Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

that we drove to the nearest town to see a movie, I didn’t like to hear my
parents discussing the movie on the way home, as I wanted to remain in
that dream state as long as I could.
Your family had to struggle in the Depression?
We were very poor but I was so young perhaps I didn’t feel it really. We
always had enough to eat.
That’s happening again today with families. Where did you go to
primary school?
In the town center of Columbia Station, Ohio; for 12 years I was at school
there.
Do you have memories of those times? Do you still have friends in
your home town?
No, I have no contacts from those days. No contacts at all. My class was very
small; at graduation there were 18. People were with me probably for the
whole 12 years, and I think all of them stayed there. I was the one who left.
I no longer have any family there.
And college?
Marietta College, on the banks of the Ohio River, where I met my future
husband, Bill Bowser, and after that the University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, where we (my husband and I) attended graduate school. I have a few
contacts from those days, but most have died by now.
I understand that you studied English and Art.
Yes. In college, it was English major and then Art minor. When I got to
graduate school, it was the reverse: Art History major and English minor,
at Chapel Hill.
I learned that you did your Master’s thesis on the paintings of
Tintoretto.
Yes, the ones in the Scuola di San Rocco. I did it without actually visiting
those paintings in Venice (I did so several times in later years), but the
particular thesis was probably easier to do from photographs because I
could arrange them on a table (instead of lying on my back on the floor
of the Scuola while tourists walked around my head) and examine the
relations of movement among them. And that was the subject of my thesis.
I suppose that all of your sensitivity to images comes from there,
even if you had it already with you.
I think that art history was a good training for film history. And there was of
course no film history training in those days; no film courses at all. It wasn’t
really until very recently that I realized what was significant about the
Tintoretto study in my career. It was the fact that it was all about movement
within the paintings and from one painting to the next. That surely has a
relationship to the film medium.
And when did movies become the center of your professional
attention?
I wanted to work in an art museum, and after we finished our studies in
Chapel Hill we came back to New York and I applied at every art museum in
town. The first one which had an opening for me was MoMA, and for about
a year and a half I worked at half-time jobs in different departments around
26 Journal of Film Preservation / 81 / 2009