Dr. Caligari

Hey!

So, this last week of classes positively defined liberal arts education for me. I went to my Film Music class where we talked about silent movies and the music in them, how music works in a film - does it aid the plot, does it give signs that the rest of a scene doesn't give, is it superfluous or necessary, is it as important as the dialogue, why does the composer use specific instruments, etc. Then, in the next Film Music lecture, we had woman visiting from a local orchestra (called the Club Foot Orchestra) who has done lots of composing work for silent films, from cartoons to more serious films, plus some work with dancers, etc.

In between those two classes, I had one Film lecture during which we talked about silent film and whether music was indeed necessary for film - I never thought about it before. I assumed silent films HAD to have music. Not the case! (In fact, one of the original reasons that there was music was because the old projectors in movie houses were so loud the audience couldn't stand the click-clacking noise, and they needed something to cover it up. But the music that was played didn't always fit the feature - they were live musicians with their own desires - played what they felt like in front of the screen for a bit and eventually got up and left when they felt like it! Often in the middle of the film! Not really what I picture when I think about the early days of cinema...) We also talked about a documentary called The Bronze Screen which is about representations of Hispanic people in Hollywood films (through many eras - the dumb, dangerous bandit, the lawless folks from below the border - women with loose morals, fiery tempered men with twitchy trigger fingers -- all the way to the Latin Lover era ((after too many South American theaters boycotted films that used the tired stereotypes)), then things lapsed back into old habits and they became the villains of Mehico again. But then, near WWII, we wanted to be friends with our neighbors in a serious way, so the government encouraged Hollywood to be much more nice about those folks south of the border, and that's when American audiences came to know the Latin Lovers once again but all in a land of beautiful escapist glory, ruffled dresses, music every night, men dancing with roses in their teeth and women who knew what they wanted and could seduce you with their dark eyes.)

After that class, I went to my "Race, Sexuality and the State" class where we're mostly still on the Race part - and all of the information I had gained from the documentary came zooming back into my mind. After that, my second Film class of the week happened where we watched The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari - a silent film from 1919 with a score composed and performed by The Club Foot Orchestra. !!!

I have to ramble about Caligari a bit just because I was so blown away by the film. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, actually) is a prime example of German Expressionism. Expressionism is a trend that was also present in the other arts  - a movement to not necessarily portray the world as it really is in paintings, photographs, etc. Expressionism brought in the idea that the artist's vision could alter reality, that things could look maybe strange or unreal because it was one person's perception of reality that was being shown. The first people to ever bring this style into cinema were German, which is why the movement is called German Expressionism. In Caligari, the Expressionist trends are marvelously clear - everything was shot on an indoor set with geometrically shaped furniture, actors had incredibly dark eye makeup and faces that were painted white to emphasize the difference in the shades, shadows were painted on the set instead of being caused by real light because the creators wanted them to be a certain way - a cleric of the state in the movie is placed on a chair that holds him five feet above the ground to represent his position in comparison to those around him, etc. It is the first example of a horror film and first film credited with having a twist ending. I won't ruin it though it's hard not to, but boy, go watch it. Please. (it's on instant view on Netflix!)

Now, for someone of my generation, one of the most intriguing things was when the movie started and I saw such images as:

I felt myself getting the chills in a familiar way - all of us students were looking around, unsure. We started whispering to one another -- "Doesn't that -- doesn't it look like a Tim Burton film???" The professor heard us, smiled and said "Yes, Tim Burton. That man has made his life from German Expressionism!"

To have that film in front of us and that kind of stylistic intensity, plot twisting and just damn creepiness was incredible. So far, so good with these class choices this semester.

A look at Mills

 

Above, a shot looking down from the hill where the dining hall is, and below looking at the dining hall itself.

 Farther down the hill from the dining hall, looking towards the rest of campus.

 Classic California beauty - dry-weather trees and bright sunshine. :)

 A look across Toyon Meadow, in the center of campus. To the left is Adam's Plaza, where our café, college bookstore, and post office are located.

 A look down the steep path leading into campus from my dorm - this was taken last night at about 9:30, when I was coming back from film class.

