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Ray Carney's Mailbag -- This section of the site contains letters written to Prof. Carney by students and artists, announcements of news, events, and screenings, and miscellaneous observations about life and art by Ray Carney. Letters and notices submitted by readers are in black. Prof. Carney's responses, observations, and recommendations are in blue. Note that Prof. Carney receives many more letters and announcements than he can possibly include on the site. The material on these pages has been selected as being that which will be the most interesting, inspiring, useful, or informative to site readers. Click on the first page (via the links at the top or bottom of the page) to read an explanation of this material, why it is being posted, and how this relatively small selection was made from among the tens of thousands of messages Prof. Carney has received.

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RAY CARNEY HAS RECEIVED HUNDREDS OF RESPONSES -- FROM ARTISTS, STUDENTS, AND FORMER STUDENTS -- TO THE POSTINGS ON THE BOTTOM OF THE PREVIOUS MAILBAG PAGE AND THE THREATS TO CENSOR OR TAKE DOWN THIS WEB SITE. SOME OF THEM WILL BE POSTED IN THE NEXT FEW WEEKS. IN THE MEANTIME, THE MAILBAG POSTINGS RESUME ON THE NEXT PAGE (MAILBAG PAGE 103). THEY TOO WILL BE GRADUALLY ADDED TO OVER THE COURSE OF THE NEXT FEW WEEKS.

A note from Ray Carney: Jon Jost, for those who have been dead to the art of film for the past forty years, is one of America's greatest and most influential artists. He and his work are a national treasure. He wrote the following letter to the the university when he heard about the issues in my department that are described in part on the preceding Mailbag page. As he notes, he taught a course at Boston University two years ago, and his letter is thus based on first-hand experience with the way film is taught at Boston University. He also alludes to a letter-writing campaign against me and my work which, I gather, some of his former BU students told him about. I had no knowledge of it at the point his letter was written in March 2008, but have since been told about it by several students and have my own mention of it at the bottom of the boxed material on Mailbag page 101. See item 3 in the "Summer 2008 Update." -- R.C.

Two years ago I did a 10 day workshop at the invitation of one of the faculty, Robert Arnold, at the Communications Department of your University. This was a very successful workshop, regarding which I will include comments of the students - comments required by the faculty who had invited me. I am recently informed of a major fracas in this department involving Professor Ray Carney. I've been informed of some rather dubious and ugly things about this.

During my stay I was a bit dismayed, if not genuinely surprised, to find that aside from the person who invited me none of the other faculty, aside from Carney, showed the slightest interest in meeting me, seeing the resultant films of the participants in the workshop, or having any other interaction with a visiting guest. Rather there was a fraudulently cordial frostiness, which might be translated as something along the line of "we wish the hell you were not here."

I have done many workshops over the decades, quite a few set in academic surroundings. Sadly what occurred at Boston University was not so different than I have experienced elsewhere, and I presume for the same reasons. I am a very experienced, rather well known, film and video-maker whose works show regularly in major film festivals, and have been subject of retrospectives at MoMA, and other such settings, such as the Harvard Archive, around the globe. [If you wish Google my name or check www.jon-jost.com.] I've made over 30 feature films, more shorts than I can remember and video installations. I've had Guggenheim and DAAD and many other grants, awards, etc. People have written silly things such as that they perceive me as one of the most important filmmakers in America, or in the world. (I don't believe such things.) However, my experience is that most academic media departments are full of persons who fit the cliché about the creative arts worlds : "those who can, do; those who can't, teach." And in general they are scared to death of a real filmmaker or artist who will inadvertently show that the academic emperors are naked. So they stay away when such a danger enters their midst.

While at BU I noted the industry-commercial oriented slant of its program, that it still teaches "film" - to say celluloid - production (which in my view is more or less immoral at this stage as film will soon be totally obsolete and impossible to work with), and other things indicative of what the students I had wrote and told me when I was there - that the teaching procedures and processes are stupid and dysfunctional, that what is taught is dull and fails to inspire, and so on and on. I don't doubt it is so. Just as I don't doubt that the incoming students are sold a bill of goods that their time at BU will for sure result in getting a job when if 10% ever find work in the media industry they'll be very lucky.

Ray Carney runs a website - a very effective and popular one that draws thousands of visitors from around the world, and provides a rich stimulus for students and filmmakers, encouraging young aspiring film and video makers to be creative, to work if necessary with almost nothing, and to take the rules and conventions of the industry with a grain of salt. I have met many young filmmakers who have been inspired and learned an enormous amount through Ray's site and through him. I can't, honestly, say I met others who did likewise with any of the other faculty at the BU Communications Department.

