Could Not Have Said it Better Myself

by Vince Durnan and Steve Smail

En route to meetings with other school heads in truly snowy Boston, I yield this column to a colleague. Steve Smail, our web guru and resident auteur, offers reflections on next week's Centennial Movie Night centerpiece.
 
We secured the historic Belcourt Theater for an event built over many lifetimes. Inspired by preserved copies of 1920s feature films from the Peabody Cinema Club, the initial plan was to screen those early films, some of the very first made in Nashville (albeit by students) as an archival salute. The idea grew to a wider lens, so to speak, that would embrace film and video work done by more recent and contemporary artists. The resulting program offers a beautiful chance to compare past with present, an excercise we've found compelling all year.
 
As Steve put things together (with the help of Chairs Ann Shayne and Frannie Corzine, among many others), he noticed elements of the early work that resonate with what we see in students today. Here's what he shared with me:
 
Learning by Making Mistakes Just Like in the Old Days
 
Students can do great work but don’t always get it right, and that’s part of why PDS and USN have been so powerful for generations. If nothing else, this school fosters teachers who have unparalleled freedom in the classroom as they explore the challenges of intellectual and artistic risk-taking with each young person.
 
Case in point: our 1928 Peabody Cinema Club students who achieved a silent film masterpiece despite what must have been great odds in the early days of amateur filmmaking. While the film holds some clues to what can go creatively right, it also hold clues to what can go wrong. After several shot-by-shot screenings of Masque (to be shared once again on March 5th at the Belcourt in a newly restored digital conversion), I’ve seen hits and misses in this 1928 production that are typical of student work.
 
1928 Evidence 1: About 75% of the way through the film, the audience is subjected to a multi-minute title card explaining a barrage of backstory so that the story’s increasingly complex narrative would make sense. Why, after so many scenes of thoughtful cinematographic care and narrative production, did they decide to do that? My guess is that they realized well into shooting that their original plan was too ambitious for the time and resources they had (including the absence of cinematic sound capability, just then making its first appearance in theatres). They had to resort to quickly go to Plan B and tell the story with words on screen rather than with moving pictures.
 
In my own high school filmmaking classes, I oftentimes find myself face-to-face with ambitious students with ambitious plans. This happens in every class here. All of us teachers have learned that oftentimes we have to decide between intervening or just getting out of the way. It’s a challenge for both students and teachers: let motivated learning and creativity take over even if it’s not part of the original plan and adds some unexpected but appropriate risks.
 
We can only imagine what Miss Lucille Heath, PDS English Teacher and the Peabody Cinema Club Advisor, must have been up against with the determined and aspiring film directors Walter Sharp and Dillard Jacobs (both PDS '28), along with a cast and crew of a few dozen students behind them. Maybe you can also imagine these same students well into their production, realizing their narrative predicament and diminishing resources, consulting with Miss Heath. She probably didn’t say: “I told you it would never work”; but rather, “OK, you can’t film everything. What are you going to do about it? How can you finish the film and screen something the audience will enjoy?”
 
1928 Evidence 2: At the cliff-top climax of the film (likely shot in the hills of Warner Parks or near Ashland City), the editing becomes rapid, as you might expect from a thoughtful cinematic editor. However, some cuts are chaotic and in some cases so abbreviated, with uncharacteristically clunky shots, that something must have not gone as planned.
 
A theory: our early auteurs, far from home and maybe nearing the end of their production schedule, realized that after a full day of shooting they only had a few feet of 16mm film stock remaining to capture Masque’s dramatic final moments. Maybe they had lost track of how many feet they had already exposed in other “chase” scenes shot that day. Their best laid plans for an amazing final vertiginous sequence turned into a compromised scramble just to capture anything they could get with the few precious feet of film they had remaining. That’s also the case with our modern young artists/scientists/essayists taking on ambitious work: “Oh, my battery ran out” or “We didn’t have another reel of film / videotape / memory card” or “our lead actress had soccer practice so we, like, couldn’t really rehearse.”
 
So here we are, 87 years later, presented with the same story, the same learning curve, the same realization that one of our primary responsibilities is to make sure students know how to deal with an unexpected situation and go to Plan B. And isn’t that also all of us, adjusting to situations and resources in every aspect of our lives as we continue to teach and learn with those around us.
 
Very interesting stuff - representative of the deep thinking of our faculty and the important conclusions to be drawn in our everyday efforts as a school. Here's hoping you have your Movie Night tix already (www.usn.org/movienight) and that we continue to see what we do with the close eye, the artist's eye, that has served us well over generations.
 
Over and out for now,
Vince
 
and ps- check our Education Week mention in the current issue. The first national press our Centennial has garnered so far.

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