2009 Film and Television Studies Graduating Seniors

This year we celebrate our 5th class of graduating Film and Television studies majors!   Our graduating seniors are: John Gerald Bennett, Whitney  Buxton, Elizabeth Ingalsbee Carey, Christine E. DeAngelis, Connor Harwood Dow, Karl Frederick Fallenius, George Edward Gove IV, David Rafael Haladjian, Peter Trask Hendee, Greg Thomas LaBier, John Lazarro, Sean Robert Lees, Tabitha Colleen Lowe, Alexandra Brett Lubart, Sophia Arez Malarkey, Erika  Meierdiercks, Christa  Pagliei, Jacob B. Pasternack, Rye Stoddard Richardson, Gregory John Schondelmeier,  and Jordan Anne Thorson

This year the festival took place FRIDAY APRIL 10th, 2009 @ 7pm in the Grand Maple Ballroom of the Davis Center.  The festival was a great success thanks to FTS senior John Lazarro who ran the festival this year.  The festival this year featured 15 films by UVM students.  And the filmmakers were: Andrew Peberdy, Stefan Milovanovic, David Haladjian, Erika Meierdiercks, Sophia Malarkey, Tavid Bingham, Raphael Valenti, Olivia Saperstein, Suzannah Mullen, Ryan Winnick, Max Jacobson, Ian Eshelman, A. Morgan, Michael Skillicorn, Samuel Fath

Angles of Deception, a film made by FTS 142: Advanced Production, screened Sat May 2nd at the Roxy Theatre!

(photo: Prof. Deb Ellis & the FTS 142 class at the the Roxy theatre)

Every year the FTS142 Advanced Production focuses on a different aspect of the production experience.  This year the focus was on "producing."  Typically, the creative role of the producer is underestimated.  Usually, this is because the role is not understood!  This spring our class learned what it really means to produce a project by taking on a script written by an FTS major the previous semester.  How is the script developed and adapted for screen?  In answering this question we faced other challenges: how to hire professional actors, finding good locations, choosing the right equipment, and creating an effective shooting and editing  scheduling.  While all members of the class participating in all aspects of the development, shooting and editing process, we learned in the end that the producer makes the film happen, and choices made by the producer drive the creative output in the process.  We started the class by reading Christine Vachon's "A Killer Life" (Vachon produced numerous independent films in the 90s through today, including Poison, Happiness, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig).  We finished the class with a screening of our class produced short, Angles of Deception, at the Roxy Theater in downtown Burlington.  Everyone in the class has a much better sense of what "producing" means - including the incredible creative potential in the position.  Please see the film’s website: Angles of Deception.

The Dugan A. Foley Memorial Award

(photo: Prof. Sarah Nilsen, Annie Fallon, Prof. Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree)

This year the Award goes to ANNIE FALLON.  Congratulations Annie!

Acceptance into prestigious University Southern California,
School of Cinematic Arts summer program

Congratulations to Suzannah Mullen, a senior FTS major, who is one of five US students accepted into the summer Fusion Arts Exchange Program, a prestigious international film program hosted by the University of Southern California, School of Cinematic Arts.  This summer, she will be joining US and international film students at USC in Los Angeles and taking courses on film direction, production, and screenwriting.  The group will also travel to New York, Boston, and Washington DC.  If you want to know more about it, check out the website.

Faculty News Spring 2009

Prof. Deb Ellis continued work on her feature length documentary Peace Has No Borders.   Peace Has No Borders follows the story of US war resisters currently in Canada resisting the war in Iraq by refusing to serve. At the center of the film is a nine-year Army veteran, Sgt. Patrick Hart, his wife Jill, and their son Rian.  The Hart family represents the personal story of the resisters and their relationship to a larger political struggle being waged between citizen groups that support them and a minority government determined to deport them.  This is a film about family, social activism and modern democracy.  It was screened as a work-in-progress at the University Film and Video Conference this year. (check out the website for this film at Peace Has No Borders)  She also produced, directed, and edited Six Vermont Artists, which was created as a companion to Vermont’s Big Read.  This year, the Vermont Arts Council is using Fahrenheit 451 as a platform for statewide discussions about how Bradbury and other artists have used their work as social commentary.  This video is designed to raise questions that can be discussed in conjunction with the book.

Prof. Tony Magistrale's edited collection The Films of Stephen King: From Carrie to Secret Window came out this year.  He is currently working on a book-length project dealing with all The Shining(s)--King's novel, Kubrick's film, Garris's teleplay, and The Simpson's cartoon. 

While working on a book project entitled Out of Time: The Ethics of Atemporal Cinema that will be published by the University of Minnesota Press, Prof. Todd McGowan wrote articles on the new Batman movie and on the relationship between Hegel’s philosophy and science fiction films.  The former, entitled “The Exceptional Darkness of The Dark Knight,” appeared in the film journal Jump Cut.  It contends that the film shows that while any conception of justice depends on an exception to the law, this exception must be conceived as inherently criminal rather than heroic or legal.  In this sense, the film represents an indirect riposte to the doctrine of heroic exceptionality that animates the War on Terror.  The latter essay, entitled “Hegel and the Impossibility of the Future in Science Fiction Cinema” appeared in Film-Philosophy.  It argues that Hegel’s contention that we never actually think in terms of the future allows us to interpret the futuristic dimension of science fiction cinema as the disguised expression of the present ideological structure.  Through this Hegelian reading, science fiction cinema offers unparalleled insight into ideology, but it does so necessarily in a paranoid form. 

Prof. Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree completed a book-length manuscript Toward an "Accented" Critique of Culture: Theorizing Postcolonial East Asian Cinema, and is working on an anthology The Trans-Pacific Imagination: Rethinking Boundary, Culture and Society. She gave a lecture entitled "Reading Cinema Globally: A Cinema of Failure" at Syracuse University on April 3, 2009.

Prof. Hilary Neroni continued to work on her book on representations of torture in American film and television.  She presented two papers this year: “Reinventing the Critique of Ideology: The biopolitical body, Agamben, and the psychoanalytic subject” at the ACLA,  and  “The Bare Life Fantasy:  Agamben, Jack Bauer, and the imperative to torture” at The Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.  And she also gave a talk “Terror, Torture, and Feminine Masquerade: The Case of ‘Alias’ vs ‘24'” at BU which was also broadcasted on WBRU.