On his site, and in his courses, and in his writing far afield from BU, Ray writes honestly about the rigors of filmmaking as a creative endeavor, and as well of the fraudulent glamour and hype that seems endemic to the media world. And he writes honestly about whether going to film schools, as most of them are organized in America (and I can testify, elsewhere), is worth it - and he concludes that for many students it may not be. In my view he is more than correct: most film schools are a waste of time and money for the students. But they are a handy gravy trough for "those who can't". While making this accurate critique Professor Carney also offers a vision of how to improve film teaching and film study in our universities, how to make film school less like a "trade school" and more like the rest of what properly should be happening in a university. He wants to make the study of film more intellectual and philosophical. He wants it to deal with important ethical and social issues. He wants to restore intellectual content to it. This does not exclude teaching the practice of filmmaking, but gives it a social and moral foundation to stand on. That members of his department regard his vision, as articulated on his web site, as anathema, and want to remove the entire web site from the university server, says much more about them than it does about him. It tells me how mired they are in a non-intellectual approach to the art, an approach which more properly belongs in a trade school or business school than a university.

I understand - through students there - that faculty at the Film and Television Dept. have asked students there to write "complaints" to the Department Dean, or perhaps even to you, about Ray Carney's website. And I am told from him that of late his life has been made a kind of hell thanks to the faculty and Dean of the Department, which rather than sitting down and thinking seriously about what they are doing, why, and how - and what it does or does not really do for the students - have instead reacted defensively and are hounding Professor Carney for daring to think differently than they do, and for daring to tell some, from their viewpoint, unpleasant truths. From my observation when there, and the comments of the students I had (who were quite familiar with the school), Ray Carney is dead on in his criticisms. Rather than attack him for his views, the faculty should sit down and have a long, deep discussion with themselves about what is wrong with what they are doing. And if they are incapable of doing this, then you, as President of Boston University, should tell them to do so, and have some outside party monitor the process since they evidently lack the self-honesty to carry out such a auto-examination themselves.

It would serve the students, who after all are the reason for the department, far better to have such an analysis made - perhaps by outside parties experienced in both the filmmaking world, commercial and artistic, as well as in the teaching world, and to revamp the methods, intentions and processes of the curricula so that Professor Carney's critique was not so transparently correct. If it were not so accurate, the utterly virulent behavior of the faculty would hardly be warranted. I suspect behind it all is a mixture of petty jealousy (do any of them have websites getting hundreds of hits per day, animated by comments and correspondence from around the world?) and fear for their jobs. The latter, from what I observed, might be warranted: in the manner in which they carefully avoided contact with me when I was there, it was clear they had no interest in anything that might disrupt their cloistered world, especially if it represented a kind of danger - someone who actually makes films and can quickly show students how to tap into their talents and do so themselves.

At the conclusion of the workshop which I did, starting with a rather mixed group of participants that ranged from total novices who'd never used a camera, to graduate and undergraduate students of the Dept of Communications from BU who'd studied for 2 or more years, we screened about 90 minutes of filmmaking they had done under my guidance in those 10 days. Mr. Arnold told me that he hadn't expected that anything would actually be made in the workshop, and he was surprised at both the quality and quantity of what was done. So were the students, but they were pleasantly and joyously surprised at what they could do if some actually expected it of them, and helped to guide them to it. And they made clear, those who were studying at BU, that the University hadn't done so in the time they'd been there.

The purpose of a University is to provide an education, to open young people to the broad horizons of the world and of their own potential. It is not to con them into spending money to learn technical things appropriate to a trade school and tell them they will get a job in the film business when the statistics in this regard are grim. It is clear that in the Department of Film and Television at BU the former does not occur and the latter does. The ugliness which has confronted Professor Carney makes clear that the department is in effect morally corrupt and has only the self perpetuation of the faculties jobs at interest, and not the best interests of the students.

I sincerely suggest, in the interests of bettering Boston University, that you make a formal inquiry into the harassment which Professor Carney has been subjected to, and that you have a full investigation and study into just how the Department of Film and Television is organized and whether the curricula it provides actually fulfills the best interests of the student's education.

