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Having recently published two books on the subject, screen studies professor Tim Shary has established himself as a leading authority on the portrayal of young adults in American film. In addition to his research activities, Shary mentors students like Ian Peters who interned at a private archive in Worcester that contains hundreds of original movie posters. |
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Meet the researchers:
Perceptions of a screen
Interview with Professor Tim Shary
While Clark president and psychologist G. Stanley Hall pioneered the study of adolescence, screen studies professor Timothy Shary is fascinated with the portrayal of teens on film. In a recent interview he discussed his interests in film, the nature of film analysis, and a unique archival resource available to Clark students
How did you become interested in studying film, and particularly youth films?
I always wanted to be a teacher. I thought I'd be an art or English teacher at a high school. But I had a couple experiences with film in high school that I've always pointed out as turning points for me. One was the screening of Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush and Lon Chaney's Hunchback of Notre Dame during an arts week held at my high school. Later I asked one of my English teachers if I could write a paper on a film. We were studying self-awareness in literature, but I wanted to incorporate a film, and she was willing to do let me do this. The film, prophetically enough, was The Breakfast Club--a youth film!
In college I discovered that there were people who studied film seriously, and by my junior year realized wanted to become a professor. At Ohio University wrote thesis on the integration of video images into texts, focusing substantially on the work of Atom Egoyan, the Canadian-Armenian director. I was able to meet and interview him
Then I went to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and did my dissertation on youth films. With the exception of one book by David Considine, contemporary youth films hadn't been covered very well, and Considine's book stopped at about 1982. There had been a few other studies of children in film and some studies of horror films, an important teen film subgenre, but I wanted to do a comprehensive study. I knew I would be scoffed at by some people for my choice of topic, and to this day I think I still get an attitude from people in the field when I tell them I study teen films. I think some of the resentment comes from older people who know that the majority of films are made for younger audiences! But I've certainly enjoyed watching most of the films aimed at youth audiences, and as I did my research, I realized how much there was to explore in these films. Since my book has come out, it's given me all sorts of opportunities to connect with students, because these are films that they grew up with and that they appreciat
What kind of relationship do you see between teen film and teen culture?
In my book Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema, I argue that the teen film both reflects and influences youth culture. But I think the heavier emphasis is on the reflection. I think that's because young people are always ahead of what the media is trying to capitalize on
I think that young people are smarter than the media thinks. They're definitely more sexually aware, not to mention more culturally, spiritually and politically aware. And you would think from looking at the teen films that are out there that most teenagers are losing their virginity at really young ages, which is not true (although some are). You'd also think that there are a lot more delinquents than there really are
There are a lot of areas of relevance to young people that filmmakers haven't explored. For example, it's shameful how few films there are about young people dealing with any form of religion and spirituality. Teen pregnancy is another example. There's almost no teen pregnancy in 1990s films, although there's a little bit in the 1980s. From these films, you'd think that teenage pregnancy never happens. All these kids are having sex, but nobody ever gets pregnant? I think that as abortion became more controversial, filmmakers just decided teens wouldn't get pregnant anymore! Also, sexually transmitted disease is almost never mentioned. These omissions concern me. Films seem to tell kids that when they're sexually active, they can just have fun and not worry
What other aspects of film interest you?
My general area of interest is American film and television. I'm glad I'm in a department called screen studies, which includes film, video, digital, and television. There's no doubt that we're moving towards a more digitally based way of receiving images. Even if traditional film disappears, we're still talking about the fundamental ideologies and perceptions of a screen. We're still seeing the evolution of this entire proces
I'm also interested in looking at the history of film and what it tells us. There's still great work being unearthed on very early cinema. One of the books that we used in my class this past year was Eight Hours for What We Will, which is Roy Rosenzweig's study of working class Worcester from 1870-1920. There's an entire chapter on Worcester movie theaters. Rosenzweig looks at all the theaters that were in town, what kind of clientele they served, who owned them, and how they dealt with the change from vaudeville to film
Clark was founded during the time period covered by Rosenzweig's book, and G. Stanley Hall, Clark's pioneer in adolescent psychology, figures into it quite a bit. I always find it ironic that I ended up teaching at Clark, where the study of adolescence was born! And now I'm studying adolescence through imager
Cinema aimed at a youth audience is an example of a film genre. I'm interested in how we study genres, how they form, and how they change over tim
Can you describe some of the major approaches to film analysis?
There are two approaches that I introduce in my intro screen class--the poles of realism and formalism. Realism looks at film as a mechanism that duplicates reality, while formalism looks at film from a more aesthetic perspective. The more you manipulate and experiment with film, the more you're able to be expressive
The formalist approach--the idea that we don't have to represent the world as we see it--has emerged with Modernism in general. The artists of the 1800s began to realize that they didn't have to paint an apple tree as it looked. They began to experiment with more expressive techniques. The same thing happened with film. In the early days there were really very few experimental films as we think of them now. At that time, filmmakers' experimentation was concerned with how to tell stories, how to expose the film, how to manipulate lighting--essentially establishing the norm for film production
You can also approach film from various ideological and sociological perspectives. Examples are race and gender studies, and what's now called queer theory--looking at gay, lesbian, and transgendered peoples in film.
