News from
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Communications and Publications, Stanhope Hall
Princeton, New Jersey 08544
Tel 609/258-3601; Fax 609/258-1301
Date: Oct. 17, 1996
Contact: Jacquelyn Savani (609) 258-5729
Film Creatively Celebrates 250th
Public Invited to Six Showings at the Garden
Princeton, N.J.--You're invited to the Garden Theater at the corner of Nassau and Vandeventer Sts. in Princeton to view Gerardo Puglia's two-hour cinematic celebration of Princeton's 250th birthday.
Princeton: Images of a University premiers on Oct. 23 to an audience by invitation only. But all are welcome without charge to showings on Oct. 26 and 27, at 10:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. The invitation list for the first night more or less coincides with the roster of names that takes five minutes to conclude the film. A lot of Princetonians cooperated in the making of this movie.
Puglia, an award-winning maker of films and videos, acted as cinematographer and director. William Tadler of New York edited the footage.
Three Princeton faculty members made especially significant contributions: Maria DiBattista, professor of English and comparative literature and chair of the Committee for Film Studies, served as consulting writer; Gaetana Marrone-Puglia, associate professor of Romance languages and literatures and director of the Program in Italian Studies, acted as producer; and Burton Malkiel *64, Chemical Bank Chairman's Professor of Economics and chair of the Steering Committee for Princeton's 250th Anniversary, played the role of executive producer. Time and again when the production ran into difficultes, Malkiel "pulled us through," says a grateful Puglia. "We wouldn't have the film without him."
In the making for two years, the movie is sometimes billed as a documentary. Better think "art" as well as "documentary" when you settle down with complimentary popcorn and prepare to view this film, which resembles a collage by Picasso more than a realistic painting by Thomas Eakins.
Enabling a wide range of contrast light to dark in the rendering of colors, film, like pigment on canvas, lasts long. While today's videos will begin to disintegrate in only about a dozen years, Puglia's film will be there for Princetonians celebrating the University's 300th.
Though Puglia talks with regret about the deteriorating state of some of the many feet of film from the '20s, '30s and '40s in the University's Seeley G. Mudd Archive Library, at least most of that footage is still usable. So he could intersperse in thought-provoking ways black and white moving-pictures from Princeton's past with his own full-color images of the University's present. Black and white seems particularly appropriate for rendering those monochromatic male faces in contrast to the color required to convey the diversity of today's student body. And, he points out, this film affords a rare opportunity to see early footage projected onto a screen as it was initially intended to be viewed.
Puglia's choice of film for his Princeton epic imposes at least one constraint that enhances the artistic, impressionistic effect of his movie. None of the speakers are identified with the customary name tags of documentary, so the viewer has to wait for the concluding credits listing the speakers in order to know who said what throughout the film.
Nor does the film have the narrative voice of traditional documentary that not only can introduce speakers, but also guide, if not control, the viewers' response to what is being seen. The absence of a narrator makes the film "less didactic" than it would otherwise be," says Puglia. "People tell their own story."
What affects the viewer's response to the film's images--more subtly and probably more powerfully than a narrator--is music. Puglia explains that films are usually scored with an orchestra, but that usual approach requires a budget far exceeding that to commemorate Princeton's 250th. So Puglia purchased instead the rights to music libraries by, for instance, the London Philharmonic and took the music into the editing room to match image and sound.
Puglia shot the film at cost. The impetus for his "labor of love" began about 10 years ago when his wife, Gaetana, got a job at Princeton, and the couple arrived to scout out a place to live.
"When I first stepped onto this campus," he says, "I felt immediately that the place is special. I took out a 35mm. camera and started to take pictures. There is a really special quality to the light and the architectural forms, all the more surprising for being in the middle of New Jersey." He characterizes that quality as "spiritual," and that is what he later sought to capture in his movie.
Puglia's approach to film-making is akin to the French "camera-stylo" in which the camera replaces the pen in the making of a script, so that there is no written script or shooting schedule to dictate what the camera sees. Rather, the camera seeks out images which in turn determine the structure of the film.
Puglia says that he got his direction in the Chapel ("a big lighting job") at Opening Exercises 1994 when a cantor filled the great space with her "hauntingly beautiful voice." That voice, he says, matched the quality he felt the day he first arrived on campus. So he read everything he could find about Princeton, left the printed materials at home, and set forth with his camera "like that detective Colombo bumping around, but on a journey in pursuit of the opposite of the dark side."
Yes, some of his subjects offered up criticisms of Princeton. But in the end they inevitably "returned to their love for the place." Almost all of his interviewees "come back to that moment of special presence" that Puglia himself experienced when he first arrived.
One of the most intriguing aspects of Puglia's film is the relationship between speaker and context. If there is any one speaker who dominates this film, it is fittingly Princeton's current president, Harold Shapiro. There he is seated in the Faculty Room with the portrait of Woodrow Wilson behind. Suddenly the viewer becomes aware of Shapiro's uncanny resemblance to Wilson. Though Wilson was not yet president when Princeton celebrated its 150th, his was the presiding presence at that 1896 convocation, where he proclaimed "Princeton in the nation's service."
One revelation of Puglia's film is the beauty of the portraits in the Faculty Room--the faces of Princeton's history. It is something of an irony that those usually unlit paintings can only be seen in this film because of the additional lighting Puglia brought in to make them visible.
The Faculty Room provides a huge challenge to picture taking of any kind because like a black hole it swallows up light. Yet it and Nassau Hall are for Puglia the heart of the University. "People have lived and eaten and slept and studied and prayed there and fought wars and governed the country there," he says. "To this day it's where major decisions are made.
"Princeton wouldn't be Princeton without Nassau Hall."
Note: Gerardo Puglia may be reached at (609) 683-4648.