November 20, 2019. KDRU 98.1
TRANSCRIPT:
AG: You're listening to KDRU, 98.1 I’m Ashley Gilland and today I’m here with Dr. Kevin Henderson, Chair of the Languages and Literature Department at Drury University, who is also Director of the Humanities and Arts Film Series at The Moxie. Thank you so much for being here!
KH: Thank you for having me in.
AG: So, I understand that this is the 8th season of the Humanities and Arts Film Series, so, what inspired it and how did it all get started?
KH: First, I’m glad that we’ve kept track that it is the eighth season because the person I started it with who is still the Executive Director of The Moxie is Mike Stevens, and Mike Stevens, on a Saturday that I couldn’t be there to introduce the film, tells me that he said something like “Welcome to our 4th season,” and then we both talked about how quickly it’s gone over the last decade here. But somewhere around 2010 or 2011, Mike and I started talking, and he was already the Director of the Moxie at that time, about different series possibilities, and he’s really in the last decade gone in the direction of series. They have regular run movies, usually independent foreign classic films, that they show every week, really every day. But, there’s an advantage to having packaged series so the people who have a specific interest come for that reason. So anyway, the beginning of all of this, we said, “Well what if we hosted films that maybe have a Humanities theme,” (and then of course you immediately think well every film has some sort of Humanities connection to it), and what if we had colleagues of mine and me host those films and by host, lead a discussion with the audience afterwards, so the audience has just seen the film, they may of course just want to leave the theater, so I guess it was a bit of a gamble, but they may also, because they tend to be films buffs if they’re going to the Moxie, wanna hang out for awhile, maybe for 20 or 30 minutes at the most, you kind of have to read the room, to talk about their reactions to it, but then if you have a faculty member there, that faculty member can either share their kind of Humanities connection to it depending on what their specialty in the Humanities is, Philosophy, Religious Studies, English, Foreign Language, History, and lead and moderate the discussion so that it kind of turns into a classroom situation, really. And we’ve really just had great fortune that people have wanted to stick around afterwards and the people, while they haven’t had much time to process the film, do have a lot to say.
AG: So, obviously there’s a connection to the Humanities and Arts departments - some of the themes from recent years have been Humanities and the Future, and Humanities and Democracy, so, for the audience, what does including “Humanities” in each theme add to it or how does it steer it in a particular direction as they’re viewing it?
KH: That’s a great question, I think one way to answer it may be that, maybe looking at it the other direction, film provides the easiest and fastest way for people to quickly associate themselves with a text, film being the text here, and then be ready to use it for examples to discuss broader themes in the Humanities. The person hosting the film has already hopefully thought through some of the themes, some of the connections they’d like to arrive at with the discussion, but it’s not really lecture-based, so they’re not guiding the discussion in one direction. Then, the audience, based on what they react to, like I say inevitably come back to themes of ethics, or morality, or very complicated moral ambiguity in a film, or the questions and decisions characters wrestle over that films don’t hope to answer in the space of two hours or less so there’s something still for all of us whether we’re part of the discussion or not to take away from the film and wrestle over. So in that way, we use film to be able to talk very quickly about what sometimes you would have to take a full 16-week semester in to gradually arrive at through a series of readings, so it really has kind of served two purposes. It’s also just great for people to show up and see a film they’ve heard about, or a film that’s kind of obscure even in a streaming age, or something that is a classic film that even if they’ve seen it or perhaps even own it, they want to see it in this larger space with 4k digital projection, a greatly enhanced sound system, and so forth, and then maybe to tie that all together, that they want to have some communal experience of film that I certainly hope doesn’t die out in an age where really anything right now we can pull out our phones and probably find, whether we have a lot of streaming services or not, some access to but in isolation on a miniature screen.
AG: So, year to year, what is the process like for selecting themes and what have been some of your favorites?
KH: I have tended to avoid themes, but have wanted to connect with the Humanities and Ethics Center theme years that Dr. Katie Gilbert has developed since she’s been Director of the Humanities and Ethics Center. So initially and probably and for five of those eight seasons, I just like how eclectic the series is where the audience sometimes will find thematic connections and it’s nice to say “oh yeah, we had that in mind,” or since you went to all six films this year, yeah, that’s what we had in mind, and oftentimes we didn’t. This year is a good example in that the fall has been an eclectic series and the films we’re still working to put together and by that, get the licensing for and make sure we can screen and find just the right dates that don’t conflict with other Drury events or other Moxie events are going to connect with this years Humanities theme, Humanities and Water, and so all of the films will have a connection to that that we show this spring.
