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spectator
Interview with Jessica Levin, Modern Culture and Media ‘96
By Leah Michaels, MCM Senior, Track 1
Leah Michaels: Can you tell me about the experiences
that you had in MCM?
Jessica Levin: My work in MCM as a Modern
Culture and Media concentrator (’96) was
focused on film production and theory, theories
of subjectivity and narrative (specifically on cities
and memory), genre film, gender, and technology
as areas in which to make provocative media. I had
come to Brown looking for a cutting-edge place for
self-directed work, and MCM was a great place for
that, with such luminary professors and mentors
as Michael Silverman, Mary Anne Doane, Nancy
Armstrong, Roger Mayer, Duncan Smith, Tony
Cokes and Brian Goldberg.
LM: What are some of your most memorable moments
in MCM?
JL: My first really formative film theory class
was Michael Silverman’s seminar on Film & The
Uncanny. It spoke directly, in a theoretical way,
to concepts which preoccupied me in the films/
videos I was making then and over 15 years later,
I continue to pursue projects which reflect a
haunted and destabilized way of looking at history
and subjectivity.
Later, I T.A.’ed a course on American Independent
Film with Michael Silverman. I had taken a year’s
leave from Brown to work in New York in film
production where I encountered many of the
films and filmmakers who dominated the ’90
independent film scene (Todd Haynes, Tom
Kalin, Mary Harron, Lodge Kerrigan, Cindy
Sherman, Chris Munch—many of those films were
produced by MCM alum Christine Vachon.) It
was great to return to Brown to look at these films
in an academic context full of smart students and
to invite some of these directors as guest speakers.
Besides being engaged in an exciting contemporary
film “movement,” we were tracking the influence of
deconstruction, gender/queer theory, etc. on hot
films of the moment.
I also did various Independent Studies and Group
Independent Study Projects (GISPs—not sure
if they still exist.) Those were amazing ways to
pursue topics of individual interest under the
guidance of our best professors. I did a GISP with
Michael Silverman on Eastern European Cinema,
and then another on Walter Benjamin and Cities.
I also helped form a video collective as a GISP
under Tony Cokes, which was (at least for me)
partly intended as a send-up of video art practice,
although we ended up making a couple of serious
pieces.
This will make me sound ancient, but Brian
Goldberg did a great class called Discourse
Networks (following Kittler and Deleuze/Guattari)
about technology, in which we used HTML 2.0
and had a pipe dream of someday utilizing video
on the web as an alternative distribution channel.
[v1 - p31]
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