Jerry Springer is perceptive smart university students"
- said "why should movies be 'realistic' like hollywood and such?"
- claimed that the "housewife" is a completely fictional invention that does not and never has existed in real life; women have never stayed home.
- said that John Waters is better than the two filmmakers who he ripped off: Paul Morrissey and Andy Warhol.
- Told a story to the class about how he decided to be a film-scholar over a ltierature-schoalr because all of his literature-criticism classmates called him an idiot for being so gay for Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.
- Said "I am not giving YOU a C-, I am just giving the CULTURE THAT CREATED YOU a C-." (he was only joking, but still.)
Author Comments:
FUCK
CULTURAL
STUDIES
How in the world did your instructor manage to do #1 ?
About how each of them claim to be "realistic" and this presents the same "problems" with their "ideologies".
ARGH.
Gotcha. He should have picked a better reality TV show to make the point. The only thing models have in common with characters in Italian neorealism is the punishing diet.
I just think that completely misses the point.
Is it too late to drop that class? ;)
I would if I could; it's a required class; need it to graduate. :c
That is pretty ridiculous! (to put it mildly)
Hope you have a good term nonetheless : >
it makes me want to murder everyone in the world. It is pretty surreal and disheartening that such behavior exists, is encouraged, and is being passed onto impressionable students; only hilarious when it's not happening to you. Someone else I told about this said that he sounds like an Ayn Rand villain.
It would be hilarious if there was a shooting rampage at my school.
Some of my other classes are okay, just this one and my other cultural studies type class are horrible. ARGH SO MUCH BARTHES.
also, your unedited comment was more fun. XP
That Ayn Rand villain reference sounds spot on from what I've read in The Fountainhead (a pretty good book actually).
However I'm not sure what you're talking about Zach regarding edited comments. I certainly don't find murder to be amusing in the slightest, that's an awful thing to say. I personally would never make light of such darkness (the vulgar brutes). But I also recognize that not everyone is as cultured as I. Anyways, I fully concur that your teacher is insane and is hurting the world and that drastic measures may need to be taken.
When he mentioned it, it was a shocking revelation that I thought strange that I didn't make the connection myself! The Fountainhead was strangely hilarious. Rand is one of my favourite writers, although most people write her off for her rape fetish and because she's a bit of a bitch. (Atlas Shrugged, despite hugeness, is a really great book too (unfortunately, Ayn Rand cannot write an ending worth piss in any of her novels or her single play))
Ha, oh you!
Do you want to go back in time and kill Roland Barthes and Raymond Williams so there will be no cultural studies? I think that'd solve a lot of problems.
wow, #4 angers me too! did he mention any of Cassevetes films he thought had one dimensional characters, or was is a snide remark under his breath?
Wasn't under his breath, just in passing. Never brought up Cassavetes again. Oh wait, he also said they all had really bad acting. But he was defending the acting in Pink Flamingos.
HahahahahHahahahAHhahahahahAHAHAHHAHAhaha!
Sorry, that's really funny.
As I said, it is hilarious if it doesn't happen to you; but if you're the one who's getting "taught" this, it's just.... depressing. I can barely believe he's not just trolling my class. He's such a parody of everything wrong with art-academia; totally an Ayn Rand villain.
I think your instructor clearly knows what he's doing. If you're going to mock anything obviously astonishing in Cassavetes, you'd go after the sublime acting. You should ask if he's read any Carney. Tell him he could learn a thing or two about being an academic contrarian.
You think he is trolling the class?
He's made a wiki-page for his class where the class can upload "cultural fragments" for the rest of the class to check out. I put up a clip from Faces and a crapton of Carney essays on there, so if he didn't before, he has now.
I just think he's a prick who knows enough to make troll-like put-downs but unsavvy enough to still sound like a complete ignoramus.
Nice re: the upload! Let me know how the drama ensues.
I've been meaning to write an angry "appeal" for more of an art related class over a culture related one, but I've just been afraid of doing it and afraid that my argument didn't sound right so I've been writing and re-writing my little petition/appeal/plea for a week now. Because there are other students who are just as angry as me. Then again, there are just as many who I feel are brainwashed by this garbage just because he's in a position of power.
I actually did that last week; I don't think anyone even checks the damn thing because no one has brought it up yet! Damn, drama can be pretty fun. (although I did upload a picture of a bloody wolf head to the "let's talk about photography" wiki he made in connection to John Waters's "Pecker" and he talked about that in relation to Roland Barthes (argh, so much bullshit)
I liked what Ebert said about Pink Flamingos:
"I am not giving a star rating to PINK FLAMINGOS, because stars simply seem not to apply. It should be considered not as a film but as a fact, or perhaps as an object."
