Tagged: Pratt Institute

Syllabus for Experimental Film, Fall 2014, Now Available

In recent years, it’s been pretty regularly expected for my fall classes to begin before Labor Day weekend. It’s something I despise, but since I have little power over the academic calendar, all I can do is complain out loud.

This year, however, only one class begins before Labor Day weekend. Experimental Film, a course at Pratt Institute begins on Thursday, August 28. That is less than two weeks away!

After a slight moment of panic, I updated the syllabus for the Fall 2014 semester, and it is now available on my professional website. As always, here’s the course description:

Experimental Film surveys the major avant-garde film movements of the twentieth century. We will closely examine the films and theories of the film and filmmakers that challenge the dominant commercial cinemas of Europe and the United States.

A nice thing about teaching this class at Pratt Institute is that the department always markets the electives throughout the institute. Here is the poster they designed to pitch my experimental film class.

Posterdesign new 4 1512

Yes, that’s a frame grab from L’Age D’Or (1930), one of my favorite Buñuel films from his surrealist era.

Cuffs and Collars Don’t Match

Yet again, I find myself having a class to teach on Halloween. Two years ago, I had to give a midterm exam, but I lightened things up by giving extra credit points to anyone who dressed up for the occasion. Most memorably was one student who dressed up as a midterm exam.

Last year, as we know, there was no class due to a little storm called Sandy. In fact, not only did we not have school, Halloween was basically cancelled in New York. Canceling Halloween in New York almost seems unthinkable, but it happened.

My class tonight is Experimental Film at Pratt Institute. We’re not covering anything particular spooky or related to the dead or undead. We’re just looking at a three postwar avant-garde filmmakers who covered New York as a subject, namely Rudy Burckhardt, Shirley Clarke, and Andy Warhol. While your common New Yorker could not identify the first two filmmakers if he saw either of them, everyone knows what Andy Warhol looked like.

Andy and Marilyn and Marilyn

Andy Warhol, stands in front of his double portrait of Marilyn Monroe, at The Tate Gallery in London, February 15, 1971. (AP Photo)


If you don’t know who Andy Warhol was, he was an artist who didn’t actually make any art. Here he is “painting” Debbie Harry with a Commodore Amiga.

To keep the spirit of Halloween alive, I bought a wig.

At least I am acknowledging that I’m wearing a costume and not acting as an impostor as Allen Midgette did at the University of Utah in 1967.

If you’re wondering about the rest of the costume, you’re not missing it. There’s no more to my costume. I’m just wearing a dark t-shirt and black slacks. Because I’m still riding my bike to class, I’m also wearing a pair of Converse high tops, Showers Pass rain jacket (30% of chance of showers, they say), and helmet, all of which is black and keeping with the sullen artist image.

But at least I got the hair right, even if it’s wrong for my skin tone.

The above link to Amazon is an affiliate link. If you buy something that link, I will earn a commission fee.

Four Excerpts of Experimental Films

Today, my Experimental Film class took their midterm exam. Since we’ve focused on analyzing specific films from the historical avant-garde, the exam consists of an in-class portion and a take-home portion:

In class today, I screened four clips, each two to three minutes in length. Students were to identify the title, filmmaker, and year of each clip. One of the clips will be from a film we have not studied in class but should be familiar.

After class today, students went home and began writing a 200-word rationale for identifying each of the four clips screened in class. Their analysis is due before class next week.

If you’d like to play along at home, here are the clips I screened in class today. Mind you that the clips are based on what we’ve studied during the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth weeks of class.

Clip 1

Clip 2

Clip 3

Clip 4

This particular clip is more challenging than the first three because it is from a film we did not screen in class. However, this film bears a strong resemblance to film we did study. Can you name the film it resembles? Can you identify this particular film?

As with the final exam for the history of silent film class, I will post the answers and some abbreviated notes about each clip at a later date.

