Scott,
For the autodidact as well as the academic there is in your text much
to appreciate.
The territory I meant to point to with the word revelatory,
a "making known of previously unknown or secret information",
strangely had little relation to the sexual dynamics of the story
or a critique of institutional power.
That part seemed relatively commonplace to me.
What was truly marvelous in my mind was the way
your "weave of voices" allowed for a non-hierarchical unfolding,
a mirror to the machinations and minutiae of the extraordinary milieu
at Harpur College,
giving all participants equal weight in defining
the intellectual life they cultivated and inhabited together.
(Tribal affiliations much more than a teacher / student dichotomy is
what I got from the book.)
The cultural / historical moment you give voice to must be considered as
one of the grand educational experiments,
akin to A.S. Neill's SUMMERHILL.
Now we can understand how, for a moment in time the circumscriptive
norm of Academia was loosed
thereby letting a major Hollywood director hard on his luck and an
anarchistic film artist
whose academic resume consisted solely of the fact that he studied
briefly with the painter Hans Hoffman
conspire along with a "Yale educated English professor lecturing on
the Odyssey"
to foment young people to THINK, to disassemble and reassemble
familiar forms ( film )
in new and utterly unexpected ways.
Therein is a text "beset by ideas"
with
"avenues to explore I wouldn't have known about otherwise."
Thank you for explicating in your inimitable way this great adventure,
David
On Jan 3, 2016, at 10:32 AM, Scott MacDonald wrote:
Chuck is correct about the title. "Binghamton Babylon" was (in part)
meant to be a lure. My personal goal (aside from documenting what
for me, and I think for our field, was a crucial time and place) was
to do a book with some scholarly value that reads like a novel. I
wanted the title to suggest that my book might be fun to read.
But also I was alluding to Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon, in two
ways: first, I wanted to suggest the obvious: that whatever has come
out of Hollywood is not the whole of cinema, that certain smaller
places have also been exciting scenes that produced important films
and videos; and second, I was alluding to the fact that Anger's book
opens with several pictorial allusions to the Babylon section of
Griffith's Intolerance where Babylon is portrayed as a great
civilization, for a time a relatively humane urban center of
cultural production.
The issue of power in American academe is complex. At every college
I've taught, I've understood that fraternizing sexually with
undergraduates is grounds for dismissal of faculty. But I've taught
mostly at small colleges. In major universities with graduate
departments issues of power seem somewhat different (since faculty
do have power over individual students, though graduate students are
generally older and so the power relations in these cases are not so
different from those in the nonacademic working world). Art schools
seem to be different too--though I've not had the opportunity to
teach in those circumstances.
One of the new dimensions of small-college academe in the 1970s was
the institution of anonymous student evaluations of professors. In
the institutions where I've taught, these soon became and have
remained very important in promotion and tenure decisions. Students
suddenly had a kind of power over their professors that was never
the case in earlier decades. I was, and am, a proponent of these
student evals--partly because they provide information that helps us
fine-tune our teaching. But they also are evidence that students are
not powerless as they were in earlier generations.
Ultimately, though, Binghamton Babylon is meant to raise the issue
of whether the tradition of in loco parentis is healthy for creative
growth.
Scott
On Sat, Jan 2, 2016 at 6:40 PM, Chuck Kleinhans <[email protected]
> wrote:
I stand corrected on the matter of only one person refusing to be
interviewed; I had not completed the book when I wrote.
I think Scott is the best historian and critic of the North American
avant garde cinema, and his study of institutions in a series of
essential books is groundbreaking for giving us all a richer
understanding of history and aesthetics woven together. But, you
gotta admit that calling the book “Binghamton Babylon” does invite a
certain kind of reading.
One question I have is how do we understand the interpersonal
relations within of the organizations we have? Especially given
that there is a level of insider knowledge that spans from gossip to
legend? You can say that’s private, or personal, or not anyone
else’s business, but we also know institutional histories and
individual artist careers often change due to who is/was sleeping
with who.
The other question I have is while we might hope "that the men and
women in the Cinema Department were adults, equal to their teachers
as human beings,” in point of fact the faculty had a lot more power:
giving grades, privileges, scholarships and other financial aid,
recommendation letters, etc. That power differential is exactly
what is at stake in the current flurry of activity in the US around
issues of sexual relations, sexual assault, discimination, and so
forth in higher education referencing Title iX in particular.
Certainly since the early 1960s, women artists have had quite a lot
to say about "the expectation that they were equals sexually as well
as politically.” And most of it doesn’t flatter men with power.
(People outside the US who aren’t familiar with the complications of
Title IX and want to know more could start with two essays by Laura
Kipnis : "Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe," and “My Title IX
Inquisition.” (@laurakipnis.com)
Chuck
On Jan 2, 2016, at 5:19 AM, [email protected] wrote:
Dear Chuck et al,
The late-Sixties-early-Seventies were (of course) an unusual and
complex moment. From our perspective now, some of what went on back
then (at Binghamton and in other places--think of the legendary
nude faculty-student get-together at the San Francisco Art
Institute!) can seem outrageous--and perhaps to some extent was
outrageous, as certain "Voices" in the "Weave" of Binghamton
Babylon make evident.
But it is also true that that generation of students certainly saw
themselves as adults and expected to be taken seriously as adults.
As various other "Voices" make clear, this included the expectation
that they were equals sexually as well as politically. Even Nixon
understood that if 18-and 19-year old young men were expected to
put their lives in jeopardy in Vietnam--or put their freedom in
jeopardy by refusing to serve in the military--then, 18-19-20-year
olds should be able to drink a beer, and by extension function as
full and equal adults in other ways as well.
The assumption that the men and women in the Cinema Department were
adults, equal to their teachers as human beings (if not yet as
accomplished intellectuals or artists), seems fully a part of the
energy of that department at that moment and part of what allowed
the Cinema Department to have powerful long-range effects.
Only one person refused to be interviewed for Binghamton Babylon. I
was unable to track down a number of other folks whose input I had
hoped for.
Scott
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Frameworks] Noteworthy Publications This Year?
From: Chuck Kleinhans <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, December 30, 2015 12:41 pm
To: Experimental Film Discussion List
<[email protected]>
On Dec 29, 2015, at 6:15 PM, David Baker <[email protected]> wrote:
Scott MacDonald's revelatory,
BINGHAMTON BABYLON: VOICES FROM THE CINEMA DEPARTMENT 1967-1977
Among the “revelations” are many references to (male) faculty
having sexual encounters with (usually female) students, and other
hanky-panky, in addition to drug and alcohol use/abuse. It seems
to me this is the first real discussion of these sorts of events in
the experimental film world. (well, historians have sometimes
touched on this for the distant past, but most of the people here
are still around).
I wonder how both people of that generation and the Millennial
generation take these details. A hidden history? More of the same-
old, same-old? Really dangerous under Title IX today (US law
giving women equal access to education)?
MacDonald mentions that a fair number of people did not want to be
interviewed, and there are very few women who are quoted.
Reluctant to drag up old baggage?
It’s interesting that for all the “taboo breaking” poses of the
avant garde, sexual politics of personal relations within the
community are seldom discussed (with an exception for some gay
filmmakers).
Chuck Kleinhans
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