I guess I agree with Ebert for once. It's not a piece of art by any means. That thing really is just a "cultural artifact".
But to its defense, it has some funny parts. But "so bad its good" is the shittiest mantra in the world. And honestly I didn't find any of the "gross-out" parts very.... gross. I just thought "wow, this is really stupid. There's no point to this. Why do people go to stuff like this and Tommy Wisseau's The Room multiple times and nobody watches A Woman Under The Influence or Last Chants For A Slow Dance? The independent film industry/market is depressing".
Reading about Waters films is much more interesting than actually watching them. The plot descriptions alone are pretty humorous, but he has absolutely no chops as a director. More of a businessman, I think, who came up with a winning persona to market his "creations." But he has one decent book, Shock Value. It is a shame if he represents DIY filmmaking still. Obviously Cassavetes should loom above any mention of Waters there.
Anyhow, there are some real gems of the "so bad it's good" genre. I should work on that list one day.
I listened to the commentary to Pink Flamingos once and I was actually pretty amazed: "oh wow, this guy's actually pretty smart. how come his movies are so retarded?" It's a shame that he represents the whole do-it-yourself ethic especially because not only are there better people (Cassavetes, Jost, for example) but the way he did everything in those early movies is seriously just ripping off Warhol/Morrissey flicks (which could probably fit into the whole "so bad its good" type thing except I'd rather not group them into that because I do find a lot of them to be original artistic masterpieces). But yeah. I'll have to take a look at that book though!
And yes, make that list, I'm curious.
It just gets to me that people trying their damnedest to make real personal artistic statements have so much trouble getting anywhere, but people who make really awful movies that are just funny to watch get everywhere.
God, this guy needs to watch some films. Maybe Abbas Kiarostami would shut him up. His characters go through struggles, like in Through the Olive Trees, but I don't see how it could relate to capitalism (although I'm sure he could find a way). Things don't necessarily change all that much. Even after thousands of years we are going through the same struggles.
He was relating the idea to Bicycle Thieves and how as much as the neorealists and stuff wanted to make some kind of radical new cinema, you can't escape the "bourgeois notion individuality" in something like this. He spoke of it as if the concept of a singular individual was concocted sometime in the mid 1800s.
Also talked about how that television reality show COPS was created specifically to make people TOO AFRAID TO BREAK THE LAW and how it was made to destroy minorities and stuff.
Next week we're watching reality TV shows (Jersey Shore, Amierica's Next Top Model, Canada's Next Top Model) and relating them to how "realism" is presented compared to Bicycle Thieves. He's asking for suggestions, so I'm probably gonna go on some kind of rant to show some John Cassavetes.
I'm really not seeing the connection between American's Next Top Model & Vitorio de Sica and if there is one is it really interesting enough to explore? This guy sounds insane. I think he is missing the point as well. Realism in film is really just a movement of making films a certain way (same way with television). I'm not sure any claims to reality are being made, more of a break away from how other films are being made. But yeah, Cassavetes would be the ideal candidate to show. Especially a movie like Husbands.
His class causes me physical pain. I feel like I am punched when I am listening to him. The defense he gives for all this is he's not trying to teach us about art or "appreciating great films" he's trying to teach us to "interrogate culture and ideology". That also pisses me off and pains me.
He's completely missing the point of art in general.
By just talking about movements and genre-distinctions and culture and ideologies you can't really get anywhere when talking about art. You can get lots of places by talking about things created corporately like reality TV and ads that way. But it's insulting to say that America's Next Top Model and De Sica's masterpiece were made under "similar ideological conditions". De Sica wasn't trying to just "represent reality" and "be socially conscious" he was just honestly expressing himself. GodDAMMIT.
Yeah. I'm thinking of just suggesting damn near everything I an think of ways to back up... A Woman Under The Influence and Faces just because they are pretty damn "Realistic". Opening Night for the whole self-reflexive aspect it has. I can't think of any other specific ways to back up suggesting them though. Can you think of any ways to make it seem compelling to show his stuff? I suck at sounding convincing. Heh.
Also will probably suggest Harmony Korine's Gummo and Jon Jost's Last Chants For A Slow Dance.
"he was just honestly expressing himself. GodDAMMIT."
Just?
Just?
*sigh*
"Also will probably suggest Harmony Korine's Gummo"
*sigh again*
And you complaint about your teacher? Damn.
aaaaand here's how it went down http://mhis206.wikispaces.com/Reality+things+suggestions
BIG ASS LOL from me.
As I said to Elston: It's pretty hilarious when it isn't happening to you.