Sincerely

Jon Jost

Jon Jost
Professor, Graduate School of Communication and Arts
Yonsei University
Seoul, Korea
www.jon-jost.com

Jost's letter is useful because it understands that the only important issue that this squabble is about is how to improve film teaching and study in our universities. This is what most of the site is about, and those sections of the site were the ones that were objected to by my colleagues -- vehemently objected to, with shouts and accusations and personal attacks and ridicule directed at me personally at department meetings for having dared to post these ideas. For those who are not familiar with the site, I would emphasize that when this program of attacking and defaming me began in the fall of 2007, there was not a single personal criticism of my colleagues, by name or any other form of identification, posted by me on the entire site -- not in the much-objected to "Auto Mechanics" piece, nor in the Mailbag pages, nor on any of the other site pages. What my colleagues objected to, abused me personally for posting, and demanded that the site be taken down for saying, were statements of ideas on how to improve film study, suggestions that film production courses should be structured to be less like learning a trade or a craft and more like learning an art. I dared to suggest that there should be less focus on technical issues and more study of the history of the art form, more thought given to the philosophy and aesthetics and purposes of the art -- more "liberal education" in the classic sense of the term. That was what they objected to on the site.

Jost correctly notes that their refusal to enter into any form of dialogue about these ideas, their immediate, passionate, knee-jerk demand that the entire site be censored and suppressed, taken down as a result of the presence of these ideas says a lot about what is going on in their courses and their minds. Their response paradoxically confirms, in the worst way, the very things I was suggesting about the limitations of a merely technical approach to film study.

The following open letter to the film department faculty was written to Chairman Charles Merzbacher by a former graduate student in the Department of Film and Television who is now a teacher and scholar in the profession. He corroborates what I said above in the note following Jon Jost's letter, namely that the site does not criticize, defame, or slander any faculty member, and that the actions taken by the department faculty can only be construed as an attempt to suppress and censor ideas which they either don't understand or with which they disagree. So much for academic freedom of thought and expression. -- R.C.

To the full-time faculty of the Department of Film and Television:

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to express my concern about the action you are taking against Ray Carney and his website. Frankly I am at a loss. To those of you that I know personally, I cannot imagine why you would be a party to this motion either as a penman or a signatory. I wonder how you fail to see that by passing such a motion you are strengthening a great many of Dr. Carney's criticisms. I would add that, as a graduate of the Graduate Film Studies program, I cannot say that Dr. Carney casts in a "false light," as your statement has it, his colleagues, the department or the student body. Moreover, I am uncertain about what sorts of legal objection you would have even if he did. Is it illegal to have unpopular ideas? But you can follow that train of thought on Dr. Carney's website.

For my part I believe it is sufficient to say that I find your charges again Carney to be trumped up at best. I plugged into the search engine on the website every signatory's name. I found one reference to Charles Merzbacher made by a student in the letters section. I find a couple references to Dr. Grundmann made by students in the letters section as well, one of which is followed by a response from Dr. Carney which, though certainly not a glowing review (and it is indeed much harder on Warhol than on Grundmann), essentially plugs his book about Blowjob. That's it: three references to the faculty who signed the motion. I see no libel there.

Which means that your argument is essentially this: if Dr. Carney will not say nice things about the department of Film and TV at BU, we demand that he not be allowed to say anything at all. As a graduate of Boston University, a scholar and a citizen of a free nation, I find this quite troubling. I urge you to reconsider your plan to pursue this action against Dr. Carney's website and his basic right to free speech.

Sincerely,

Dr. Daniel Jones

The two preceding letters were unsolicited. I had many opportunities to solicit student letters of support -- all of which I rejected. In the course of the spring term, more than 100 students or former students approached me asking if they could write letters or circulate petitions on my behalf (I shall post a few of the inquiries and proposals below when I have an opportunity), but I turned all of them down, telling each and every one of them absolutely NOT to write, call, email or ask for a meeting with anyone at Boston University. My thinking, which I explained to most of those who inquired, went as follows:

In the first place, academic freedom is not something that can or should be decided by a vote. If every man, woman, and child in America was opposed to my speaking my mind about ways to improve teaching and learning in our universities, it would not, and should not, affect a thing I do or say. Some principles are too fundamental and too important to be decided by majority vote. My job, my professional mission and obligation, is to to speak the truth as I see it in the intellectual areas to which I have devoted my life, without fear or favor. It's not about being popular. I'm not running for office (thank God).

