Students best know Associate Professor of Film Studies Scott Higgins as a gatekeeper of the film major, instructor for introductory classes like “History Of World Cinema” and “Language Of Hollywood.” Outside the classroom, he’s no slouch either: he published “Harnessing the Technicolor Rainbow: Color Design in the 1930s” in 2007 and has a new book on the way. Higgins sat down with The Argus to discuss ’80s avant rock, early magnetic video tape, and keeping in touch with his roots.
The Argus: So, what’s on your bookshelf?
Scott Higgins: I have a lot of crap on my bookshelf, as you can see. I tried to prepare for this by getting a book I was reading at home and bringing it in. So it’s not technically on my bookshelf, but that’s beside the point. So we’ll get this over with. Here’s the book I’m reading now; it’s called “The Color Revolution.” It’s by Regina Lee Blaszczyk, and it’s great. It’s a decade-by-decade study of color in mainly popular American design, so it’s a book that I wish was around when I wrote my book on Technicolor because there was no one who had this, who talked about, “This is the palette of the 1940s, this is the palette of the 1950s.” It’s gonna be awesome for contextualizing movies, I think, and it’s got lots of pretty pictures. So it’s good to see other people doing serious work on color as a part of our culture and all that.
But I’ve got all kinds of other crap that’s more interesting on my bookshelves. “Space Cat” [by Ruthvan Todd] because it’s a ’50s book about teaching kids about space travel, but they decided to make a story about an astronaut and a cat. And the cat just looks scared and bewildered through the whole thing, but in a helmet. I mean, it’s a cat! But look, it gets kind of happy at the end. I must admit that I haven’t read “Space Cat” cover-to-cover. It’s from 1952, and it’s like “L’Atalante” in space. So you see here, he’s passed out on a planet, the cat attacks him, I mean, comes to his aid…
A: But it looks like he’s scratching his helmet.
SH: It’s funny because it looks like he’s scratching his helmet and allowing the oxygen out of his suit and actually killing him, leaving the astronaut stranded. I don’t think that could possibly be what it’s really illustrating, but I like to think of it that way.
And then I thought I’d just pull out records, since most of [this bookshelf] is records. They’re in categories, so these are sincere records that I believed in when I was an adolescent and in college, and these are less sincere records that I bought for a quarter, generally when I was in college and beyond. So these tend to be lounge records, stereo demonstration records, and some soundtracks, and these tend to be New Wave and pop and avant rock. Over time I’ve grown to like [the less-sincere ones] a lot better than [the sincere ones]—I aged into them. These used to be ironic, too, because this is back when vinyl was a quarter a pop. There’s a lot of novelty here, but there’s also a lot of good things. [pulling one out] “More Bagels and Bongos” is not one of the good ones, but it’s a nice concept. What I like about this is it’s the sequel to “Bagels & Bongos.” The Irving Fields trio did Jewish-themed mambos for one record, and they did another one—songs like Mama’s Mambo, Wedding Merengue, My Hometown Girl, all done in Yiddish. So that’s “Bagels & Bongos.”
Moving over here, this is basically our unconscious here because we have everything. I could bring out my teenage rebellion section. It’s mainly this stuff, Cabaret Voltaire, which I don’t know if you know them—probably don’t—but they’re a danceable kind of quasi-industrial band, but they would do things like name their EP, “Drinking Gasoline,” which sounds like, “Oh, yeah, I’m drinking gasoline now!” And they were also filmmakers, so the record I was gonna get was “Micro-Phonies,” ah, so okay, this is the record I bought in ’84…
[As Higgins pulls Cabaret Voltaire’s “Micro-Phonies” off the shelf, Corwin-Fuller Professor of Film Studies Jeanine Basinger walks into his office.]
SH: I’m in an interview here. Very important. Talking about records.
JB: I’m so sorry! When you’re done, come in—I’m gonna introduce you to A.O. Scott, and you’re gonna take his son—
SH: His son to school. Yes, take his son to school, yeah.
[Basinger exits.]
