L-R: Christian Leus, Dominique Silverman, Adam Reece, Connor Newton
It rained nonstop during our October trip to the 2015 New York Film Festival. Rather than seeming dreary, the weather heightened the coziness of Film Society of Lincoln Center’s series of theaters that hosted the festival. We hurried along the wet roads, splashed through puddles, and huddled together under umbrellas as we made our way down the busy city streets. The theaters provided welcome shelter from the pouring rain and blustering wind; we left one world and, for a spell, entered others. For five days we enjoyed the opportunity to view curated films and discuss them over delicious food in this new environment where anything seemed possible.
How did we arrive in this dreamy festival landscape? During the fall semester of 2015, the four of us participated in the Shivley Film Fellows Program at Hendrix College. This project was generously funded by the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship (Hendrix’s Odyssey Program supports students’ engaged learning projects) and headed by our mentor, Dr. Kristi McKim. This multifaceted, tutorial-style program facilitated an intensive study of film and film writing. We met weekly with our professor to read and discuss film writing and to workshop our own pieces. Throughout our project, we produced a blog called Projections @ Hendrix, wherein portions of the following reviews were initially published.
Throughout our semester, two guest writers visited campus: film blogger, curator, and cinephile Girish Shambu and Amherst College Film and Media Studies professor Amelie Hastie offered lectures to our community, shared meetings and meals with our group, and conferenced individually with each of us, such that we could learn from their innovative scholarship and receive outside feedback on our own writing. Shambu taught us, in person and through his book The New Cinephilia, to rethink cinephilia and take advantage of the internet—using everything from Twitter to Facebook to blogs—as a means to connect with other people who love film. Through her Film Quarterly column “The Vulnerable Spectator,” Hastie challenged us to pay attention to our own experiences and emotions, including them as we wrote about the films we saw.
L-R: Christian Leus, Dominique Silverman, Adam Reece, Connor Newton
Following in Hastie’s footsteps, as a group we became fascinated with how to incorporate personal reflection into academic analysis. The following reviews reveal this experimentation. Since we are crafting these pieces months after our trip to NYFF, our recollections are necessarily informed by the personal moments of fascination, joy, or disappointment that have stayed with us. Because of the newness of the films, we were unable to rescreen any of them prior to writing. Although our work may suffer from diminished details, we maintain that their subjective focus reveals what about these films most potently affects us as spectators. We chose to independently author our reviews so as to cover all of the fifteen films we had the pleasure to experience at the festival and to further explore our preserved impressions.
Author Biographies
Christian Leus is a sophomore English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a native of Altheimer, Arkansas. An aspiring film critic, Christian spends her time writing about spectatorial experience and annoying her friends with her opinions.
Connor Newton is a senior English-Film Studies major at Hendrix College and a co-president of the Hendrix Film Society. Connor enjoys the films of Wes Anderson, as well as other films dealing with adolescence, such as Les quatre cents coups by François Truffaut. In the future, Connor plans on working at a brewery in Little Rock, continuing to study films and write on the side.
Adam Reece is a senior at Hendrix College majoring in English-Literary Studies. He recently received the “Kenneth Story Best Senior Thesis Award” for his work on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, and will be graduating with distinction.
Dominique Silverman is a senior English-Film Studies major and gender studies minor at Hendrix College. In addition to film she enjoys podcasts, cross stitching, and working towards dismantling patriarchal structures.
Mentor Biography
Kristi McKim is an Associate Professor of English and Chair of Film Studies at Hendrix College, where she was awarded the Charles S. and Lucile Esmon Shivley Odyssey Professorship, honored as the 2014-15 United Methodist Exemplary Professor, and nominated for the CASE U.S. Professors of the Year Award. Her publications include the books Love in the Time of Cinema (2011) and Cinema as Weather: Stylistic Screens and Atmospheric Change (2013), in addition to pieces in Camera Obscura, Studies in French Cinema, Senses of Cinema, Film International, The Cine-Files, and Film-Philosophy.
Department Overview
Hendrix College offers a major in English with an emphasis in Film Studies and a minor in Film Studies. This growing program within an intimate and rigorous liberal arts college environment includes a variety of courses in the history and theory of film and media, alongside co-curricular experiences (such as this trip to the New York Film Festival) generously made possible through the Hendrix-Odyssey Program. Extracurricular film-related groups include Hendrix Film Society and Hendrix Filmmakers.