LMS No More

This semester I swore off all learning management systems (LMS) for my classes. The biggest reason was out of self-interest because I am teaching four classes at three colleges and mastering a different LMS for each is a huge pain. Don’t believe me. Let’s take a look:

College Learning Management System Version
CUNY Queens College Blackboard 9.1.70081.25
Fordham Blackboard 9.1.110082.0
Pratt Institute Moodle 2.5.2, I think

Each also has a very idiosyncratic way of logging in. With Fordham, I just use my single sign-on, and I’m usually in. However, with CUNY, I have to login twice using the same credentials and then select Blackboard, after I tried to login to Blackboard.

It’s also hard to brush up with each individual platform because you often don’t even know if you’re going even to teach the class as colleges cancel classes at the last minute. This is one of the cruel realities of part-time teaching: it really discourages advance preparation, and many of us don’t bother with it until just before the start of the semester.

Another reason for abandoning the learning management systems is that each one was recently updated. Let’s face it, none of these learning management systems were going to be easier to use than the previous version. In fact, you can bet that each iteration adds a number of new complex features for the IT department purchasing the upgrade, at the expense of usability for the teacher and students. No, thank you.

Can you tell me where to stick my syllabus?

Can you tell me where to stick my syllabus?

How is an overworked teacher supposed to function without an LMS? Am I helpless like those teachers at Springfield Elementary when the students stole the Teachers’ Editions? No, I just roll things back to the days of web 1.0.

Static HTML syllabus

After a year of testing, I’m bringing back the static HTML syllabus. For example, my Media Technologies class has one with a pretty easy-to-remember web address: http://juanmonroy.com/mediatechnologies. I wrote the whole thing in Markdown and then exported it to HTML using Byword or Marked, depending on my mood at the time, which I then uploaded with the help of BBEdit. On the syllabus, there’s links to resources, such as:

  • textbooks
  • reserve readings, available as PDF.[1]
  • screenings
  • lecture outlines
  • slides

If you want to print the syllabus, there’s a print.css stylesheet that will render a printer-friendly version. (I told you this was really old stuff.)

Spreadsheet Gradebook

On my own computer I keep a gradebook in Numbers. You can do the same with Excel, Google Docs, and Open Office. Blackboard never had a good way of taking attendance so I’ve had to do this anyway. Moodle offers its own attendance module, but sheesh, it’s way easier to use an old paper attendance sheet than to decipher one of ten “attendance codes.”

In any case, calculating scores by spreadsheet is not the easiest thing in the world. I know most people use spreadsheets like a database to store lists and such, or to add and subtract simple values. However, a long time ago, a former boss of mine taught me Excel functions with weird names like VLOOKUP, LEFT, LEN, MIN, and SUMIF. Things really get fun when you nest functions inside others, and with those lessons from 1996, I calculate student’s grades in 2013.

Weening yourself off an LMS might not be the easiest thing. I am really pushing the limits of what I know about HTML, CSS, and spreadsheet functions. But I know that fighting bloatware is a cause I’m prepared to support.

  1. To avoid the ire of publishers, I use HTTPD Auth with a single username and password for everyone in the course.  ↩

Experimental Films

Did I really say that I’ve been procrastinating in preparing this semester’s syllabi because I’ve taught all of this semester’s courses before? That’s not entirely true. It turns out that the first two courses this week and next are new to me. The first class, which starts in two days, is Experimental Film at Pratt Institute. I’ve based this class on an undergraduate class I took at UCSB, taught by Constance Penley. This introduction to non-narrative experiment film truly changed my life, exposing me to films that were radically different from what we had studied in other classes. It helped me make sense of film theory, a challenging course in its own right, because I saw what was possible with film when not constrained to telling stories. And in some significant way, it lured me to New York because a great deal of these films were made and continued to circulate in the vibrant film culture of this city.

