I really do rule the school
The first two days of my new semester went swimmingly. Tuesday night I had my Art of Robert Altman class in which we watched M*A*S*H, which I had never seen. It was so funny and my professor was very impressed with my analysis of the film within the context of Altman's "professional" or "occupational" films (The Player, Ready to Wear, The Company) so I felt like I was a smarty-pants for a little while. I also got back my final paper from last semester on Far From Heaven (which I'm sure most of you didn't read on my live journal) which was a big fat A. Yeah.
Last night I had my Film Criticism and Digital Design classes. The criticism class was really great because the professor is having us base all our writings on the guidelines for getting published in Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and Cineaste. So it seems that I will achieve something professionally out of this program after all. She said that many students from the class from previous semesters have been published. We're also having guest critics come in to talk with us. One of them is David Sterritt, who wrote 2 books on Godard and also did the commentary on the Breathless DVD, all of which factored heavily into my thesis, so I felt as if I will be meeting a celebrity (yeah, that's lame, I know).
My design class was good, but I think it's going to involve a hell of a lot of work. I have to create a website and a 4 minute video by the end of the semester (it's time for me to finally learn HTML. Frank, I may need your help). I also need to find Final Cut Pro and Photoshop for Mac. If anybody's got copies (or knows anybody who does or where I can get them free) let me know. Please. My instructor wants the class to be a portfolio-building class, so again I will be getting some sort of professional gain from this. Up until last night I'd always viewed my film studies and media studies education as something fairly self-serving and only of interest to me. I'd always said that I'd end up as a professor after getting a PhD, meaning that grad school would really just be a lay-over until getting into a real doctoral program. But now it seems that I can actually do things with what I'm learning, and there is more application to this than just being able to talk at length about Lacan and phalluses (phalli?) in Hitchcock's films. Oh yeah, I have to read Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" for 2 more classes, bringing my total number of times having read this for class up to 7. Hurrah to the gaze.
After class Erika, Anna and I went to Grassroots for a couple of pitchers. Then Erika and I ran into (almost literally) MTV's John Norris as we were getting on the Q train.
Last night I had my Film Criticism and Digital Design classes. The criticism class was really great because the professor is having us base all our writings on the guidelines for getting published in Film Quarterly, Sight and Sound, and Cineaste. So it seems that I will achieve something professionally out of this program after all. She said that many students from the class from previous semesters have been published. We're also having guest critics come in to talk with us. One of them is David Sterritt, who wrote 2 books on Godard and also did the commentary on the Breathless DVD, all of which factored heavily into my thesis, so I felt as if I will be meeting a celebrity (yeah, that's lame, I know).
My design class was good, but I think it's going to involve a hell of a lot of work. I have to create a website and a 4 minute video by the end of the semester (it's time for me to finally learn HTML. Frank, I may need your help). I also need to find Final Cut Pro and Photoshop for Mac. If anybody's got copies (or knows anybody who does or where I can get them free) let me know. Please. My instructor wants the class to be a portfolio-building class, so again I will be getting some sort of professional gain from this. Up until last night I'd always viewed my film studies and media studies education as something fairly self-serving and only of interest to me. I'd always said that I'd end up as a professor after getting a PhD, meaning that grad school would really just be a lay-over until getting into a real doctoral program. But now it seems that I can actually do things with what I'm learning, and there is more application to this than just being able to talk at length about Lacan and phalluses (phalli?) in Hitchcock's films. Oh yeah, I have to read Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" for 2 more classes, bringing my total number of times having read this for class up to 7. Hurrah to the gaze.
After class Erika, Anna and I went to Grassroots for a couple of pitchers. Then Erika and I ran into (almost literally) MTV's John Norris as we were getting on the Q train.