Film Professor Elegy...
I just learned that one of my favorite college professors,
Roland C Jones, has died.
For over thirty years he had been an English professor at
Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado but one of his passions was film so he began to teach a couple film history classes.
Back in the late 1980's when I attended the school I was a history major but I loved film so much that I used to sneak in and monitor his class. Then in my final year I needed a few credits to 'officially' graduate so I chose his 'Introduction to Film' class. Everyone wanted to take the class and it was completely full with a waiting list but – knowing my passion for film – he let me in. (Later he recommended me for the Telluride Film Festival student program, for which I will always be grateful).
Roland attended every one of the 30
Telluride Film Festivals and each year we would try to meet-up at the park in the center of Telluride - with some of the other Fort Lewis students who had been in the program - and talk about the latest movies, the latest cinematic trends and what we thought of the festival. But time was always too short and like all festivals we were always on the go. I only saw him twice in the last four years.
The Class
While Roland certainly taught a good chunk of the standard film canon (yes, he showed the film
Rashomon) he also championed many films and filmmakers that don't usually get highlighted in film studies classes. Privately he had reservations about
Citizen Kane but loved the early John Waters films. He once asked me if I thought that
Citizen Kane was really that good of a film.
Of note, Roland chose silent comedian Harold Lloyd over both Chaplin or Keaton. He also loved the enigmas that were in Antonioni's
Blow Up. But the film he really championed was Kenneth Anger's
Scorpio Rising a 45-minute underground film classic made in 1963. Roland had managed to get the actual film print from Anger after bugging him for years to get it. Anger finally relented and gave a print to Roland and to this day Fort Lewis College has one of the few prints of the film [I don’t think UCLA officially has a print]. Roland was proud of this fact to such an extent that he would show the film to us twice in a row.
If you've ever seen
Scorpio Rising you can understand how radical this is. The film is primarily about members of a biker gang getting ready for an initiation. But it is the formal aspects that make the film so good. It consists of 13 provocative and humorous scenes accompanied by 13 rock songs from the period. The film simultaneously embraces and warns us about the dangers of group mentality – from the occult to Nazism to Christianity. In Anger's world one should be wary of all even though they may seem appealing.
In many ways the film was a precursor to music videos and was a notable influence on the way that Martin Scorsese used music in his early movies. It's a challenging film that in time has become one of my favorites.
Roland seemed to get a kick out of showing a film that would occasionally bothered and offend some students. I can remember him telling a few upset students that since they were younger than him they should be more open minded to radical cinema. I would sit back and laugh.
In the 1990's he told me that he had even gone to a more radical extreme by showing
Derek Jarman's Blue, which is a 77-minute film consisting of only a blue screen and a voice-over by Jarman about his blindness from AIDS and impending death. Roland told me that the class didn't warm up to the film too much but he felt it was important to show it since it really pushed the envelope of cinema.
Roland also was a big supporter of the New Wave films, which started in 1960 with the
Nouvelle Vague movement in France, lead by such directors as Jean Luc Godard (
Breathless), Francois Truffaut (
The 400 Blows), Resnais (
Hiroshima, mon amour) et al which in turn influenced Hollywood's most radical (some say best) period with such films as
Bonnie and Clyde and
Easy Rider.
Roland also advocated his own idea of 'new wave' by making a list of 10 things that make a film a new wave including, 'the film must have non-traditional heroes, the film must be anti-establishment, the film must have a precarious ending, etc'. He felt that all of these aspects spoke to the contemporary world we lived in and he was always on the lookout for current films that displayed these aspects.
The books we used in the class were Gerald Mast's
A Short History of the Movies and Stanley Solomon's
The Film Idea, which has one of the best analysis' of the film
Rashomon. Two books I still consult on occassion.
I'll miss the chats I had with Roland up in Telluride. I'm sorry we could not have had a few more conversations about the present state of film. Our tastes were quite different but I always enjoyed his unique take on film and what he considered important and vital as well as just trashy and fun.
He will be missed but the films he taught won't soon be forgotten. I hope some of the other students remember him and think a little about what they experienced and learned in his classes.
