Wake Forest Magazine, September 2004 - Past Issues - Wake ...

“Actually, the decision was surprisingly
easy,” says Brunette, who
holds a joint appointment in the
art and communication departments.
“I had been looking for a
change for the past five years or
so, and Wake Forest was ideal.
First of all, I was really attracted
by the students; they seemed so
enthusiastic and focused academically.
There was this apparent
emphasis on delivering value to
> By David Fyten
them; teaching seemed so important.
Also, there was a real sense
of intellectual community among
the faculty. A problem we always
had to fight at George Mason was
that everybody on the faculty lived
thirty or forty miles from everybody
else; I’m looking forward to
Wake Forest’s sense of close-knit
smallness.
“I was attracted by the sheer
interest in film studies here, from
the dean and provost on down to
the freshmen, and everybody in
between,” he says. “I’m also excited
about all the connections in
Winston-Salem—Films on Fourth,
the School of the Arts, the [River
Run International] film festival—
and I’m look forward to developing
those even further.”
Like fresh film stock for the
movie director, enthusiasm and
interest present a blank palette to
Brunette the teaching artist. “In
the past, I’ve found the course
I’m teaching this fall [“Survey of
International Cinema”] to be almost
life-changing for some students,”
he observes. “They’re smart,
they’re engaged, but they haven’t
really been exposed to the classics
of world cinema, or to other cultures,
for that matter. And they are
blown away by what they see.”
But to describe Brunette as a
cultural elitist would be grossly
inaccurate. “I don’t believe in
approaching film studies from a
purely art-film perspective,” he
points out. “We have to start where
[the students] are. They are watching
Hollywood films, and we must
respect that. Our task is to help
them see in a more critical light
the beauties of the Hollywood
movies that are good and to equip
them with the critical skills to understand
the ideologies promulgated
by the more nefarious ones. It is
important that we work at both
ends [of the cinematic spectrum].”
Brunette, who in the belief that
movies are meant to be seen on
the big screen hopes to establish a
regular series of independent and
foreign films in 35mm on campus,
says film is an excellent subject of
study at a liberal arts school like
Wake Forest because it encompasses
all disciplines in the arts
and humanities and also demands
critical thinking and writing.
“The obvious connection is with
theater because people are acting
and saying dialogue,” notes Brunette,
whose wife, Lynne Johnson, is an
art historian and will teach halftime
at Wake Forest. “On the other
hand, with psychologically probing
close-ups, which you really can’t
do in theater, some people say film
is more akin to the novel. Still
others, for the obvious visual reasons,
think it is closer to painting.
There is music, of course. And
movies depict history. Often when
I write reviews, I engage questions
of historical interpretation, political
science, and international
affairs. Film requires close reading,
and my students have to write
closely argued papers that rely on
them having ascertained the meaning
of the textual particulars of
what they’ve seen.”
But when the credits roll and
the curtains close on the subject of
what is film, Brunette says it is
more than the sum of its parts. It
is an art form in itself, and should
be taught as such.
“In the past, it was novels like
Joyce’s Ulysses, or visual art like
Serrano’s Piss Christ or the photographs
of Robert Mapplethorpe,
that roiled the culture,” he notes.
“Today, it is a film—Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ. Film is
the dominant cultural form of our
time. This is where it is.”
P R O F I L E
SEPTEMBER 2004 35