Sheeler and Strand, Manhatta (1921)

I’ve relished the opportunity to teach an experimental film class somewhere, but it’s been difficult because the subjects I’ve been teaching have little connection to the avant-garde. My classes at Fordham are geared towards communication students looking for jobs in the media industrial complex and, at Queens College, I teach the core curriculum for media studies and film students. However, when I started teaching at Pratt last year, I proposed the course on the historical film avant-garde and they accepted the course for this fall semester. When I first taught an early film history class last fall, we covered a section on the European avant-garde, and the students responded really well to the films of Fernand Leger, Rene Clair, and Marcel Duchamp. Perhaps it had to with the fact these particular filmmakers were artists first, and their aesthetic came from their experience in other art forms. It was an exciting revelation.

Anemic Cinema

The syllabus is still not done. I’ve been working on locating films for the screening list. It’s a long list, covering about ninety films, and I’m still grouping them into a coherent fourteen-week schedule.

Here’s the list so far, subject to time and budget constraints:

  1. Manhatta (Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, 1921, 11 min.)
  2. Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1923, 3 min.)
  3. Retour a la Raison (Man Ray, 1923, 3 min.)
  4. Entr’acte (Rene Clair, 1924, 15 min.)
  5. Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Leger, 1924, 19 min.)
  6. Symphonie Diagonale (Diagonal Symphony) (Viking Egglund, 1924, 5 min.)
  7. Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp, 1926, 7 min.)
  8. Twenty four Dollar Island (Robert Flaherty, 1926, 12 min.)
  9. Un Chien Andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1927, 12 min.)
  10. Etudes des mouvements a Paris (Joris Ivens, 1927, 4 min.)
  11. La Glace à trois faces (The Three-Sided Mirror) (Jean Epstein, 1927, 45 min.)
  12. Berlin: Symphony of a City (Walter Ruttman, 1927, 65 min.)
  13. Looney Lens: Split Skyscapers (Al Brick, 1927, 2 min.)
  14. Looney Lens: Tenth Avenue (Al Brick, 1927, 2 min.)
  15. La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman) (Germaine Dulac, 1928, 41 min.)
  16. Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (Florey and Vorkapich, 1928, 11 min.)
  17. Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929, 15 min.)
  18. H20 (Ralph Steiner, 1929, 13 min.)
  19. Mechanical Principles (Ralph Steiner, 1929, 11 min.)
  20. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, 68 min.)
  21. Symphonie der Wolkerkratzer [Skyscraper symphony] (Robert Florey, 1929, 10 min.)
  22. L’Age d’Or (Luis Buñuel, 1930, 63 min.)
  23. A Propos De Nice (Jean Vigo, 1930, 45 min.)
  24. Philips Radio (Joris Iven, 1931, 36 min.)
  25. A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda, 1931, 11 min.)
  26. 145 W 21 (Rudy Burckhardt, 1936, 10 min.)
  27. Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1937, 18 min.)
  28. Lambeth Walk, Nazi Style (Charles Ridely, 1941, 2 min.)
  29. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943, 14 min.)
  30. At Land (Maya Deren, 1944, min.)
  31. Study in Choreography for Camera (Maya Deren, 1945, 4 min.)
  32. Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1946, 15 min.)
  33. Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947, 15 min.)
  34. Puce Moment (Kenneth Anger, 1949, 6 min.)
  35. Interwoven (Harry Smith, 1949, 3 min.)
  36. Rabbit’s Moon (Kenneth Anger, 1950, 16 min.)
  37. Eaux des Artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953, 13 min.)
  38. Under the Brooklyn Bridge (Rudy Burckhardt, 1953, 15 min.)