AG: So, so far this season, there have been two screenings for A Night at the Opera with the Marx Brothers and Frances Ha, so how do you plan to explore the theme further in the spring semester?
KH: That one, like I’m saying, by the spring, there will be water themes, there’s very little water in Frances Ha because she’s landlocked there in lower Manhattan, she does cross over water to get to Paris for one part of the movie. Night at the Opera, it just happened that Dr. Ted Vaggalis, a Philosophy professor and Chair of that department is a lifelong Marx Brothers fan, and so it became clear that if he was going to talk about Philosophy or Ethics, it would probably be in relation to a Marx Brothers film, and A Night at the Opera happens to be one of their most celebrated, probably top 3 for most fans and critics, but one in which they’re on an ocean liner for quite a bit of the time, which kind of feeds the humor and also I guess on a technicality relates to the water theme. The ones in the spring are going to engage the theme in a much more direct way that they won’t just technically have water in them or something like that where we say “Well, it’s got a lake in the background!” But each of them will be examining our probably increasing complicated and limited and problematic relationship to water and water resources and clean water and a changing planet in the 21st century.
AG: What’s it like bringing classical films like a Marx brothers film to a contemporary theater and what’s the audience reception like with that?
KH: I’m really glad that there’s the support for an independently owned arthouse theater like the Moxie in Springfield and really across southwest Missouri. It is the only such theater I know of in the southern half of the state, so we also, we’ve had people come in from Kansas and Oklahoma and, you know, border states and towns, because they don’t have a similar opportunity within an easy radius of where they live. You know, you’d have to go to Kansas City, Columbia, and St. Louis, and St. Louis technically has two arthouse theaters, but that’s not much for the state of Missouri. I say all that because there’s a kind of built in crowd there who really want to see classic films in a theatrical space and with other people in a way that seems normal to me but I’m much older than you, and probably by the next generation, we’ll seem kind of passé and quaint and, why wouldn’t you just stay home on your couch and just look at your phone or your laptop and whatever, so there are a lot of people who just enjoy the experience of seeing a really good print, or a restored print which we’ve often gone with when we’ve had the opportunity, of a film they have at best seen a long time ago in a non-letterbox copy, on a VHS copy of a copy that was all that was available when I was your age, if that was even available. I teach History of Film here, and one thing we look at is how a lot of directors who were that first wave of people that went to film school to become directors, people that went to school in the sixties and early seventies, which would include Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma and Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, pretty much the big names, in American directing at that time - all of them tell these stories about how even though they were at UCLA, NYU, and USC, very well-funded programs to this day, they didn’t have any access to something like Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which now on a lot of lists is like the “Number two greatest film of all time,” or something like that. And it’s kind of amazing to think that there are all these people who’ve always loved films that have no opportunity to, DID not have an opportunity to see them growing up, and only now for the first time are getting to see them in a restored way on a big screen and with other people. And so, the experience has been great, in that the crowds have been in general very strong, and there’s always gonna be a range in terms of how popular or well-known a film is, or how much of a leap of faith someone’s taking to come see it. I know there are a number of films we’ve shown that I had only seen through some kind of rental VHS DVD or now Blu-Ray or something like that, and it’s been really cool to have the experience of seeing it enlarged.
AG: I’m curious how the individual films are chosen - are professors proposing these ideas that they want to host discussions for, or are they more assigned to them?
KH: I really just take requests, so, there are times when I’ve put out a call to, really, everyone in the Humanities and Arts, and I think one year maybe everyone at Drury, because certainly there are, would be film scholars in a lot of different departments, you know, I can certainly name people in the sciences who are really knowledgable of film and would also make great hosts of any of these films. Because there’s been so much interest in recent years, I tend to have about a year and a half to almost two years of potential proposals just given to me in casual conversations, hallway conversations, people shoot me emails, etc. and then from that, I kind of coalesce a list of what I think would be a good eclectic mix or this year what might fit a theme, and then from that, Mike Stevens, because he runs the theater, handles distribution and licensing, and so sometimes it’s come down to people’s first choice just not being available because of the way in which rights sometimes revert to the original filmmakers, and so it’s literally like do you have that filmmaker’s number, or address or email account, and sometimes in very rare cases, and since I already mentioned Francis Ford Coppola, the filmmaker takes back the rights to their films, in his case The Godfather, Apocalypse Now, The French Connection, and many others, and then, I’ll just say can charge a pretty large one-time rental fee. A lot of films can be rented from the studios licensed for one afternoon showing by a theater for about $200-250. Some films that then make it really difficult to screen them one time and even begin to break even are upwards of $750-1000, which is just sort of too pricy for us even if we really love the film and everything. We could show one film a year! Or one film a semester, and hope that everyone makes it for that one showing.
