June
8
Gilmore Pays Tribute to UCLA Dean Rosen
On May 29, before UCLA professor Bob Rosen stepped down as film and TV dean --he'll be replaced by Loyola Marymount Film and TV dean Teri Schwartz-- Geoff Gilmore (who worked at UCLA and Sundance and is now chief creative officer at Tribeca Enterprises) paid heartfelt tribute to his long-time mentor. Rosen will continue to teach such popular courses as Navigating a Narrative World, on which he partners with Peter Guber. I audited the semester's last class: I never thought a real estate mall developer like Peter Lowy could be so compelling. I got hold of Gilmore's speech, which is a moving testimony to the power of a great teacher:
[Photo: Geoff Gilmore, Bob Rosen, Felicia D. Henderson, Peter Guber]Bob Rosen is tonight being celebrated as a leader, an innovator, an archivist, an educator, perhaps even someone whose career demarcates an end of truly selfless pioneer in the arenas of film preservation and education. But for me personally, he’ll always be my most significant teacher, my mentor and a man who literally taught me how to think. I first met Bob as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. I was sleeping in the student lounge during the month of August. (This was 1970) After about a week a roommate of his, a housemate, rescued me and brought me back to Elfreth’s Alley, the oldest continuously lived on street in America, by the way, where this long haired fountain of energy and ideas was living on the top floor. He offered me, after extended conversation and wine, a place to stay for a few days. It was easier to do in that era… and thus began my education. It was a multi-faceted education. It was academic, it was political. It was a worldly education, and especially an intellectual education. And so over the years at Penn and at UCLA, I took courses with Bob. I became his T.A., I was his work-study student (I was awful). I was his employee at the Archive and, as an adjunct lecturer, a professor in the department he led. And all along the way, I learned from him. His perspective was always original. He would teach not the classics, so to speak, or the required texts, or for that matter the accepted wisdom or predominating theories of the day. He would instead teach you a way of understanding history, or culture, or politics, or social behavior, or the historical social function of cinema (for he always was a historian in the broadest context), and he gave you tools or, frankly, insight. And he did it his way. He taught for decades in the various universities he inhabited without ever finishing the degrees that he should have and without ever publishing what he should have. He did anything but follow a tried and true career path. He taught us and was allowed to be a faculty member, because he was truly a remarkable teacher and an original and at times an absolutely brilliant mind. He was for many, an inspiration. Now all this talk about originality, about his insight and the theorized perceptiveness, you may ask what we are talking about. Well, if you’ve seen the films and you heard his analysis: for instance, “Kiss Me Deadly” and his argument about gender knowledge; “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and McCarthyism; and “Birth of A Nation” and Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Party. And don’t let us forget About “Pinnochio” and the whale’s jaws as the mythological vagina dentate. And his formulations about genre: the struggle with the Western individual and his community; the struggle with the Horror individual and instinct and repression; the detective film individual and his struggle with the search for knowledge. And on and on and on. His work was not film for a reflection of the social or history. No, it is history. It is the social. It is what he has been working on his whole life, narrative. Reality is defined by narrative. I don’t want to sound too abstruse. I’ll stop here. I do not know what I’m most sorry about: That this new generation won’t have the opportunity to study with him and to learn from him as I did. Or, if I am even more sorry that I no longer have that opportunity. Teachers have always existed with a mixed stature in America. They sometimes command respect, are given awards but are rarely offered the compensation or rewards they deserve. Bob was to me first and foremost a teacher. And in this tribute to him, I want to thank him for being mine and so many others’ teacher. You have left us an invaluable legacy and gift.
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