  39. Inauguration of the pleasure dome (Kenneth Anger, 1954, 38 min.)
  40. Desistfilm (Stan Brakhage, 1954, 7 min.)
  41. Wonder ring (Stan Brakhage, 1955, 5 min.)
  42. Gnir Rednow (Joseph Cornell, 1955, 6 min.)
  43. The Aviary (Rudy Burckhardt, 1955, 5 min.)
  44. What Mozart Saw on Mulberry Street (Burckhardt, 1956, 6 min.)
  45. Rhythm (Len Lye, 1957, 1 min.)
  46. Bridges Go Round (Shirley Clarke, 1958, 4 min.)
  47. Window Baby Water Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959, 13 min.)
  48. Cat’s Cradle (Stan Brakhage, 1959, 6 min.)
  49. East Side Summer (Rudy Burckhardt, 1959, 11 min.)
  50. Eyewash (Robert Breer, 1959, 3 min.)
  51. Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961, 8 min.)
  52. Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963, 4 min.)
  53. Blonde Cobra (Ken Jacobs, 1963, 33 min.)
  54. Blow Job (Andy Warhol, 1963, 28 min.)
  55. Little Stabs at Happiness (Ken Jacobs, 1963, 15 min.)
  56. Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964, 28 min.)
  57. Prelude: Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1964, 25 min.)
  58. Kiss (Andy Warhol, 1964, 34 min.)
  59. Empire (Andy Warhol, 1964, 69 min.)
  60. Go Go Go (Marie Menken, 1964, 11 min.)
  61. Kustom Kar Kommados (Kenneth Anger, 1965, 3 min.)
  62. My Hustler (Andy Warhol, 1965, 66 min.)
  63. Sins of the Fleshapoids (Mike Kuchar, 1965, 40 min.)
  64. Peyote Queen (Storm De Hirsch, 1965, 9 min.)
  65. Hold Me While I’m Naked (George Kuchar, 1966, 17 min.)
  66. Castro Street (Bruce Baillie, 1966, 10 min.)
  67. Fuses (Carolee Schneeman, 1967, 22 min.)
  68. Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol, 1967, 180 min.)
  69. Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967, 45 min.)
  70. Square Times (Rudy Burckhardt, 1967, 6 min.)
  71. Zorns Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970, 60 min.)
  72. Nostalgia (Hollis Frampton, 1971, 36 min.)
  73. The Wold Shadow (Stan Brakhage, 1972, 3 min.)
  74. Baldessari sings [Sol] LeWitt (John Baldessari , 1972, 4 min.)
  75. Undertone [Excerpt] (Vito Acconci, 1972, 9 min.)
  76. Vertical Roll (Joan Jonas, 1972, 20 min.)
  77. Television Delivers People (Richard Serra, 1973, 6 min.)
  78. Five-Minute Romp Through the IP (Dan Sandin, 1973, min.)
  79. Female sensibility (Lynda Bengalis, 1973, 15 min.)
  80. Triangle in front of square in front of circle in front of triangle (Dan Sandin, 1973, 2 min.)
  81. Boomerang (Richard Serra/Nancy Holt, 1974, 10 min.)
  82. Performer/Audience/Mirror (Dan Graham, 1975, 23 min.)
  83. Sodom and Gomorrha, New York 10036 (Rudy Burckhard, 1976, 6 min.)
  84. New Improved Institutional Quality (Owen Land, 1976, 10 min.)
  85. Cycles of 3s and 7s (Tony Conrad, 1976, 3 min.)
  86. I, An Actress (George Kuchar, 1977, 9 min.)
  87. Sweet light (Bill Viola, 1977, 9 min.)
  88. Vital statistics of a citizen, simply obtained (Martha Rosler, 1977, 39 min.)
  89. Valse Triste (Bruce Connor, 1978, 5 min.)
  90. Wonder Woman (Dana Birnbaum, 1978, 5 min.)
  91. Cerveza Bud (Rudy Burckhardt, 1981, 22 min.)
  92. Bad Burns (Paul Sharits, 1982, 6 min.)

The course starts on Thursday, August 29, at 5:30 PM. The syllabus will be live on the web then…or at least it better be!

Writing Syllabi in the Summer

Although Labor Day isn’t for another seven days, for all intents and purposes, summer is over. I usually try to get my syllabi done in early August, but I haven’t been especially motivated lately, especially since I’ve taught these classes before. I didn’t start reviewing the syllabi until last week, and I even posted one for this semester’s Introduction to Electronic Media and that class that was ultimately cancelled on Friday.

