friday's presentation

My Latin American lit professor had been begging us all week to come to a presentation she had put together with a few NYU Tisch professors. She brought them over here to do this talk about each of their fields and was really excited about the whole thing. Unfortunately, she planned it for a Friday night. I thought it looked interesting so I told her I'd go and volunteered to help at the reception after.

The professors were Fred Ritchen, a prof of photography who does an insane amount of things and I believe was nominated for a Pulitzer, Carol Dysinger, a film prof who does big-name editing, and another prof who teaches drama writing and I feel terrible that I can't remember his name.

The dramatist had some actors read from his latest play, which honestly looked pretty good. It was wry and tongue-in-cheek, but clearly set itself up for some major themes: it seems to be about a girl who tries to make it as an actress in NYC (for real!) but fails and gets home by pretending to be the family member escort of a corpse traveling by train. We only heard the opening two scenes but it looks like she ends up on the run with an escapee from a mental institution. Okay, so that sounds played-out, weird, and unpromising. But I think that's the point; even from what we saw it's always very aware of itself as a drama and purposefully keeps to stereotypes. Then he read from a novel he wrote, two short sections that I guess are stories within the story. They were both a similar wry kind of funny, but had deeper themes without hitting you over the head with them.

Prof Dysinger has been putting together a documentary she has been filming in Afghanistan the past couple of years. She said her aim was to try to simply show what everyday life is like for a typical American soldier in Afghanistan, without having a political agenda. While I think, and she later acknowledged, that it is pretty much impossible to make a piece like that from a "neutral" standpoint, the pieces we saw did concentrate on how things actually work there between the American and Afghan military, rather than anything overtly political. It was a very interesting clip, focused on the interaction between the generals of both nations and their relationships.

The last, Prof Ritchen, was also interesting, and perhaps the only actual example of the "new" media my professor was touting. He did point out, though, that putting photography online (most of his presentation) is hardly a new idea; what makes his projects "new" is the perspective they take on the internet and photography. He showed a handful of sites he's involved with that all try to get to the heart of world issues through photography. These could be ones showcasing photos of the lives of children in Rwanda who do not see themselves as victims but just as children, or one that reveals how highly publicized photos have been altered in the media. His main theme was that with the evolution of photography it is simply too hard to use that medium as a source of truth, as we often do. Pictures don't lie, right? He says they do very easily, and although I'm not entirely convinced by his presentation it was engaging and did make me think.

So after a few hours of that we all retired to the "Grand Salon" to nibble foie gras, crab, vegetables and drink champagne. Not that I got to do much of that I was serving the champagne, but it was nice to be able to talk to the presenters a little about their ideas.