Lol. Why are all college professors douche bags? They probably have to take a test or something.
There has to be. at least one for lecture-based courses. or maybe that's just what cultural studies does to people.
tonight is reality-tv-screenings. argh. ARGH. I want an aneurysm so i don't have to go.
Oh, gee, um... Sorry. I've sat through a bad film study class before, but I think you've survived an even worse one...
Shalom, y'all!
L. Bangs
I am not yet sure if I will survive. I'm only about halfway through; it ends in April. :c
is your professor old(er) or young(er)?
i thought about taking a film class or two at my university, one on Westerns, another on Hitchcock, and another may be on American Noir???, all great in theory. but then i remembered that one should not mix business with pleasure, and that the professor for any and all film classes is an OLD asshole. he may not compete with your professor as you have outlined here, but would be able to insert his own bitter eccentricities on the craft of film. i have heard at least 10 scathing reviews of his teaching method from different students from the full range of my biased perceived "intellectual"/personality status: all negative, all derogatory, and worse, if you get more than one student in a conversation about him, regardless of what class they had him for, tempers flare and effigies are constructed and piled atop one another in a pyre of almost pure hatred of the man, the professor, the human being.
nevertheless, both of these professors top a story my American Lit. professor told my class about someone the English department (him along with a few others) interviewed for the Romantic Literature position.
paraphrased from his paraphrase of the interview-
UC professor(s): (niceties aside) what are your credentials? who are you most familiar with?
Romantic "scholar" interviewee: named the biggies...Hawthorne, Poe, Wordsworth, Coleridge...(Thoreau, Emerson-though they are not considered "Romantics")
UC professor(s): ok, tell us about them, your various studies, your foci, any publications you may have, etc.
Romantic "scholar" interviewee: well...(random bullshit about some authors listed above without talking about any of the works themselves...).
UC professor(s): what have you studied?
Romantic "scholar" interviewee: well, i...([her school of thought]...some kind of criticism - Dialectic Materialism? - this is not it, all i can remember is it starts with a "D" and DM is stuck in my mind despite what i have read about it).
UC professor(s): what kind of study is that?
Romantic "scholar" interviewee: i don't study the primary sources, i only study secondary reviews/critiques of the various texts.
my professor: pauses out of amazement of his own recollection of the interview, and best, wanders who gave her a degree, how they are still an institution of "high"er learning, and how disillusioned the woman must be to actually fill out a resume and interview for an academic position at a university not run out of the basement of a Dominoes pizza eatery. how-the-fuck can anyone comment on any work of art without considering the culture it was created in, at least superficially: art is not created in a vacuum! but the space between her toes up beyond the recesses of her nose was!...and all those who sail with her!
He looks like he's about 40 or so.
Seems there's a fuckton of dumb film study teachers out there.
That person sounds like an idiot.
Argh. People at my school seem extremely enamored with just reading about things-- not paying a whole lot of attention to things in themselves and always reading modern context backwards into older works. Then again this is just in respect to movies ot painting and such-- nobody at my school knows or cares a lick about literature or reading if it's not directly post-modern theory related and I find that pretty depressing.
so he looks like an idiot.
probably so, since some people think film is NOT art, literally; most people who like to watch movies of all types (genre, era, language...) think of it only as leisure time, which is partially true, but frustrating when my mind fissures and contorts along with every scene-even with a film like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-well, sometimes. and most people will not go near a black and white film let alone something like Metropolis, or even Manhattan....
i wish i could have been there to hear the actual exchange, or at least have the audio tapes; and i would love to know the "university" that certified her an idiot.
i find that people do the "me->now->then=>>meaning". "if it's not post-modern theory related [then it ain't shit]" does sound depressing enough for me to drop-out again. and these are the people who will run the companies that make the brakes for your car, set the sanitary budget for food production, and edit that dreadful thing called literature, and worse write our sitcoms-personally i am on an all cartoon (Futurama, KOTH, SP) diet with some House, Lie To Me, Curb Your Enthusiasm & fake news. and as far as it being limited to film and painting: where there is smoke there is probably fire and they will burn the whole fucking place down; though no one death has ever stopped us from out balling the other masses that call themselves planets (pluto is post-post-post modern existential romanticist: just looking for attention).
hey zach, you should come chat on soulseek with Marquee, callanyvegetable, feif and I. If you end up installing it tell me your username!
Seriously zach, come join our club it's a blast! We even decided to relax our rules about letting homosexuals in, just for you.
Awwwwww, that's really sweet of you dudes.
I made my username Zaccchary
hey Zach, come online. my name is Elston.