AG: Are there any other specific issues in films that you’d like to explore in the future that haven’t already been explored?
KH: Yeah I think it’s probably pretty endless, and again, I veer more toward it being an eclectic mix and we sort of see what the themes are organically, right, if you put these films together in this order, and some of the same people - and there are people who have attended every single screening! There are some people, they’re Drury connected and Moxie connected and they just are fans of the series and they like to hang out for the discussion. And so, they’re the ones who really have the best vantage of saying, “You know, now that I’ve seen all six films from this year, I think, you know, one big connection, or one idea of Humanity that comes from each of these films is,” and then they can make that connection. I think it’s pretty endless and I think the themes that we tend to gravitate toward within a series or with something like the Humanities and Ethics Center, are broad enough that the theme itself gets you to realize how prevalent it is everywhere, like one year it was Humanities and Power, and it’s hard for me to think of a film that doesn’t, with its character dynamics, somehow explore power or being empowered or feeling powerless. So I think just thinking adjectively like that you could just keep going and going and going with different topics. There’s no shortage of films to show.
AG: What has surprised you most about the film series as it’s evolved over the years?
KH: I was surprised by the times that we sold out the large auditoriums there. The largest auditorium in the Moxie, and there are only two so I should say larger, seats 88 people, and for one showing, and this was back aways, probably 2013, 2014, somewhere in there, and for one showing we had like 135 people show up, and I was surprised because with every film I think, “Oh, well this may be the one where I show up and maybe one other colleague and it’s just the two of us in a theater, and at the end we look at each other and say “Well, maybe it’s run its course, maybe 8 seasons was enough,” maybe, you know, whatever the number is. So I’ve just been glad that there’s been the level of interest there is, and, you know, even if it’s a screening where, say, you know we range quite a bit, but 25 or 30 people show up. It’s great to think that on a, usually it’s always like a beautiful Saturday at 1pm, where we, I’m sure are all tempted to not go see a film, or not go stay inside, or not go to a Humanities event, or whatever, so, just that there’s been enthusiasm for it. The other really specific thing I’d say is that after a screening of Chinatown that I hosted, which, I don’t want to give away too much of Chinatown, and it would’ve been a perfect one for this year with Humanities and Water, part of that film explore the real-life historical backdrop of the population boom and the city-building boom of Los Angeles around the time and leading up to World War II. And, that is a fraught history, to say the least, in that some of the people in power in real-life Los Angeles after the turn of the century used what powerful resources they had to redirect the water supply away from parts of California that quite literally withered and died and became, to this day, drought areas, so that there was hydroelectric power, and so that there was water funneled to what becomes like the largest city in the United States. That’s a long explanation to say that that really informs a lot of the corrupt backdrop of a film called Chinatown. Two people stayed afterwards and, while talking, started crying. They were actually from California, they were traveling across the country visiting relatives, they were certainly aware of Chinatown the film, because it’s just one of those famous Hollywood films. They had stopped in kind of on a whim to see it, and then the discussion afterward, the talk through the politics of that, and talk through the manipulation of ecology and talk through limited water resources, spoke so clearly to what really was more of their parents than them generationally and their grandparents’ experience living in southern California at that same time, that they were viscerally moved, right? They’re crying and talking about it, and that probably is a more profound experience, just as it would be if someone had a really profound emotional experience in a class I was teaching. You’re kind of happy that people are there and have done their reading and show up and want to talk, much less that it’s kind of that immediate and powerful. Film has that effect on people, when it really works.
AG: It sounds like these films have really pulled out the connection between unexpected people. Where can people find more information about the upcoming events?
KH: There’s a Humanities and Ethics website that Dr. Gilbert maintains, we will have posters around, we’ll be old-fashioned and paper-driven about it starting in the spring, there’ll be information on Dorm TV and the DU Calendar, we’ve had pretty good representation with media releases and the News Leader and area print sources, and a few times we’ve even been fortunate to be go on like KY3 and Color Tin and other places just to talk about the series and kind of get the word out more broadly to the community. One I should probably mention first is that the Moxie website is a great place to go because they have all their series including ours and all of their events, you can click forward, not to see what’s opening every week any more than you can every theater, but with series particular you can check their calendar and get their text updates and so forth.
AG: Awesome. Again, thank you so much for being here, this has been Dr. Kevin Henderson, Director of the Humanities and Arts Film Series. I’m Ashley Gilland and you’re listening to KDRU, 98.1.
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