Two Important Things

1.) Listening to Holst's The Planets while drinking my coffee and doing some reading for class at 8:00 is a great way to start the day. I feel like everything I do is massively important with this score. :)

2.) Thanks to film class yesterday, I learned the word "somnambulist". More on that later!

A few noteworthy things!

1) In Trader Joe's last week (fantastic alternative earthy-crunchy fun grocery store, if you don't know it) with Erin, we stopped in an aisle as we heard the loudspeaker say "Excuse me-- um, if you left your dog parked outside, it just got loose, so... go find your dog. Thank you."

2) The sign on the outside of the film room last night:

 Our super fancy computer labs IN EACH DORM. That computer screen is the size of four of my heads. Head. Just- wow!

 Aaaand - the huge course reader! Also, my hair is long enough to put in a ponytail now. :)

Survived the first week (albeit not a full one)

Thanks to the scheduling system here at Mills (which is exactly the same in this respect to that of my high school), or semester starts with a three day week (beginning on a Wednesday), followed by a four day week (because of Labor Day) and then, after we've warmed up our studying muscles, we get a five day week.  Since we started on a Wednesday and today is Wednesday, I have had all of my classes more than once so far and feel a bit more like I'm in the semester. In fact, I feel quite assimilated into student life. I'm chilling in the first floor computer lab while waiting to move my laundry over in the room down the hall. How much more student-y can you get?

I wanted to check in once again. I think the culture shock is wearing off a bit and the student workload shock cycle is going to do the same, though since it started after the culture shock one, it'll end a bit later. I'm at the point now where I got everything done for that first week and have turned it all in -- and all of a sudden, it's time to do it all again! It's like a treadmill. A treadmill of libraries, papers, pens, professors and tantalizing free time you could use for studying.

But I'm not whining. This is what I do, isn't it? At the age of 21, I have spent more than three quarters of my life in school. Yes, I went to school in exotic places and in between there were summer vacations, but essentially, all I have ever done is be a student. And the adult world never tires of telling the youth that these are the best years of our lives, so I'm ready to enjoy my senior year. Even with the homework.

It was without a doubt a fantastic decision to not take the computer science class. I am now thrilled to have wound up in both Stylistic History of Cinema and Film Music in the same semester. Coincidences are amazing things. Yesterday, in contrast to the first day of music class, yesterday we watched clips from a few movies (M, The Passenger, Carrie, Forever Amber) and had to identify just what the music did for the movie in those scenes. Was it "just" background noise, was it advancing the plot, was it mimicking the plot, etc. Then, in the evening, I had my History of Cinema class - last week, when I had the class, we only watched a film and since the first class wasn't required, the professor didn't talk to us much. He saved his introduction to the course for last night.

OH. MY. GOODNESS. A very dorky part of my brain is in love with this professor's way of thinking, talking, and being. To give you a picture, he's a man in his (probably) mid-sixties who ALWAYS wears tight blue jeans, hawaiian button-down shirts, cowboy boots and (a new development this year) has shoulder-length wavy silvery hair. As we affectionately call it, Jesus hair. He has been teaching for at least 35 years at various different colleges and my class will be the last one he ever teaches. He's going into retirement and has revamped one of his previously lower-division classes (for those of you who don't know, that means it's a class intended to be okay for first-years to take, though it's not restricted to first years) as an upper-division one. That's our class.

Two nights a week, we have a three hour class with this man. The class is 9 people. And he's just fine with that. He has a hilarious way of talking that is hard to convey if you've never heard it. It's sort of that he wants to convey a piece of information but doesn't feel satisfied unless he gives you every detail about it, even if that means that a 5-minute explanation takes twenty. He is telling us about a film that a certain director directed which was done after that director's most successful film - which incidentally was called XXX and produced in the year YYY and made famous the actress ZZZ for her role as QQQ. Etc. Hilarious. He also says things like "With my hearing problems ((he's exaggerating), memory problems and... and just general dementia, this is gonna be a fun semester." He also says it all with a Texan accent.

