Announcing a new teaching gig: CINEJOURNEYS
I've teamed up with the folks at cinejourneys.com to offer some online film studies courses that YOU can take for a very affordable fee.
If you’ve been reading this blog or following me on social media, you know that I am currently in the process of leaving the sinking ship of academia for…what, exactly, I am not sure yet. Arriving at this decision was extremely difficult, although I will admit deep down I always knew it was only a matter of time. Everyone is troubled by what’s happening to the university right now; how the project of neoliberalism dismantled this core foundation of our civic society, and we fear the uncertain direction for what remains of higher education in our technologically complex society. But at this point in my career I find it more useful to think about the way the collapse of the university doesn’t simply present an employment problem for people like me, but rather, how it challenges us to secure the future of the project of knowledge production and transmission in a society rapidly devolving into reaction and A.I. mysticism, all while paradoxically more information is available at everyone’s fingertips than at any point in the history of humanity.
At the risk of turning this announcement post into an exercise in narcissism, I will just say that I am obsessed with this problem. Against the urge to be sober about one’s employment in a commodified and bureaucratic institution—we are workers, as the return to labor consciousness in the 2010s reminded us—it just is true that teaching is a vocation and one that serves a foundational role for the stability of liberal democratic modern societies. It’s personal to me; after entering the academy in graduate school, coming off a ten-year stint taking random classes at community colleges while working retail and living in a van driving around the country playing music, I had a bit of culture shock. I loved undergrad at Portland State, taking classes with people like me, who didn’t get into fancy private institutions after high school, all having an opportunity to think together. Fuck class differences, this is something that everyone is capable of, as long as they have interest. This ethos made me resist a lot of the professionalization of the academy throughout my graduate studies, which in retrospect was probably to my detriment (but none of those people have jobs either so Fuck It, We Ball). I don’t think any of the above makes me unique, in fact, it’s just what happens when a generation that has wider access to higher ed (good) live in an environment where the productive forces of the economy also more equitably distribute downward mobility (bad).
This is all a long way of saying that my dream was always to get a PhD and then go teach at the kind of institution where I got my undergraduate degrees, peopled by students with full-time jobs in income brackets that reflect what American society is actually like. I got to do that for two years at the very same institution that I was holding as a model! But now here I am, trying to find a way to keep teaching. So while this hopefully won’t be my only foray into online teaching, it’s a first. Thanks for bearing with me, now for the details.
Cinejourneys
I’m very grateful to have teamed up with the Cinejourneys folks just as it is getting off the ground. The project was started by true Movieworld vets, and its instructors include people with wide experience in the film world over the past few decades: critics, academics, writers, DVD commentators (I’m available, distributors!), ranging from experience at places like Criterion, Turner Classic Movies, to academia, podcast, and the festival world.
Click through the website to see how it works. It’s just getting started so the full offerings aren’t up yet, but the idea is pretty simple. Essentially, you sign up for an account with the site (free or pay for perks), and then use that account to sign up for the courses that interest you as they are scheduled, which we instructors—”guides”—design and offer over Zoom, for a one-time fee. Some courses focus on a particular auteur and their body of work, others movements like the Japanese New Wave. I have plenty of ideas for future classes and want to thread the needle between interesting and unique, stuff you can’t get anywhere else, but also foundational and useful as a scholarly endeavor. There are other benefits across the website, such as “Journeys” that are shorter in length and come with your basic account; it’s a really cool program and I encourage you to click around on the main site.
As I experiment further with online pedagogy, I’m trying to brainstorm ways to offer more rigorous academic courses through a more academic institution of some sort. But the goal of my courses at Cinejourneys will be to thread the needle between offerings that interest a wide range of cinephiles and the theoretical and intellectual methods that I think are foundational for any intellectual project. It will still be the me from my writing and posting, but it won’t be like taking a graduate seminar with a huge time commitment. There will not be assigned readings in these courses, but I will have suggested texts for each class meeting that I will be using to build my lesson plans, and you can follow along with links I will provide (elsewhere, because of The Law, so shhhh).
