18 January 2008

So my first week of classes is over! I now have three whole days to do whatever I want.

I’ve flipped my schedule a bit, so now I’m taking video, sculpture, photography, and Italian. I wasn’t given permission to take intermediate drawing, and, since I really wasn’t fond of the beginning drawing teacher, I decided to drop that course. I had to eliminate at least one class or else I’d spend the next three and a half months running around like a chicken with my head cut off. Or some other equally unpleasant image.

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When determining which class would be sleeping with the fishes, sculpture was the only class I absolutely knew I wanted to continue with. For one, the class is wonderfully small, which, after attending Fieldston for the majority of my life, I know is key to a great learning experience.

On Wednesday we took a field trip to an old haunt of Michelangelo’s at 70 Via Ghibellina, a street which happens to have a delightfully confusing numbering system. These small museums are part of what I really love about Italy—what looks like a normal building in Firenze (my photography teacher told us not to call it Florence; he believes you can’t translate names) will wind up being a sanctuary for beautiful old sculptures and art. And because art is so well preserved and in such abundance here, the city doesn’t feel the need to set these places aside as “culture”. Culture isn’t something separate from the everyday. Italians don’t have to go to the Metropolitan to experience the extraordinary because they live the Metropolitan.

Upon our return to the SACI main building, we spent the last two hours continuing work on our first project. All of us had to make a lovely flat slab of clay (as I mentioned in my last entry) upon which we will construct a drawing by Degas, a detail from an Egyptian pot, an Escher-esque scene, etc. Due to my minor obsession with all things French, naturally I chose to make a three-dimensional version of a Degas. After chicken scratching an outline on my slab, I began to pile and shape small amounts of clay to build my dancer. So far everything is going really well (knock on wood), and I’m quite proud of my work. If I get the chance, I’ll take a photo and post it. Of course, I’ve already said I would post multiple pictures that have yet even to be transferred onto my computer, so don’t take my word for it.

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My photography teacher, Jacopo, is easily one of the most interesting people I’ve met in Italy, if not ever. He has such interesting views on local culture, lifestyles, and politics. He can talk for an hour about something totally unrelated to photography, and we’ll listen the entire time, completely spellbound. To paint a picture of his storytelling ability—I’ve tried to type several of them here, but since I can’t even come close to emulating his diction, I’ve decided not to do them injustice by inflicting my own phrasing. Besides, you need to hear his quiet but commanding voice to get the full effect. He’s not unlike Mr. Reyes in that way.

Our first photo assignment, due Tuesday, is to expose one 36-shot roll of black & white film. Jacopo wrote down seven numbers on slips of paper and had us select one out of a box. The number we chose was the bus we’d ride to the last stop, all the while taking photos of fellow passengers, of the view from the window, and of our eventual destination. Firenze has about 40 bus lines. The line I hoped to get was #25, which ends at the cemetery just outside the city. Instead I drew #14. All Jacopo said was that it would take me south.

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Bruno Spinazzola is the real deal. He even gave us all a snazzy business card with the name of his production company on it. He’s Franco-Italian and speaks in an even more stereotypical foreigner-trying-to-speak-English way than Dario. And there’s a girl in video named Silvi, who speaks roughly six languages fluently (I asked her to name them recently, let me see if I can remember them all—Albanian, English, Portuguese, Italian, French, and possibly Spanish, maybe Greek), and who has absolutely no inhibitions about correcting Bruno’s English. Which becomes even funnier when she corrects him and he doesn’t realize she’s correcting him. As you can see, these conversations often occur in a roundabout fashion.

I was skeptical about sticking with video—I’m not really a film person like my sister Woo is, so endless shoots and reshoots generally bore me—but ultimately the eccentricities of the other students in the class and the personality of the teacher swayed me to choose it over drawing. It’s like picking a college—a lot of people ask which school is “better for your major” (again, whatever that means, since so many of those judgments, like grades, are terribly arbitrary). I generally prefer drawing, but if I’m going to spend three months taking a course with either a genuinely interesting teacher or a didactic, uninspiring one, I’ll choose the former any day.

The first homework assignment was to film a sequence. That was due Thursday, but thanks to my previously whirlwind schedule, I’ve been given an extension until the next class on Tuesday. (By the way, if anyone has any ideas for me, I’d be happy to hear them.) While I paddled my boat against the current of time, the rest of my class hopped into a proverbial motorboat and is speeding along without me. (And that, thank you very much, was my horrific attempt to reference one of the greatest passages in all of literature—the last few paragraphs of The Great Gatsby.) And by that, I mean, I have more than one assignment due Tuesday. Why didn’t I just put it like that before?

Our second task is to film and insert more shots into our sequences. Together as a class, we nominated three of the more promising ones to flesh out. The group I’m in is working on a scene in which a stationary camera records a girl’s feet running around getting ready to go out, and while she flies out of the door, she knocks the wonderfully heavy Anna Karenina onto the floor. Which is an oh so subtle way of implying that our ballet-shoe-wearing protagonist is cheating on her husband. By means of augmentation, we filmed the husband coming home and discovering his wife’s infidelity by watching the tape in the camera he planted by their bedroom door.

Since I have little to nothing to offer my group by way of experience, I decided to come up with as many Anna K references as possible to pepper our extended sequence with. My two best (or worst, depending on how you look at it) suggestions were turned down. First I suggested we name the wife Kitty; one of the other group members who hadn’t read the novel thought I was just being hilarious. Sadly, I was not. Then I suggested we have the husband try and fail to kill himself with a homemade black-painted toilet paper gun (an art project which I only came up with after the director asked where we’d get a fake gun from). That idea, surprisingly enough!, was also vetoed. However, my suggestion that the email the husband discovers on the computer say that the two clandestine lovers should meet at the train station was approved. So I figure if we add credits, mine should say “Train Station enthusiast” or “Consultant on all things Anna Karenina”.