Secondly, as I explained to current students who asked how they could support me, and if I wanted them to write letters on my behalf, or what else they could do to help me: I regard it as highly unethical and unprofessional for faculty members or administrators to be coaching or advising current or recent students on making statements about other faculty members, where the faculty member or administrator suggests what kind of statement should be made or expresses his or her opinion about an issue to the student in advance (or where the student knows without being told, which was clearly the case in this instance, since several faculty members had already made many critical statements to their students about my work, my ideas, my approach to film, or my web site over a long period of time). Such "manufactured" student opinion represents a serious abuse of faculty and administrative power. Students are in a necessarily dependent relation to faculty -- who grade them, write letters of recommendation for them for grad. school and jobs, and have a wide range of power over them both before and after their graduation -- and it is impossible for students in this situation to be neutral or objective when a teacher or administrator who has taken a position on one side of an issue asks for their input. I refuse to manipulate students, to pit them against each other, and against faculty members in this way. It is an abuse of power and an abuse of the faculty-student relationship.

As with any situation of this sort, there is a history that can throw light on how it came about. Between the summer of 2003 and 2005, a number of administrative changes and reappointments were made within the College. A few not entirely honorable individuals with not entirely honorable motives secured positions of power and authority and initiated the process of manufacturing and manipulating student opinion to threaten or sanction faculty members who did not fall into line with curricular and policy changes they wanted to put into place. These administrators and faculty members began a series of unethical practices. They spread gossip and rumors about other faculty members to marginalize and undermine them institutionally. They met with students privately in their offices and coached and encouraged them to file complaints about particular faculty members. They publicly criticized the work or ideas of specific faculty members in classroom situations. And, to the extent they were able, they penalized these same faculty members financially and in other ways. I am glad to say that in recent years and months, some members of the College administration have been replaced, but other individuals still remain and past practices unfortunately linger on and continue to inform the current situation.

* * *

I received many statements from people around the U.S. and the world about how important the site was. A sample (currently incomplete) of those comments follows. The letters meant a lot to me. During this difficult period of time it was especially nice to be reminded how much the site mattered to so many young (and old) artists, students, and former students. The following email came from a former student who is now a teacher and studying for his Ph.D. I've withheld his name to respect his privacy. -- R.C.

Greetings, Ray,

I thought I should write to you because I have spent so much time on your Web site and with your books over the last several months. I have been through every page of your "mailbag" and your colleagues are right, it is dangerous, but unlike your unfortunate colleagues, I find it invigoratingly dangerous for all the right reasons. Frankly, I delved into it on a lark, but once I started reading a few of the letters and especially your responses, I was hooked. I was up until 5AM one morning because I couldn't stop reading and thinking and reading and writing and taking notes. Some of the things I read filled me with so many interesting questions or if not fully fleshed out questions, then leads or feelings or glimmerings, or flashes of insight, impulses or whatever, that I felt that my brain was literally vibrating.

From there I returned to books, moved onto Dreyer, have started your book on Leigh, and read (three times now) your astoundingly enlightening "Notes Toward a Pragmatic Aesthetic". That essay is a classic, I think. And then to discover the new films, new to me, that is, the marvelous works of Bresson, Tarkovsky, Noonan (The Wife is AMAZING), Bujalski, Nilsson, Friedrich, and others as well. (I even read the Steve Martin autobiography -- back when he was still touring, he came to XXX and I went to see him the two or three nights night in a row, I was so obsessed with his brand of humor -- and it was so insightful, full of surprises.) And I can't wait to read Phonenix I and II ... and you returned to some of my old personal favorites, Joyce Carol Oates and John Cheever, although now I'm re-reading them in a different light (and that Alice Munro, whom I'd never read -- truly eye opening work!). And then I returned to Beck's books on Zen that have sat on my shelves unread for several years ... it's as if all kinds of things I had never related to one another have over the the last several months been connected in marvelous and interesting ways and it's all thanks to you. It was almost -- but not quite -- as good as being in class with you again. One of the most mind-blowing episodes of my life took place when you led us through Robert Frost one afternoon in class ... and then there was your lecture on Moby Dick ... and Eakins and Sargent ... I guess I could say you were the "Woodstock" of my academic career. And the flashbacks are fantastic!

