Cinematography Unit: Light Meter Workshop

Northern Borders Cinematographer, James Brad Heck, took his Cinematography Unit out for some hands-on work with the light meter.

 Photos courtesy of Jeremiah Menzel Davis

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Film Critic Gerald Peary Visits Northern Images Class

North American film critic, Gerald Peary, visited the Northern Images class this week to show his documentary film For the Love of Movies.  The film chronicles the history and the current state of American film criticism.  In a discussion following the film Peary reflected on the production of his film and he offered his view on ways in which the internet and social media have entered the picture––sometimes validating and other times invalidating professional film criticism.  He also explored the  often charged relationship between film directors/creators and film critics.

Gerald Peary is a much-published North American film critic for more than twenty-five years. His cinema articles have appeared in many newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe, and in film periodicals around the world, including Film Comment, Cineaste, Sight and Sound, and Positif. He has been a reviewer for many publications, including the Real Paper, the Boston Review, Toronto Magazine, and Macleans. 

(Sourced from Gerald Peary's website at http://geraldpeary.com/).

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Garret Keizer visits the Northern Literature course at Marlboro College

As part of the Marlboro Film Intensive curriculum, students read Garret Keizer’s 1996 book-length essay, No Place But Here: A Teacher’s Vocation in a Rural Community.  Keizer is a respected essayist and contributing editor to Harper’s magazine. He also appeared on the Colbert Report recently to discuss his work.  Essayists are usually pretty adept at stimulating passionate dialogue, so our class was fortunate to have him attend our class and lead discussion on his book and related topics including “noise,” the subject of his latest book. 

Our group struck up an intimate and energetic conversation about Mr. Keizer’s experiences in public education. Students offered stories about their own experiences in the schools. After the session Mr. Keizer agreed to share his thoughts on the class and he sent us the following note.

After the close of my visit with the Northern Borders film project class, I was asked if I might write a paragraph or so summarizing my responses to the experience.  Hoping I understood the request accurately, I am providing the following observations.

First, I was gratified to find the class so friendly and attentive.  This was by no means a case of “warming up” to the visitor, but rather a predisposition to see that the visitor was made to feel at home from the start.  As a result I found that I was able to direct all of my energies to the questions posed to me and little or no energy to matters of personal presentation and rhetorical strategy.

Second, I was delighted by the range of questions.  I have been in book discussions where a single issue or exchange winds up predominating, not always with the greatest relevance to the overall purpose of the gathering.  In this case, the open agenda seemed to enrich the discussion rather than permit it to go astray.  To the best of my recollection, most of the questions fell into one of the following categories:

• Questions of clarification relating to “Getting Schooled” or No Place But Here
• Questions relating to education (with several sub-categories such as classroom management, parental involvement, personal experiences with school, home-schooling, etc.)
• Questions relating to the social and cultural context of the Northeast Kingdom and of rural communities in general
• Questions relating to the “writing life”
• Questions relating to characterization in Northern Borders

That’s an impressive range, I think, and I’ve probably failed to account for one or two questions that elude classification.  In retrospect, I feel I can stand by the answers I gave, though I wish that some of them had been more succinct.

Finally, I left the campus impressed by the sense that the issues raised by the reading and discussion, as well as by the filmmaking project, actually matter to the students.  That certainly contributed a great deal to making the experience matter to me.  And I had fun.

Garret Keizer

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