Editor's note: This article is the first of a four-part series examining senior theses and culminating experiences in the arts.
As the middle of the term approaches, seniors majoring in every department at Dartmouth are busy wrapping up their projects and theses.
Drawing near the end of their college careers, seniors majoring in the Film and Television Department don't have much time for nostalgia before they enter the cutthroat entertainment industry beyond college. There is an enormous variety among their culminating projects, which represent the cumulative manifestation of all they've learned. More often than not, the works are also experiments that take advantage of the safety net of an academic forum.
Nathan Ruegger '06 has been honing his skills in the art of screenplay writing. Arguably, screenwriting can be regarded as a subcategory of both film studies and creative writing. Ruegger's Honors Thesis in Film is "a feature-length screenplay about the true story of Ireland's greatest poet, W.B. Yeats," which boasts an especially literary nature.
Although Ruegger knew from the outset that his screenplay would focus on Yeats, it wasn't until the fifth screenplay outline, he remembers, when "professor Phillips and I discovered the screenplay's center, his marriage." In the screenplay, Yeats' widow, Georgie, relates her late husband's life story to a "novice biographer," following their romance as it unfolds. "William reaches the age of 50, unmarried and poor," Ruegger explains, "But when he meets the eccentric young Georgie, they marry and fall in love. They write powerful new poetry together, but in the wake of the Irish Civil War and the rise of William's fame, he struggles with ghosts from his past and new temptations that force him to choose between the greatest loves of his life -- his country and his wife."
What seems like the synopsis of a successful BBC period piece has been the grueling creative effort of just another Dartmouth student, who prepared for the project with "2,000+ pages of biographical materials" this winter. His senior spring hasn't been as relaxing as he may have hoped. "This term, I hand in 20 pages of my screenplay every Friday, a grueling pace that will ensure a polished final draft before I throw my cap in the air at Commencement," Ruegger said.
Instead of delving into the past like Ruegger, another senior film studies major, Craig Rubens '06, has been contemplating the meaning of the present for his senior project. Crossing America on the famous Big Green Bus last summer, Rubens documented the journey as a means of examining the spirit of youth and possibility. His travelogue of the trip grapples with "the elements of open road, what it means to be a twenty-something year old with the world laid out in front of you, and the idea that a group of friends could take a hair-brained idea like taking a school bus and converting it to run on veggie oil to travel around the country."
Brendon Bouzard '06 chose to write an honors thesis after having expected to make a film, although he said that not a lot of people write theses for film studies. For Bouzard, this was the final chance to write an extended paper as he thought that his future career would never provide a chance to do so again.
He explained that his long-term goal was "to make films for the rest of my life, so I decided that at least at college I'd write a lengthy paper ---who knows if I'll have the opportunity to do that ever again?" His topic explores filmic representations of the killing spree committed by Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate in 1958, which, according to Bouzard, "taps into a lot of our assumptions about Americans in the 1950s" as well as the broader "issues of cultural memory."
Bouzard's thesis, which he is writing under the guidance of professor Amy Lawrence, "analyzes how different films that depict or reflect on those events receive them ideologically. There's everything from a low-budget '60s horror film to a TV movie to one of the most important works of the American cinema, Terrence Malick's 'Badlands,'" he said. It may become a fascinating film in his future career.
Another senior completing his major in film studies has chosen yet another medium for his work. Krzysztof L. Siuda '06 is filming the first high-definition student production made at Dartmouth, based on a "short narrative fiction" screenplay co-written by Suida and his friend Nicholas Ray '06. Siuda cast his film with student actors Christa Hinckley '08, Sam Gilroy '09, Anna Cates '06 and Daniel Lee '06. The story centers on a group of recent college graduates who meet up and notice the changes in their friendship as they prepare to face adult reality. The director calls the project his "goodbye to college life." Although he said that he had problems scheduling convenient times to shoot, the project in general seems to be an enjoyable conclusion not only to his studies but also to this chapter of his youth.