I view this idealistically. In the 1960s and 70s, cinephiles—especially in France but across the world—thought and wrote about cinema in a deeply informed and theoretically engaged manner. Figures of this time included academics—Metz, Bordwell, Wollen—but also critics and artists, really anyone interested in media and culture with a political consciousness (one of the most influential 70s film theorists had a day job as a dentist!). I have a sense that the level of thinking that was being done at this point was far more disciplined and productive than the Rotten Tomatoification of cinephilia online, which gets absorbed into stan/fan culture, misreadings of concepts such as Mulvey’s male gaze, and fear of or even disdain for careful textual analysis. My courses at Cinejourneys will be designed and taught in this spirit, taking all attendees seriously whatever their background, and trusting that they are capable of thinking Big and that I can learn from them too. I believe this is vital for us in our historical moment, and while these courses aren’t going to like, change the world, I hope they are chances to help anyone interested in art have a steadier foundation in intellectual and political history at a time when most discourse on contemporary cinema is generated by Chat GPT.
FILM THEORY - MONDAY NIGHTS STARTING JUNE 16 - JULY 14 @ 8PM - SIGN UP HERE
My first course will run for five weeks, meeting on Monday nights at 8 on Zoom from June 16th-July 14th, and it will be an Introduction to Film Theory. In it we will learn in a rigorous way not only key concepts in film theory—apparatus theory, identification, ideology critique, formalism—but also how such concepts relate to the development of intellectual history, capitalist society, and the project of modernity. In other words, the course is for everyone, and it will teach you important tools from the film theory tradition that will be useful for you however you relate to cinema. In equal measure we will be entering into a much larger debate about the relationship of art to culture and hegemony in late capitalist societies. For all my courses I have designed a little preview of structure you can see on their main page, outlining the trajectory we will be taking. Check out what I’ve got set up for Film Theory, which I’ve structured both chronologically and around key concepts each week—from classical film theory’s focus on ontology and realism to midcentury debates over signification and ideology, studies of spectatorship that range from feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory to phenomenology, film as art (the auteur theory, etc), and finally the questions posed by digital technology’s rise and our return to a monopolized culture industry.
What to expect? Our courses will not be structured as intense seminars, which can lead to performative posturing unhelpful for actual learning, nor derailing ourselves with less useful rabbit holes about this or that aside in the text. Rather, they will be big, open conversations that I will lead, built out of a rigorous lecture each week, and you will have the chance to be a part of the conversation throughout. We will meet once a week (Mondays at 8PM Eastern) over zoom for a few hours, and I will provide screening and reading lists as well as to give anyone interested a chance to develop some kind of material result (advice on an article, check out your work, or even just continued conversation about theory—pose me what you want to get out of it!).
GENRE THEORY - AUGUST-SEPTEMBER - SIGN UP HERE
My second course will be the same thing but focused on Genre Theory, which I understand to not merely be the typification of style but rather a technology for crafting the sensible as societies move forward in time. I’m really excited about both of these courses, but this one in particular will be something I don’t think you can get anywhere else on the open internet. My goal with all of these courses—including the more academically rigorous courses I hope to teach online—is to bring my expertise as a thinker and researcher to you unencumbered by student loans or the scarcity of program admissions.
The last bit I need to mention is the cost. My pricing for these first courses is a flat $65 fee that covers all five weeks and gives you access to materials. To be all neoliberal, this is obviously way cheaper than a college course, and I’m only undercutting them because they don’t give any of us jobs anymore. HOWEVER—for paid subscribers of Histories of the Present, I am offering a discount of $15 per course that will bring the total cost down to $50. If this is successful and I teach more classes, I’ll make this work out to be a better deal for you. But for now, I have tweaked my subscriber benefits to account for this, which you can access for the $5 per month level. You will receive the code via email when you sign up as a paid member of Histories of the Present (if you are already a paid member, shoot me a message for the code). I know that $5 a month doesn’t mathematically add up to big savings on a five-week course that doesn’t even start until June, but I’m also about to start adding more benefits here on my Substack for you to actually feel like you’re contributing to something that provides you a benefit.
Anyway, thanks for bearing with me as I enter the freelance world. I am really hoping to make this stuff work and am brainstorming new ways to (ugh) monetize my skills and I really hope you continue to have interest in what I do and what I can offer. I really appreciate all of you for just reading this blog, before we get into any kind of subscription system. I really hope to see a number of you in my courses this summer.