When We Were Fuddy-Duddy but Thought We Were Futurists
By Dominique Paul Noth
Today it may sound quaint that the new UWM film major in the 1970s emphasized 8 mm handheld cameras, personalized storytelling, guerilla street shots, freezes, cuts, sudden closeups and rack focus techniques. No less a film maker than Francis Ford Coppola – he’s an early example of a film student who changed Hollywood -- forecast back then that the 8 mm adolescents next door would soon dominate the industry.
Such were the predictions. The new UWM film studies program under Richard Blau was making driver’s license basics central in order to demystify film for college students. The emphasis was not on what Hollywood had done but what you can do with this easy-to-acquire equipment. (I have lost touch with Richard, but his photography studies are intriguing, and he is still listed as professor emeritus at the UWM Peck School of Arts.)
I must confess that as I write this account in 2025, the feeling that keeps overtaking me is how dumb we were. We thought we were on the technological edge in teaching sophistication. I sure thought my hours in research to teach film would be something to crow about decades into the future, as opposed to apologizing for how much time I spent on stuff that now can be found on everybody’s cell phone.
I spent hours – days! -- putting together info that now is within a computer click. Few of us, even those considered technologically advanced, recognized how rapidly the novice computer world would morph into a basic component of US living.
Back then, the first generation of college film students were entering the industry and universities were pressured to keep up. Without actually realizing it, my Monday night offerings at the Union Cinema, looked very similar to the foreign, independent and documentary films booked into the cinema by a student organization, the YSV Film Society, if I recall the name right.
That emphasis 50 years ago was a learning curve to knock Hollywood dreams out of the heads of budding film students -- to force them to make film a normal tool to look at themselves and life around them. There were academic, social and visceral reasons for this approach and I certainly don’t want to minimize them.
But face it: innovators then just underestimated how fast the world was moving. The beloved new-fangled CD was doomed. Film itself looks old-fashioned given the digital computer-generated methods making celluloid antique.
Today entire films can be shot and edited on IPhones, the cuts and camera movements looking as smooth as if Hollywood had laid tracks for a dolly shot. Visit any university or even high school today – they’re way past 8-millimeter.
Back in the 1970s, I was sharply aware that in the rest of the faculty’s eyes, Hollywood was me. Dean Robert W. Corrigan encouraged what became my runaway offshoot – using old movies and audience reaction to explore social ideas and how artists work (something like how studios sneak-previewed their own projects).
It wasn’t just cobbling together John Ford, Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock (the three biggest name directors in the outpouring of books on the auteur theory). It was also about the role commercial film played in social development.
I became the biggest draw film class because I had commandeered the UWM Union’s cinema on Monday nights and, with the help of their technicians, rented 16 mm versions of old movies (sometimes we could show the 35 mm version). I added selected sections from those films for discussion, driving the projection booth student crazy by marking which segments of the old celluloid to revisit.
How naïve we were, so proud of our stop-and-look capability, explaining how the rented version of Cinemascope films was usually TV influenced, so they cut off the images on the corners and added their own scans within the screening.
I usually opened the class with a short lecture on the inside history of the movie – info rare then but commonplace today on the Internet.
I was proud that after a film we could have a question-and-answer session that would show excerpts from the film to make a point. That’s something colleges now routinely do.
The films and their practitioners were the guinea pigs. Did Hollywood movies spur or slow US entry into WWII? Were the escapist musicals of the 1930s also a way to fight the Depression?
I reached back to examine film makers bending the studio system to their desires, while also watching the box office. But it wasn’t the usual suspects I was picking. I deliberately deepened the auteur thinking into the power of collaboration.
What seems laughable today is the tedious time-consuming preparation. I spent days laying the groundwork to change topics and subjects every semester, personalizing the info for some 200 students with the general public free to occupy the remaining seats.
Remember, there was no Google or central pool of film data. On my own I assembled an extraordinarily deep collection of industry film books and cast selections, meticulously listing and dittoing the entire cast and credits for each film. Today all this information is available at a click on your computer.
Google didn’t get going until 1998 and information centers for films like imdb or Wikipedia didn’t exist. If anything, today’s Google is even more complicated than the Google search 20 years ago. It has added Artificial Intelligence, which sometimes makes searches more complicated, more confusing if you don’t understand the deep information, more jumbled if you don’t word your search carefully.
Outtakes? One of my classes was much amused when a local film buff (he booked films for a local movie theater) supplied us with the outtakes from “My Man Godfrey” and other films of the 1930s, with stars cussing or fumbling lines. Again, today this is commonplace. Those particular outtakes now occupy multiple sites on the web.
Back then, it was important for UWM that I didn’t cross lines of purpose, but inevitably I did. There were intersections with my TV work and often students wanted to chat not about an old film but my current movie review.
The popularity of my course, and the fact that the contents changed every semester, invaded the drawing power of the other film courses. I thought I was dovetailing by encouraging students to look at films from the past not for their star quality but for the force of vision – and just who were the visionaries. Some were more enthusiastic about doing that than shooting their own footage.
There was a danger here – and still is. People at the university kept trying to make my approach to films an echo of particular theories out there. Especially academic theories as both the university in Milwaukee and the one in Madison sought intellectual basis for expanded film courses.
The auteur theory – one man or woman in charge despite all that studio interference – remained the most popular concept. Other academic theories or study systems wandered further away from “who was in charge” discussion into examining what was before us, as if everything was on purpose or everything was an accident. Semiotics studies invaded UWM, focusing on the signs and symbols within a movie, intended or not.
The danger of theorizing was to neglect the contributions of others and the economic pressures that could also drive decisions. I made that point vigorously, citing producers, composers, directors of photography, film editors and others with specific contributions, sometimes extending to many films. Even today I have trouble getting people to appreciate screenwriter Frank Nugent for his influence on John Ford. Or composer Bernard Herrmann’s influence on Hitchcock.
I pointed out the reasons beyond paycheck why the same actors worked again and again with Ford and how there were films he and Hawks made for the paycheck but were quietly twisting to their concepts – or failing to twist. I discussed the individuality and the group-think in films that explored the spiritual world, the Americana world, the slum world.
Only now, some 60 years after the auteur theory took hold and created enormous debates among many famous critics (Andrew Sarris, Pauline Kael, Milwaukee-born Richard Schickel – all friends incidentally as well as colleagues), do we recognize what was true and what was exaggerated.
But all had ideas that shaped our interest, to which we added our own visions. The auteur theorists may seem quaint today, but their passions and insights still affect how films are seen and judged.