To Martin Benjamin ’57;

This being at least the second time you have written to this fair paper of ours, I had imagined that I had a pretty good idea what to expect from you. Imagine my surprise when at the end of your diatribe, you lashed out at my very own major, Film Studies. Although your mention was brief, my space is even more so and I am forced to paraphrase (check the Feb. 24 issue for specifics):

1. The new film studies building is made of red bricks, and it is ugly.

2. This building symbolically represents the incomprehensibility of post-modern film.

3. Corwin-Fuller Chair Prof. Basinger loves “Pink Flamingos”. She has no taste.

Permit me to make my own brief but hopefully enlightening summary of the Film Studies major at Wesleyan. Founded in the late 60s by Jeanine Basinger, the department is now one of the main draws of the University, as well as the most prestigious theory-based program in the Northeast.

Thankfully, post-modernism has precious little to do with the film work at Wes— instead, our work is largely based on neo-formalism (Bordwell & Thompson). Put very simply, the philosophy goes thusly—the filmmaker is trying to get the viewer to care about his film, intellectually, emotionally, or what have you. He uses film style towards that end. Our job, as viewers, is to try to figure out what the filmmaker’s original goal was—and how (and if) that goal was achieved.

There are between 65 and 75 film majors at any given time, making it one of the most popular in the school. Sadly, popularity and prestige have not translated to funding—Film Studies has only three full-time faculty, one of whom is tenured, plus a “visiting professor” who handles technical classes, an American Studies professor who teaches two film courses every other year, and between three and five other department professors who contribute one class. This compares somewhat unfavorably to Wes’s largest major, Government – 138 students and 15 full-time professors, or even to one of the smaller majors, History, with 25 full-time professors, according to their websites. Perhaps our building is ugly. But standing next to perhaps the ugliest compound in history, the CFA, we think it looks pretty much okay. You might also be interested to know, Mr. Benjamin, that the new Film Studies building was paid for entirely by outside contributions—although it will benefit students for years to come, none of their money went into building it.

I could go on about the virtues of the department—the excellent Cinema Archive with original documents from dozens of Hollywood bigshots, the Film Series which screens twenty-six excellent free prints per semester, the valuable (if beleaguered) thesis department playing fests from Slamdance to Ann Arbor – but instead, I’ll simply say this: the Argus staff doesn’t have the time to fact-check your Wespeaks. So please, take responsibility and do it yourself. And always remember that although a pithy ad-hominem quip may satiate the errant ego, a flurry of overwrought verbiage doth not a well-reasoned contention craft.