George Winston

Although never made, this is the short film that saved my college career. I had been stumbling around Hampshire, trying to find my niche. I took a photography class, to rekindle that fire, but hated it because it was so undisciplined and because the work load was so light. In my high school photography class, we had to produce and matte two finished prints per week, and then spent the last class of the week (Saturday, thanks to Interlochen’s perverse schedule) critiquing the works with the teacher. No holds were barred and no punches spared, and the work got appreciatively better because of it. At Hampshire, because it was so alternative and cautiously inclusive and focused much more on process rather than product, we only had to produce about six prints over the entire semester, and the teacher was so wishy-washy that she never actually criticized anybody’s work. Even the patently awful series of photographs produced by the student who blindfolded herself as she walked around town taking random shots so that she would not impose her imperialistic gaze on the environment and visually oppress it into the constrictive notions of composition was applauded for her efforts.

My advisor was also in the photography department, though he wasn’t my teacher. He was about the most unhelpful, least inspiring advisor a student could have. Because I was accepted so late, and showed up on campus moments before classes began, I was thrown into his advisee group without him knowing it. I spent all of my first meeting with him listening to him whine that he had too many advisees as it was and what the hell was he supposed to do with me and so on. He was always incredibly discouraging whenever I met with him, belittling me and my plans. When I proposed my final project – my Div III – to him, and told him that I wanted to go back to Interlochen for a year and shoot a documentary on their dime and then come back and edit it, he actually said, “That’s not going to happen. Why should they give you any money? Who the hell are you?”.

My other experiences weren’t much more encouraging. I dropped an Optics class because the professor was so unpleasant and so seemingly uninterested in the topic. My drama teacher seemed more interested in trying to seduce his students than he was about teaching us anything. I was just about at the end of my rope when I got into one of the more popular classes on campus, Visual Literacy and Media Criticism.

The class was one of the legendary classes on campus and I had tried to get in the first semester but hadn’t made the lottery cut. However, my name was put on the waiting list, giving me an advantage in the spring semester, and when that finally rolled around, I got in.

It was a fantastic class. We met in a small auditorium with no seats, just wide carpeted steps. It was a groovy idea, but didn’t really work. The steps were too wide to sit against the back of one and have your knees bend over the next one, so you either sat with your knees comfortable but no back support, or with half your back supported and nowhere to put your legs. Good in theory, awkward in practice. Very Hampshire.

The first day, I walked in, took a spot on the floor, and waited silently with the other students for class to begin. There was a still camera on a tripod on one of the steps, hooked up to a flash in an umbrella, pointing at an empty chair that was sitting in the front of the class.

A few minutes after class was supposed to begin (I don’t think any class ever started on time at that school, much to my irritation), the door swung open and a thin, sprightly, bearded man walked in with his bag and notebooks. He set them down on the floor, walked up to the chair in the front of the class, and sat down in it, facing us and the camera. He picked up a wire off the floor next to the chair. It was a cable release for the camera. He said, “My name is Greg Jones,” smiled for the camera, and pushed the cable release. The flash went off and the automatic film winder advanced the next frame of film in the camera. He got off the chair, and joined us on the steps, quietly facing the front of the class. After an uncomfortable moment, somebody got up, sat in the chair, said their name, and took a picture of themselves. Greg busied himself in his notebook, writing down the name of that person. One by one, we all took turns in the seat, saying our name and snapping our photographs.

When we were done, Greg walked to the front of the class and told us that, in the future, we should bring pillows to class, partly to cushion our slim collegiate butts from the hard floor and partly so that if we were tired, we could go off into one of the darker corners and take a nap. During class. He said that some of the worst times he spent in college were in classes in which he spent the whole time desperately trying to stay awake. He knew that if he just crawled off and had a quick fifteen-minute power nap, then he’d feel much better and could concentrate on the rest of the class. But since he couldn’t, he’d spend all of his energy just trying to keep his head from falling over and would miss the entire class because of it. He didn’t want us to have to suffer that way, and he’d rather we go to sleep in his class than struggle to stay awake and be miserable.

Then he told us about the camera experiment. He had started doing it as an interesting way to learn everybody’s name, and as a social experiment – peer pressure in action. But then he noticed an interesting thing. Almost nobody would look at the camera. They’d avert their gaze off to the side and look uncomfortable. If they did look at the camera, it was with a concerned, scowling look. Only once did he ever have a student that faced the camera squarely, gave a big smile, and pushed the shutter button. That student was blind. That started a discussion about pictures and how they steal the soul and being aware of your representation and Visual Literacy was off and running.

Although the course materials were starting to get a little dated (full, as they were, of ads from the ‘70s), the work was fascinating, and each class was completely different from the previous one. We talked about how to read an image or an ad or a movie. We shared stories about how television affected our perception of reality. We explored the ways the media subtly (or not-so-subtly) directed our attention to some things and away from other things. We studied composition and visual coherence. I loved the work and the class and the teacher, it was one of the highpoints of my week. I wanted to get closer to Greg, maybe even get him to be my advisor, but he was an extremely popular teacher on campus, and everybody wanted to work with him.

One of our last assignments was to write up a treatment for a film or video project, storyboard it, and defend our choices. I had been fiddling around with my little portable four-track tape deck, and had added some primitive synthesizer string lines to a George Winston piano piece I always liked. It was short and bittersweet and evocative, and I decided to do my storyboard project using it. I wrote out a treatment for what I ended up calling White on White and handed it in.

This was about the time that my assigned advisor asked me who the hell I thought I was and that there was no way I was going to be able to do my Interlochen project. I made an appointment with Greg, hoping I could cajole him into being on the committee for one of my Divs, not even dreaming he’d consider being my advisor. When I went in to see him, he was so impressed with my treatment and rationale that I had handed in that he had already cleared space on his calendar for me and added a section for me in his advisee notebook. He was hoping to talk me into letting him be on my committee, perhaps even my academic advisor. I was stunned. I told him about my idea for my Div III and he leapt up and started dancing around the room. He said how great it would be and how we’d start working right away on finding funding – perhaps the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be interested – and this is before I produced one second of video on my own. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Here was one of the most popular and highly sought-after professors on campus leaping about and telling me how fantastic I was and how much he hoped I’d let him work with me. I stumbled out of the meeting in a daze. I had a champion, I was going to be alright here. I immediately went over to the photography building and officially told my advisor to fuck off.