After getting that bit of bad news, I lost whatever slim motivation I had developed last week. I took the weekend off and started reviewing my unfinished syllabi today. Since it’s a bit late in the game here, I did a little triage to figure out which classes to prioritize, and, in doing so, I figured out that I have a “soft landing” at the beginning of the semester.

Course College Start Date Enrollment
Introduction to Electronic Media Fordham University August 28[1] 3
Experimental Film Pratt Institute August 29 14
American Film Industry CUNY Queens College September 3[2] 9
Introduction to New Media Fordham University September 3 19
Media Technologies CUNY Queens College September 9 27

As you can see, my classes start over the course of three weeks. And with one already cancelled and one in danger of being cancelled, I start one class each of the next three weeks, giving me a bit of time in finishing each of these syllabi. It could get complicated if Queens College runs American Film Industry. The course had six students enrolled on Thursday, when I learned it was in danger of being cancelled, but it now has nine students. I’m not sure if that’s enough to spare the course. I haven’t heard anything yet, but I am not updating another syllabus only to have the class cancelled.

It’s not easy to write syllabi in the summer…especially when there might not even be a class.

  1. This class was cancelled on August 23, due to low enrollment.  ↩
  2. This class is in danger of being cancelled due to low enrollment.  ↩

Pratt Cancels the “Midterm Break”… then Reinstates It

This is my first semester at Pratt, and when as I was preparing my syllabus I learned of a “midterm break” that had been scheduled to coincide with Election Day on Tuesday, November 6. Due to Hurricane Sandy and the attendant cancellation of my class on Tuesday, October 30, they have cancelled the “midterm break” and now are requiring us to make up our Tuesday classes, including mine, on November 6.

Here’s the announcement:

Dear Faculty, Staff, and Students:

Next Tuesday was originally scheduled as “Mid-Term Break” and no classes were to be held. This was to allow folks more time to vote.

However, due to our class cancellation this week, normally scheduled tuesday classes will be held on the Brooklyn Campus, Tuesday, November 6th.

Note that tuesday classes will only be held at PMC if power is restored and the building can reopen.

Future consideration will be given to other make up classes as we move forward.

The calendar committee will consider making “Election Day” coincide with our mid-term break in future years.

Peter Barna, Provost

Update: The break was reinstated on Thursday, November 2.

More Closures due to Storm

By now, the string of emergency alerts from my work sites have been trickling in and are beginning to have a pretty predictable pattern.

Here’s the order of the announcements.

  • CUNY announced a complete closure of its campuses, around 7:00 this morning.
  • Around 12:30 PM, Fordham reassures us that everyone and its facilities are unharmed, but that classes are cancelled for Wednesday. That closure directly impacts me since I teach an 8:30 class there.
  • Just before 1:00 PM, NYU also announced a complete closure of classes and activities, although they have established electronics charging stations, provided Internet and health care services at Kimmell and the lower level of Bobst Library.
  • At about 1:45 PM, Pratt Institute, where I was supposed to teach class today, has been cancelled classes for tomorrow as well. However, that is a moot point for me since I only teach there on Tuesdays.

Oh well, back to getting some board games.

Early Film to World War II, Fall 2012 Syllabus

The syllabus for Early Film to World War II, at Pratt Institute, is now available on my professional website.

From the course description:

This course is a survey of film history from the beginnings of public film exhibition to the aftermath of World War II. We will look at industrial practices and stylistic developments, such as the development of motion picture technology, the development of narrative techniques, the establishment of national cinemas, the transition from silent to sound cinema, the dominance of Hollywood, the effects of World War II, and the ascendance of television, and the fall of studio system . While this course is primarily focused on Hollywood and American cinema, the contributions of major national cinemas are also explored.

This is the first class I’ve taught at Pratt, and I’m looking forward to working with a new set of students.