A: We can wrap this up, if you need to.
SH: No, it’s okay, I’m talking about Cabaret Voltaire. [holding up record cover] Look at this thing. This is ’83, or ’84? It’s got a guy, like, I don’t know what the hell’s going on there. He’s got a bandaged face, and he’s foaming at the mouth. It’s like a bondage kind of thing. I mean, that’s an offensive… I mean, not offensive, but it’s scary, it’s meant to be scary. That’s what I was all about. The music itself, though, is pre-electronica, I guess, kind of punky industrial stuff, but all actually very, very danceable. It’s also got pink in it, and is also pretentious—Cabaret Voltaire is the surrealist philosophical movement and nightclub in Weimar Germany, so it’s pretentious, danceable, and offensive, which is pretty much where I wanted to be when I was in high school. And that is what this record collection is all about.
I think what people forget about the ’80s is that it was all Journey, all the time, on the radio, and if you wanted anything that wasn’t like that, it’s not as though there was an easy middle ground. You were either flirting with complete avant-garde stuff or idiots. [pulling out another record] And this is a record up out of New York, in about 1986, and it’s by Test Dept., and they’re also nuts. But you see, it’s quite good. This is like Russian constructivist design [on the cover], so we’ll put on some Test Dept. and we’ll talk.
I like the record collection. It’s only here because I have kids now, and it got kicked out of the house because I had it in a bedroom and we had to change the bedroom into a child’s room, so all of my records came here. So it’s like a memento mori, a reminder of death or of where I came from and how stupid I used to be. That’s very important when you’re a college professor.
[Higgins puts on the Test Dept. record.]
SH: It’s like, real banging of metal. Light Einstürzende Neubauten kind of thing. It’s angry. [He turns the record off.] So when my students come in and are all angry at the world, I look back, like, “I relate entirely.” You don’t lose it. So there’s my record collection, and there’s a bunch of zombies and robots up on the shelves as well.
A: Lots of really cool action figures.
SH: Some people say it’s a Peter Pan complex, and to them I say, “Absolutely.” That’s absolutely true. Also, I have my own kids, and they get really good toys. Part of it is realizing that they don’t like the toys I would have liked, so being a father is not really about introducing kids to all the toys you had. Because the toys you had, they age badly; plastic gets brittle and breaks very easily after about 30 years. Everything that was really a hearty toy when you were a kid, you give it to your kids and they break it in a second.
And secondly, they don’t really care. So then, I was just trying to figure out, “Who am I?” It’s a mid-life crisis thing. “Who am I? Well, I liked robots, so finally I have all of the robots.”
I also have the VHS copy of “Alien,” which was before it was released commercially. This is a very early VHS tape from ’83. Before videotapes were cheap enough to sell in stores, they had record-club things, so you’d sign up for a video club. This is the Magnetic Video Corporation video of Alien, but it’s part of a club. You could only get this thing through the mail, and it was quite expensive, too—it was like 50 bucks, this thing. And it’s pan-and-scan; it’s kind of horrible.
But it’s like my first close analysis of a film, done on this videotape, of the chest-bursting. I was, what, must have been 11? 12? And my best friend would ride bikes around the neighborhood and we’d go down in my basement and put “Alien” on, and we’d count the shots and figure out, “Where’d that come from?” When [John Hurt’s character] starts convulsing, he gets a spatter of blood on his shirt, but the blood doesn’t come from under his shirt, somebody drops it from above the frame. We were so geeked when we figured that out. So we ran it again and again, and the videotape is probably wrinkled there, to figure out, “Cool, how’d they get his chest to explode? That’s awesome!”
Thinking about it now, I think about the obvious sexual imagery of it all, and me and my best friend in the basement looking at a videotape of a guy’s chest exploding and a penis monster coming out, thinking, “That’s just barely veiled.” There it is, man. Early videotape. So I’ve got that as a reminder of who I was and still am. Magnetic video.
It never goes away; I guess that’s it. You’re a geek for the rest of your life. It’s better not to try to deny it. Take it with you, put it in an office.