Anyway, I just wanted to attest to the value of the site that your colleagues find so offensive. I am working on my PhD at (XXX University) and I am thinking of exploring or tracing sources and artistic consequences of the affirmative skepticism of Emersonian Pragmatism. (The skeptical angle has always interested me, but it's the way Emerson and James and the art that follows them deploy skepticism to affirm life's creative potentialities, not its Derridean dead ends. I'm actually taking a course on the history of Skepticism taught by XXXX, who was a student of Richard Popkin. We started with Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism and I can't help but see some affinities with Emerson, James, and the Pragmatic aesthetic you've been writing about.) Obviously I'm indebted to the trail you've blazed, but I hope to extend it because the work you've done and continue to do is so very important. And no, I'm not getting to a favor to ask, this is just a friendly note to a man who has had such a remarkable effect on my thinking, or better, my living as thinking or thinking as living or whatever it is, there doesn't seem to be a verb for it.

For the last five years that I've been teaching, it's been your example that has served me as a model and not without its attendant frustrations. It's astounding, really, how even young people can be so dogmatic, so unwilling to engage their own prejudices, their own "mind forg'd manacles", how they can be so surprisingly resistant to the challenges of art, to different ways of thinking, how they take it so personally when I dismiss some beloved piece of "Oscar winning" Hollywood fluff as mindless tripe -- it's as if I'm saying they are mindless as well when I all I want to do show them that there is so much more. Where is that supple young mind of lore? (And I can't and don't completely blame them -- as Emerson wrote, society is a conspiracy against our manhood, especially when it's driven by a deadening public school curriculum.)

And for my troubles, my urge to improve the lives of those I teach, well, I'm just being "elitist" and "snobbish", according to my colleagues. And it can be so frustrating and so disappointing because life is rich and full of possibilities and yet some just won't let go their egos, even for a moment, just to dip a toe in the water, take the risk, abandon the fear, and at least give joy a chance. Among my students, there are always at least one or maybe two that "get it", so to speak, but most pass on the opportunities offered for reasons I'll never fathom. But that frustration is something that I have to learn to release, although it's been a struggle to do so at times and I can't say I haven't felt like just quitting and going back into the world of business on more than one occasion.

But for each year that I teach I learn somewhat more and am able to abandon yet another little piece of myself to Bach, Beethoven, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Emerson, and the other geniuses that renew and enrich my life each time I take them up to teach them again. The students get one chance; I have to remember that as a teacher, I am fortunate enough to revisit genius again and again and learn anew. "But that's not the way you taught it last year," -- no, it isn't, but this year I see something new to reach for, like that shimmering, glimmering something that Frost wrote about in a poem about a well, I think it was ...

Anyway, my condolences to you with your travails but I am sadder still for your colleagues, who out of fear and the basest of human frailties know not what they do (or do they?). If you must take down the site, please archive the mailbag. It's too valuable to become part of the digital ether. With a gratitude beyond words,

XXXXX

RC replied:

Wow. Thank you! I deeply appreciate your kind words. And need them!

You're right about the young potentially being part of the problem too, though it's not really their fault of course. One of the tactics my colleagues have adopted to use against me with administrators higher up is to encourage students in my program to write letters protesting what is on the site. It's of a piece with everything else they have shown themselves capable of stooping to. It's wrong on so many levels: It's not only profoundly unprofessional and unethical to involve students in the process at all, and a grave abuse of their power over them(it's a rare student who will dare to tell a faculty member he or she has in a course that he or she will NOT write such a letter at the faculty member's request); but as your note suggests, most students just don't have enough background or training to understand either the intellectual or the academic freedom issues or make an informed judgment about them. But these faculty members know no shame, and I have to say, on the basis of the last four or five months of experience that my opinion of these colleagues is even lower than it was before this. They have, in effect, proved everything I only suspected or feared. You should be a fly on the ceiling at a meeting where they sit there and call me names. The things they say embarrass me. For them. I mean.

But don't let any of that trouble or concern you. I'm Emerson's football. The more kicks the better. I get my kicks from the world's kicks, and the more of them I get, the more proof that the world needs a few different ideas and ways of proceeding. Ouch and gasho!

I'm so glad to hear about your own deep commitment to teaching and studying. It's so easy to become cynical, to cut your expectations down in the face of resistance or puzzlement. (One of my colleagues told me -- he had no idea how shocking his statement was to me -- that his goal was to get his courses to a place where they "ran themselves" and "took no real new work each year." That's what I call cynicism.) Keep learning. Keep changing your mind. Keep exploring. Keep diving deeper and deeper. I'm reading a lot of Henry James this semester and learning as much new as I did the first time I ever read him. There's no end to it. Mountains beyond mountains, oceans within oceans, discoveries beyond discoveries.

Must get back to work (and paper grading), but just wanted to tell you how much I appreciated your thoughtfulness.

RC

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