|
| |
"Could You Use Me?": Brief Thoughts on Movies and the University
From: Columbia University
| By:
Dan Friedlaender |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Columbia University offered its first film course in 1916. Over the course of the century, self-conscious discussions about film have occurred that are not unlike the way in which the world is considering new media today.
But Columbia's film holdings, like those of many other universities, have never been treated as archival treasures. In 1995, Dan Friedlaender, then a student in Columbia's M.F.A. program in film, began a mission to excavate Columbia's collections. To date, Friedlaender has uncovered more than 700 films.
To ensure that the best of these holdings will at last be brought to the public's attention, Fathom will endeavor to present clips on an ongoing basis. To launch this effort, Friedlaender chronicles his quest in this essay, which is accompanied by two Columbia screen gems: the Greek Games at Barnard, circa 1944, and an amateur film thought to have been shot during the campaigns of Franklin Roosevelt and Herbert Lehman for governor of New York in 1928. |
arly autumn 1997: At work on my graduate thesis film and looking to use some institutional footage, I wander into the Butler Library's Rare Books and Manuscript Division and shortly thereafter find myself screening a variety of films from the "Columbia Historical Record" collection: Stand Columbia, a 1966 promotional documentary about the university; opening ceremonies for the Mudd and Ferris Booth buildings, from the late 1950s; alumni home movies of a university banquet, old classmates playing baseball at a resort and commencement activities, early 1950s; military ceremonies with General Eisenhower (Columbia's president-elect), late 1940s; the Class of 1927's 10th and 20th reunions; Nicholas Murray Butler's installation as president of the University in 1904. |
 | |
| Home movie of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert H. Lehman, 1928. | |
Later that year, a neighbor gives me a few videotapes and a reel of film she has saved from a building on campus: animal behavior observations made by a section of the psychology department in the 1980s. They depict various tests: mostly nervous monkeys and pigeons tapping images on a television screen in a particular order. |
She tells me that they were tossing out dozens of films. |
These discoveries got me thinking about the historical presence of motion pictures--films as well as texts, ideas and documents--at Columbia University and its affiliates. |
May 2000, 18 months, 15 archivists, a dozen-plus divisions/departments/archives, nine buildings, four campuses, a handful of professors, hundreds of films and countless pages of documents later: New doors keep opening, and a vast interdisciplinary tradition of motion picture activity around the university--a parallel universe to the Mecca of Movies a continent to the west--is gradually revealed, a world's fair of research, thought and experience rising out of the swamp. It began almost 100 years ago.
 |
Autumn semester, 1916: On 116th Street, in a building now known as Dodge Hall, Frances Patterson teaches her University Extension course on photoplay composition. With an enrollment of 42 students, it is the first course on motion pictures offered at the university. |
Eerily similar, though more profound, her 1922 syllabus returns me to the screenwriting courses I will take more than 70 years later, in the same building, one floor up. Questions from Lesson 1: How does the product of the poet or dramatist differ from that of the cinema composer? From what different angles may a student approach the study of the photoplay? Distinguish between an art and a science. |
 | |
| Greek Games: Rehearsal and Performance. | |
Winter 1935: Dr. Myrtle McGraw, a researcher at Columbia Medical Center's Normal Child Development Clinic, releases her film Development of Reflexive and Adaptive Behavior Patterns in Infants: Johnny and Jimmy; over the next decade, she will produce several dozen more landmark films documenting infant behavior, neurological function and motor response. |
In the summers, she travels to Long Island or upstate New York with her family; they spend time at Southampton Beach and Greenwood Lake. The children skip rope and play ball, and her husband, an engineer, smokes a pipe while sitting in the shade of an apple tree. She shoots it all on her 8-mm. Bell & Howell. |
February 1945: Chief librarian Carl White, back from war duty in Washington, organizes a committee of various faculty members to study the relationship of the university to motion pictures. Over the winter and into spring, the committee will meet several times at the Faculty Lounge. Excerpts from their discussions in March of that year: |
Librarian White: "The librarian looks upon the film as important from at least three
standpoints--as a medium of expression like marble, oil and canvas, or music; as a medium of communication like the newspaper or radio; and a means of record like handwriting or the fossil remains of mesozoic reptiles. The industry has risen as a commercial undertaking. But its strictly commercial character may not on that account prove permanent. It is possible that as time goes on it will assume more of a public service character." |
Dean Calkins, School of Business: "I am not greatly impressed with the importance of the motion picture to the university in terms of our understanding its uses. I cannot avoid the feeling that an industry, which has millions at stake, will learn more about its uses from its own experimentation. It seems to me that one of the greatest interests of the university is in training personnel for the stage and screen. If a project could be formulated for financing a school of dramatic arts, I think it would be admirable. Having a moving picture series on the campus which would exhibit old and recent movies periodically would be advantageous." |
A.P. Coleman, lecturer in East European languages: "We should collect travel films concerning various countries. I am sure films are here to stay, that they ought to find uses in the humanities, as they have, for example, in the teaching of surgery or battle techniques." |
Dean Carmen, Columbia College: "The university is living in the dark ages with
respect to its use of the motion picture." |
Later that spring, the committee sends its proposals and findings to President N.M. Butler. By the end of the year, financing from the industry is withdrawn, and the issue lingers. |
Fifty-four years later, sitting in Rare Books and Manuscripts, I wade through the library office files. The Film Division in which I did my graduate study would never have existed without the committee's investigations. |
|
| |