But this all is just making him sound like a strange old man from Texas who can't seem to stay on topic, but that's only a small fraction of his character. The thing that is so endearing is how much he does for his students. He has made available to us the syllabus from each of the courses he has taught here along with his lecture notes from all of them. Every film we watch in class is available in the library but just in case it happens to be checked out of the library, he has them all in his office and we can borrow them from him. We all get a hard-copy of his lecture notes, exam review sheets, and other articles that he's written or collected about the films we're going to see -- all bound together in book form, something that would normally cost at least 30-50 $ (I know, having worked in a college bookstore) and he gets it all compiled and printed and bound himself and delivers it to us personally for free.

Add on top of all of that the fact that he is delivering information about film to us students that we've never heard before - understanding how the complex machinery came around, the debate about whether or not film would every BE art, --- and he says those fantastic things that you hear in your life that are SO obvious but you have NEVER thought about them. For example, no other art form is so intrinsically tied to technology. No other art form forces artists to be so collaborative (you can't be a master actor, director, producer, choreographer, screenwriter, cameraman, editor, sound mixer, composer, and movie theater owner). And, since it was not considered to be something worth saving or something that would ever really be art, 90% of all films that were made around the world before 1950 are gone.  You sit in his classroom and hear his passion as he talks about films, and all of a sudden, you want to simultaneously and immediately adopt him as a grandfather, sleep with your course reader under your pillow, and study film for the rest of your life.

There are few professors who can do that in one lecture. To be fair, it did take him three hours, but man, I had fun.  With that, I think I'll go move my laundry to the dryer!

*Sigh of relief*

I finally decided not to take that Java class this semester and making that decision relieved me more than I ever expected. Now I can concentrate on the rest of my classes and actually start coming up with a plan for the full semester instead of assuming the first four weeks would be full of five upper-division courses with a huge workload (three math assignments per week, 100 pages of reading per week in one class, only about fifty in another one but for that, the reading takes at least twice as long, two writing assignments per week, peer tutoring for Abstract Algebra and Real Analysis, etc.). I can have a plan and I can breathe and it feels AWESOME.

Also, I started taking a photo shoot of the campus last night so that I could show all of you what it really looks like here, but the light wasn't exactly optimal, so I'll have to take a few more pictures today in the sunshine (if it gets sunny) and then I'll post them here. :)

Also, I found a bike lock so I can zoom around campus on my bike again. And my coffee was delicious this morning. It's just a damn good day, apparently. :)

A few pictures from Santa Cruz and a few thoughts.

I realized I hadn't posted these few pictures from Santa Cruz yet, so here they are:

 

My iPhone has a camera on both sides, so I was trying to take a picture of something happening in front of me and ended up with this one, which I actually kind of like!

The first day after I got here, I went to Rockridge (an area right near where Oakland blends into Berkeley) with my friend Erin. Among other things, we visited the amazing and fantastically expensive store Market Hall, where they sell more delicious looking things than you could imagine. Everything from goat to duck to raspberry maple syrup, handmade gluten free pasta, and of course - what I was interested - so much amazing cheese! Needless to say, I didn't buy any, but I took a picture of it. :)

I also have to post here this picture below. Erin, one of my closest friends, gave me an incredible birthday present: earrings that are guitar picks with MATH written all over them! Take a closer look! :D :D :D

Now, I have two other thoughts that I wanted to write here. Number 1: I notice now (and I feel like I'm getting older as I say it) that since I'm living in a dorm room again, I sit on the floor a lot more than I used to back in the days of apartment life. My knees are noticing it!

Number 2: I was freaking out a bit the few days that I've been back here, feeling like I won't be able to keep up with my German with no one around here to speak it with. Then, thanks to some help from C, I had an idea - I still am obsessed with listening to audiobooks when I run or exercise but I have some issues with listening to books that were written in English in German - it just feels odd, if I could read the book in its original language (like Lord of the Rings, etc.). However, there are LOTS of books that I cannot read in their original language - such as Smilla's Sense of Snow (Fräulein Smillas Gespür für Schnee) and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Verblendung). For those books, I might as well listen to them in German - and so far, it's been lots of fun! Especially today in the relatively hot sun it was great to be hearing about piles of snow in a tiny town north of Stockholm...

However, far too soon, I'll be done with those books and will need something else. I'll be on the lookout for more!