You mentioned the move to digital technology. How much longer do you think traditional film production will be around?
I hate to say it, but actual celluloid probably has only about 10 or 20 years left, at which time it will be relegated to pure art form. There will still be a lot of purists who want to shoot on film, and I know a lot of avant garde filmmakers will still experiment on celluloid, which I think is very vital, and I hope that some company will always be out there making film stock. But we're moving largely into digital. It's not quite as good as film yet, but it's getting there, and it's generally cheaper. The fact that a lot of young people are out there, shooting on small cameras and making little movies and playing them on their home computers I think is wonderful. While I don't teach production any more, I did so at U Mass, and I was very interested in promoting the use of newer technology
What kind of background do you need to study film?
It depends on what you want to do. It's a very interdisciplinary field. For instance, there are people doing film preservation, and it's important that they have a knowledge of film history. But what's more important is having a knowledge of chemistry so you can understand how the chemical properties of film break down and how film can be rebuilt. You also have to understand the physics of light. This type of information is far more important to preservationists than learning how to interpret an image
If students want to study film history, I tell them that they have to learn 20th century history in order to situate the film in a social, political, and economic context. People with an interest in film semiology often have a background in comparative literature or English where they've learned critical theory. People who want to approach film from the perspective of cognition or perception need training in psycholog
Audience research is a field that hasn't been explored much. Most audience research is done by the film studios, and they don't share that information. So the field of audience research has only been tapped by a handful of scholars because it's very quantitatively based. Someone with a film degree who could also incorporate some good statistical and math skills could go far with that. The industry is still very "hit or miss" when it comes to placing their products, which is rather odd considering that films are investment
From the information you provide in your book, it seems to be surprisingly difficult to locate copies of many films.
There's a misconception that everything is out there. It's not. One video store was particularly valuable to me because it had started in the mid-1980s to buy all these cheesy B-grade teen movies, and it kept them on the shelves. Virtually none of the video chains were able to help because all they have are new releases. And DVDs compound the problem. As VHS is being phased out, the studios should be releasing old films onto DVD. If they don't, those films will no longer be available to the publi
Are screen studies undergrads able to pursue their own research?
Absolutely. And we really encourage that for the students who are more advanced. With a lot of our juniors that we recognize as being not only serious but academically proficient, we encourage them to do an honor's thesis. Often they grow out of course projects, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they grow out of a junior year study abroad experience.
A number of our students will do scholarly and production based theses, where they shoot something on video, edit it as a documentary or narrative production, and then do a corresponding analysis either of something related to the content of the film, or a filmmaker of influence who is being paid homage. Probably a little more than half of our honor's theses are scholarly where they're doing an analysis of genre, a certain director or director.
This next year one of our best students, Alex Kupfer '04, is doing an honor's thesis on film preservationist Jacques Ledoux, who had a great role in defining the modern film archive. Alex received a Bickman award*, so he has a really great budget to travel to Europe, and to a few places in the U.S., to interview people who knew Ledoux. He's going to shoot a documentary about Ledoux's influence, and he's writing a paper at the same time. That's really graduate level work in its ambition. It's the kind of work that we encourage in students at that level. Sarah Peddicord 03', who just graduated this spring, is going to the University of Southern California, which has one of the best film programs in the country. I worked with her on a paper that grew out of her internship at the Rotman poster archive.
Worcester resident Steve Rotman '60 has the largest private collection of movie posters, probably in the country. His archive is publicly accessible only through the Internet and contains about 200,000 posters. About four years ago our department struck up a relationship with Steve whereby we were able to have students intern at his collection. They get to handle these priceless artifacts of film history. As part of their internship they have to do a project, and their projects are astonishing. They get to handle genuine archival materials and look at changes in presentation, size, scope, subject matter. It's genuine primary research because these posters are very rare. Some of them are unique and the students are able to go in and study changes over time, changes in theme. The student currently doing the summer internship is a science fiction/horror fan and he's looking a movie monsters. It's been great-a real benefit.
I think Clark's honor's thesis program, combined with the internship programs we offer, really gives undergraduates a great opportunity to immerse themselves in screen studies. Screen studies is a pretty new field and there are only about 12-13 undergraduate film studies programs in New England. Clark has been ahead of its time in that way--our program started in the late 1970s.
Read another interview with Professory Shary.
*The Sara Bickman Music and Arts Summer Internship for Undergraduates provides financial support for summer internships for undergraduate students majoring in the Visual and Performing Arts. Awards are made to students in their junior year for projects to be conducted between their junior and senior years. Applications are made on behalf of students by sponsoring faculty members.
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Additional Resources
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Professor Tim Shary
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A unique resource