Campus Productions is the student chapter of the Research Film Studio that grew out of an extracurricular filmmaking workshop co-taught by the award-winning director, Bence Fliegauf and Princeton professor, Erika Kiss in the fall of 2019.
Woodrow Wilson was the most prominent intellectual of the white supremacist culture war waged against equal rights for Afro-Americans. Wilson propagated a falsified history of the Civil War and Reconstruction. He also glorified the Ku Klux Klan as the legitimate ruler of the South. As President, Wilson reshaped the federal government to reflect the general will of the Southern whites to dominate Afro-Americans and unleashed a state propaganda machine to change public opinion in the North that hitherto rejected white supremacy.
On the presidential campaign trail, Wilson made the promise to William Monroe Trotter, founder of the Equal Rights League, that, as President, he would uphold the law that granted equal rights to Afro-American citizens. Trotter then organized the black vote for Wilson, despite the latter being the candidate of the Democratic Party. Trotter first went to the White House in 1913 to remind the president of his promise of equality and freedom for Afro-Americans. Wilson made yet another empty promise to look into the complaint about segregation of the federal government, pretending that he had no knowledge of it.
Our first short film is a reenactment of the third meeting between Trotter and Wilson, as documented by official White House transcripts. Trotter this time sets a mousetrap for Wilson and actually catches the conscience of the king.
Our research-filmmaking method, in which artistic imagination is guided by disciplined scholarship, is best suited for the exploration of the cunningly covered-up, under-documented, falsified and disremembered history of the American people. In addition, the cinematic reenactment of Trotter’s successful outing of Wilson as the political force behind the legalization of segregation could be cathartic if screened on the Princeton campus.
Prince’ Noir, or, Tales from the Campus is a short film based on three actual events that took place on the Princeton campus involving black students during the time when Woodrow Wilson (then known as Tommy) was an undergraduate. Two of these stories can be found in the ‘Princeton Slavery Project‘ website and one in Barksdale Maynard’s Wilson biography. The film will retell these tales from pluralistic points of view creating suspense and some confusion. One of the stories, however, positively uplifting. When five Southern students presented James McCosh with the ultimatum that either they leave Princeton or he expels his black student from his psychology class, President McCosh answered that “they would have to go, for under no circumstances would he exclude the Negro from his class so long as he wanted to attend.” Prince’ Noir is a campus film – nothing can prevent us starting production in the fall. We have several award-winning directors lined up to advise us on Zoom.
In the interface of environmental and film studies, this multidisciplinary course investigates the phenomenology of home in relation to the environment and a the civilizational (both cultural and technological) paradigms of colonizing versus nomadic homemaking through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.
The research filmmaking exercises provide the students with concrete immersive experiences on which might form their choices for future research, augment the students’ experience and provide the highest level of assisted learning. Cognitive competence for quantum thinking can be educated by finding new strategies of representation and expression via 360-degree, immersive filmmaking from an environmental perspective in a radical break with the classic single fixed-point of view and tangible-object fetishism habitual to the mind. Making quantum research films enable students to use their imagination counterintuitively, so that the mind can adjust to the extreme conditions of quantum systems of non-tangible relationality and to non-directional spatial-temporal conceptions.
This course surveys a hidden canon of African American film while also uncovers the roots of representational injustice in Hollywood and the secret, but cardinal role Woodrow Wilson played in the production and distribution of Griffith’s “The Birth of a Nation” that led to the rebirth of the KKK. Wilson’s policy of segregation was adapted by Hollywood as a self-censoring industry regulation of representation. Black people could only appear on screen as subservient and marginal characters, never as equals, partners or leaders. This industry code, Wilson’s legacy, has become second nature to Hollywood.
ArtHouse Memes from Zora Neal Hurston to Jordan Peele
Work in progress for the Venice Art Biennale 2023
