New Way of Seeing: Learning to Read Cinema
Roberts-Stanley, Jenica

>>JENICA: Do I just start talking? [Laughing]

>>SPEAKER: Do you want to say your name?

>>JENICA: Alright, my name is Jenica Roberts-Stanley.

>>SPEAKER: And what is your narrative going to be about?

>>JENICA: My narrative is actually about learning to read film and when I started out as an undergrad I was a theater major. There was this class that we were encouraged to take and it was the intro. to film course and it was actually a weed out class for most of the film majors [Laughing] at Wright State. So it was a pretty intense class and I never thought of them in that way and I always just wanted to go and watch movies and I'd always liked it but I had no idea how compressed the language was and that everything happens in the same space. So there was this activity that really kind of drove us home where we had to watch the first couple of minutes of this film and we were told we needed to draw the first, I think it was six frames, and so we were drawing and we all thought we were doing great and most everybody in their sketches got to the end of the two minutes and then the instructor showed it to us again so we would count where the actual frames are. It turned out that it was all of like a second and half but everyone else had expanded so far and it really is a language of compression and of stopping and paying attention and I guess it kind of foregrounded how I thought about language and it's interesting I have that narrative all by myself but every time I teach with film it's interesting because it always gets repeated back to me by my students. So it's like this kind of evolving thing where there's a point in every semester and it's not quite half-way, it's about a little over the quarter of the way through the semester and no matter what class it is and somebody will come in and they'll start chattering and someone else will be nodding and so I come in and was like, "Well, what's going on?" They look up and they say, "You've ruined us." [Laughing] "We can't watch anything and it's just terrible." So the rest of the class comes in and so-and-so's a little concerned and [Laughing] they're like, "Oh no, it happened to me, I can't watch the thing anymore. It's all I'm thinking about, the framing or the camera movements, we're just overwhelmed." And so I'm like, "Ok, we can stop. We don't have to do anything else like that, we'll just watch movies for fun the rest of the semester." And they all kind of think about it for a while and somebody invariably speaks up and says, "No, this is better." And the rest of the class is like, "No, I like this better." So it's interesting because even though it involves this big learning process, it's that once it happens they want to do it more and more and more. So it's a really cool way to think about language and how it develops after and how it kind of snowballs so once it starts you'd be looking at an alphabet and you'd see the letters and understand the meanings and they really stop being symbols. Cinematically there are so many things that just go on and we don't notice them anymore that once they happen it's done and we've taken so much information but when you actually start learning the language you start to see all of these pieces and all of it kind of opens up. So for the students and for me it's like this whole big world opens up when you learn this language and it's a whole new way of seeing. [Laughing]