Sometimes a Good Notion

If I’ve learned anything from being a Professor the past few years is that preparing a new class is both hard, tedious work and an absolute adventure.  Typing hundreds of pages of lectures is wearisome and sometimes overwhelming. As I’m planning a new course I sometimes feel that I’ll never be finished but the process is also exhilarating.  Each lecture page has to fall into place within the greater narrative of the class and each class must build towards the thesis of a particular course. I try to find ways to communicate with students that are both interesting and challenging to them and to myself.  I want to engage them intellectually at best and keep them awake at worst.  It is work that is never finished. After every term my lectures are filled with notes and adjustments that must be addressed before the start of the next.  The student’s honesty also helps.  Last term one of my screenwriting students told me that I only bored her twice and she reassured me that this was a very good ratio.

Despite the difficulties it’s a process that’s full of discovery.  With every subject I approach I learn something new.  Take for instance my current encounter with some very early Méliès films that I came across as I researched a Film History class I’m teaching this summer.

Méliès, every self-respecting film student, maker, academic, or buff knows as the director of A Trip to the Moon (1902). It is a staple of Film History courses around the world.  I have taken FH courses three times in my academic career and in each the images of Mélièswhacking moon-men with his umbrella have been ingrained in my mind as “important”.   And they are.  Méliès was an early player in the industry and he explored mise-en-scene, montage, and cinematic time before anyone had a name for those things.  Credit must be given and A Trip to The Moon deserves serious discussion.

However, the man made hundreds of films.  What I feel that’s missing in discussions aboutMéliès is the celebration of the pure unadulterated silliness of his films.  The Méliès shorts are cinematic and full of magic.  They, for the most part, don’t have a story or a plot, but not much did at the time.  They present a man, Méliès, more interested in entertaining others than in being remembered for his cinematic contributions.  These short pictures teach us the most important lesson that Méliès had to offer, which is that this is the business we call “show”.

Here are three of my favories: Un Homme de têtes (1898), L’Impressionniste fin de siècle (1899),  Le Diable noir (1905).  Each of these simply for your entertainment.

Un Homme de têtes (1898)

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