On Oct. 13 from 2—4 p.m., four faculty filmmakers from the Film and Media Studies department screened their work for coworkers, students and friends in the Gilman 50 auditorium. The event highlighted the presenters’ labors of love, with a program that featured the following works: unravelling by Susan Leslie Mann and John Bright Mann, Manger by Jimmy Joe Roche, Turf Valley by Adam Rodgers and Thomas Ventimiglia, and I’m Not Your Monster by Karen Yasinsky.
unravelling opens on several dancers pressing their ears on fraying, pale lavender wallpaper. Eerie strings fill the room, which is naturally lit with no visible windows. As the beat solidifies, they stoop and rise to the rhythms, snatching at the newspapers strewn over the floor. Occasionally, their cult-like reverie is broken by radio broadcasts, always a disastrous announcement — the Titanic sinking, the Columbia STS-107 mission — which compels the dancers to scramble into a narrow hallway and sway from wall to wall, desperately trying to gather more information.
During the Q&A that followed, producer and choreographer Susan Mann and director, cinematographer, composer, editor and Film and Media Studies Senior Lecturer John Mann discussed their creative process. Referencing the overall themes of the film, John Mann relayed his inspiration from history, namely the cyclic nature of human-caused disasters. He hoped to capture the feeling of waiting for the next disaster to occur without knowing when it would strike. For instance, the film incorporates a pause in the dance that exactly matches the length of the pause in the Houston control room before the Columbia STS-107’s disintegration.
“[John Mann] said to me, ‘I want you to do a dance that has the Hindenburg, Titanic, Amelia Earhart’ … So we decided that what we do, instead of trying to capture those moments, was to capture the feeling of anxiousness that develops from the repetition of these catastrophes,” Susan Mann said.
To translate the film’s themes to choreography, Susan Mann focused on the emotions of anxiety and unpredictability — she explained that the dancers had never heard the music throughout their rehearsals, and that their only auditory cues were spontaneous statements from her, such as her saying that there was an invisible intruder in the room, or ants in the dancers’ clothing.
The second film, Manger, directed by Film and Media Studies Senior Lecturer Jimmy Joe Roche, follows a homeless narrator as he delivers a fierce soliloquy about his take on the Book of Genesis. The unnamed narrator is the only one to ever speak, and the actors for Adam and Eve remain impassive throughout the film as if they don’t have the agency to change what’s being narrated. At the start, Adam and Eve are born in an idyllic place signifying the Garden of Eden, but the garden’s natural light is slightly distorted by a vintage filter. The narrator then introduces Adam and Eve’s fall from grace, which is described in the Book of Genesis. However, instead of consuming a forbidden fruit, the two begin abusing drugs, and the lighting shifts from natural sunlight to neon strobes as their addiction grows more severe. Near the film’s climax, the narrator’s voice crescendos to a booming volume, and Adam’s and Eve’s faces grow more shadowed until they no longer resemble humans.
During Manger’s Q&A session, Roche emphasized the importance of lighting to the piece, especially since it contains just one speaking character.
“I love the way that light works in film … It can signal that a dream is happening, or that we’re inside our minds, or that we’re experiencing something that is riding the inner world into the outer world,” Roche said.
Due to his focus on lighting, Roche was also able to produce Manger without a heavy budget, instead filming at precise times during the day to capture the ambience of certain scenes. He added that the real-world locations added to the authenticity of the film, such as the parking lot littered with needles in the opening scene.
The next work was an episode from the TV series Turf Valley, (S2. E8, The Game) directed by Film and Media Studies Senior Lecturer Adam Rodgers. The episode revolves around a day in the life of a stay-at-home dad. It starts with a dream that he’s universally admired by his wife and neighbors. He then heads to ‘work’ at a community recreation center, where a coalition of like-minded dads ride prop horses, riff electric guitars and pull swords from stones.
Before long, the dad wakes up to reality, and he meets up with another father to spectate his middle child’s ‘Macaroni’ game. It’s an absurd combination of field hockey and plague doctor masks which none of the fathers understand. As the game progresses, another coalition of fathers meets at a playground dressed as secret agents, ready to tackle the task of watching their newborns for a day. During their gathering, a curious social media influencer comes up to the head agent and asks what the point of the dads’ efforts are if they don’t receive public recognition. In response, the head agent slaps him into the bouncy rubber floor.
Discussing the origin of the film, Rodgers said that he hoped to translate his experience as an at-home dad into a TV series. Since Turf Valley was created during the pandemic, the filmmakers were constrained to a local neighborhood setting. Prior to then, he and the other creators had discovered the National At-Home Dad Network, a community of fathers with the same experiences that offered new ideas for episodes.
“We found this huge community of fathers who were trying to figure it out, and they hated being called babysitters. And you know, it’s this whole cultural phenomenon that we didn’t intend to become a part of, but were suddenly in the middle of it, and so they were sort of our partners,” Rodgers said.
The fourth film, a hand-drawn animation titled I’m Not Your Monster by Film and Media Studies Senior Lecturer Karen Yasinsky, presented a montage of disjointed clips that evoke a spectrum of emotions. It begins with kennel dogs growling at the audience, a woman glancing around at invisible ghosts and comedian Gene Wilder enthusiastically greeting someone offscreen. Rather than fleshed-out environments, the film takes place in a blank void, which gives a general feeling of suspense. For instance, in a scene where a jockey jumps hurdles, the hurdles only appear as white negative space when the jockey’s silhouette overlaps with them. Though the film doesn’t have a specific subject, its overall emotional arc transitions from fear to anxiety to relief, with bits of excitement interspersed between.
During the Q&A with Yasinsky, she discussed that the connection between the images was determined by certain qualities she loved, whether it was the emotion the image elicited or the way the subjects moved.
“It’s really just things that I love that I want to take out of the context … and then put it into a new sequence and try and bring a new kind of life,” Yasinsky said.
For the animation, Yasinsky made use of rotoscoping, a technique in which animators trace over footage to make their drawings more organic. She drew 12 frames for each second in the four and a half minute film, and hopes to incorporate more in the future.
After all the films had been screened, the host thanked everyone for attending and the filmmakers for sharing their diverse visions and creative processes. Although the films came off as overly abstract at times, the event was a refreshing opportunity to experience different filmmaking processes and listen to the directors’ takes.
