Daniel, My Brother

For seven years, my teaching partner Daniel Garcia gave our students chiaroscuro splashes of light, lyrical camera movement, languid story structures. From me, they got disk management strategies, the rule of thirds, equipment calibration procedures. And students benefitted. Our stylistic divergence prepared them for multiple workplaces, modeled for them distinct creative styles.

Daniel’s departure this month leaves me looking for a partner. Not merely someone who will cover the classes Daniel once taught, but another mule to share my yoke. Enough like me to pull in basically the same direction, different enough from me to teach students what I cannot.

One of my fondest memories of Daniel is an argument we had in Chicago. Eating dinner in the city’s theater district, we had a knock-down-drag-out brawl over the potential for creativity in independent and Hollywood cinema. For maybe an hour, we slammed each other with escalating arguments of emotion and logic, anecdote and hyperbole. And it was wonderful. We laughed as hard as we fought. Never once in that whole wrestling match was our friendship threatened. We were undoubtedly impassioned but ultimately safe in our brotherhood.

Neither of us was tenured. One had no power over the other. I was not currying his favorable recommendation. He did not fear my damning vote in some administrative Star Chamber. We were truly peers. Thus the mix of poet and mechanic was more or less equal as we fashioned the Media Production major.

But I hope to be awarded tenure this year. Can Daniel’s replacement possibly tell me the same [sometimes brutal] truth that Daniel was able to?

Teaching as Learning (Again)

Too often I forget that teaching is the best way to learn.

I'm trying to be particularly transparent with a small crew of filmmakers who will be accompanying me on a three-week shoot near New York in January. To that end, I've set up a private blog wherein I'm deconstructing the process of film making. Recently, I wrote about a long shower during which I considered the composition of interview footage and the purpose of a "B" camera. It shouldn't surprise me by now (but it always does) that the act of explaining my ideas gives me even better ideas. As I blogged about the emotional intensity that a "B" camera's extreme close-ups might convey, it occurred to me I might mount the "B" on the jib we're hauling to NYC. I know I'm not the first person to think of putting a "B"camera on a jib. Even so, it might add a rare and distinctive lilt to the footage.

The lonely shower is a fine and reliable an incubator of good ideas. But perhaps it's not the greenhouse. Perhaps the necessary transparency of a master explaining (even justifying) himself to apprentices improves the creative product and process of both.