February
8, 2002
Film
Studies Scholar Robin Blaetz: Exploring the Language of Imagery
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FRED LEBLANC
Robin
Blaetz
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Would Hollywood create
a movie about Joan of Arc that would bolster support for the current
war against terrorism? Visiting Associate Professor of Film Studies
Robin Blaetz thinks the answer is probably yes. Analyzing cultural
references to Joan of Arc, including every film about Joan of
Arc made or distributed in the United States, Mount Holyoke’s
first full-time film studies scholar argues in Visions of the
Maid: Joan of Arc in American Film and Culture (University Press
of Virginia, 2001) that the history and mythology of the fifteenth-century
French heroine has been used for 500 years to send all sorts of
social and political messages, especially during war time.
Blaetz argues that
filmmakers called upon Joan of Arc during and after World War
II, for example, first to recruit women to the war effort and,
later, to encourage them to abandon wartime jobs and return to
the home front as traditional wives and mothers. “Women had
to realize that while their efforts were temporarily necessary
during the war, these new tasks were not meant to replace the
duties of wife and mother,” writes Blaetz, describing the
female personas held up in advertisements, cartoons, posters,
and films of the 1940s and 1950s, a period of concern over changing
gender roles. The traditional Joan of Arc, a short-lived war hero
who sacrificed herself at the stake, was appropriate for this
task, writes Blaetz, “because the freedom attained through
a job had to be envisioned as temporary.”
Blaetz calls her analysis
of Joan of Arc in culture a “close reading” of the kinds
of imagery that she believes to be this century’s dominant
text. “We live in an image culture,” says Blaetz, meaning
a culture dominated not by printed messages but by visual messages
conveyed through television shows, movies, videos, commercials,
gameboys, Xboxes, advertisements, and billboards. “There
is a language being used to send those messages we’re seeing.
If you’ve never learned to read it, you’ll be manipulated
by it,” she warns.
Whether they’re
taking Introduction to Film, History of Film, or a course in avant-garde
films or documentaries, Blaetz’s students learn the language
of imagery, a language built on a vocabulary of light, arrangement
of objects, sound, camera angles, editing patterns, set design,
costume, and music. “Everyone interprets the images of film,”
Blaetz says. “Everyone hears their messages and experiences
the feelings they evoke, but few can tell you how or why the images
are so seductive and magical.” Blaetz’s film courses
take students behind the curtain to reveal the magician’s
tricks. “You’ve ruined it for me,” is the compliment
Blaetz loves to hear from students no longer able to watch and
experience a film without really seeing it.
Currently in her first
year of a three-year appointment, Blaetz is enthusiastic about
expanding the program of film studies for Mount Holyoke and the
Five Colleges, which do not currently offer a film studies major.
“People love film,” says Blaetz. “They’re
so excited about the matter, the topic at hand, that they’re
willing to work at learning its forms and developing critical
opinions about it.” High enrollments in Blaetz’s classes
seem to prove her point. Blaetz is delighted by the students who
are enrolling. “Students are extremely serious and attentive
here at Mount Holyoke. They are really present and listening.
There are always hands shooting up!” says Blaetz, who can
compare her MHC students with nearly twenty years worth of students
at New York University, Adelphi University, George Washington
University, and Emory University.
It’s an attentiveness
and excitement Blaetz clearly recalls from her own past. She was
working as an au pair in Paris after graduating from Ohio University’s
Honors College, where a tutorial system allowed her to focus on
the writings of Virginia Woolf while also exploring dance, theater,
French, and other interests. Free for much of each day in Paris,
Blaetz spent many hours watching French films; it was just a pastime
until she saw the work of French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard. “This
is it! This is the language of my time,” she thought. Immediate
and complex, Goddard’s films combined everything Blaetz loved—narrative,
visual effects, movement, theater, and philosophy. She immediately
abandoned plans to study comparative literature and applied to
New York University, where she focused on experimental, documentary,
and European films. She completed her degree in 1989 with a dissertation
on narrative technique, using all the films ever made about Joan
of Arc, including her favorite film, Robert Bresson’s 1962
Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc.
When she’s not
writing about Joan of Arc, teaching, or watching film shoots in
Los Angeles with her husband, a Hollywood production designer,
Blaetz is focused on experimental films, her favorite genre. The
avant-garde is challenging; it uses images in unusual ways and,
unlike Hollywood films, favors visual imagery over narrative,
Blaetz admits, but its films “stay with you,” she says,
and are often “more about understanding than information.”
She is currently working on a broad anthology of feminist avant-garde
filmmakers of the 1960s through the 1980s; and she hopes that
by teaching how to approach and “read” the language
of the avant-garde, the book will help people move beyond the
melodramas of the 1940s and enter a more exciting period and genre
of feminist filmmaking. It was the avant-garde filmmaking of the
1970s that brought film to the university as a serious subject
of study, Blaetz has argued, and if she has her way, the vocabulary
of the avant-garde and of all filmmaking could some day be as
basic as that of English 101.
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