Faculty Retirement Minute
for
Ted Perry
Written March 15, 2012
by
Stephen Donadio
In one of the drive-by observations that make up My Reel Story [“reel” with
two “e’s”], Ted Perry’s glancingly autobiographical account of his life in the movies
and the movies in his life, our long-time colleague tells us this: “The people in my
family move, they have the journey-proud gene. If they don’t have that gene, they
have the gene that enables them to intuit a wandering impulse in others.” As anyone
who’s ever spent any time with him is aware, Ted himself has this gene of
restlessness: even when he’s sitting down, perfectly still, with a cool drink or a hot
cup of coffee, he’s ready to go, on the verge of some unspecified errand. Which
makes it all the more remarkable that he should have found his way to Middlebury,
Vermont and settled down here, up to a point. As for many of us, raising a family had
a lot to do with that, and in his case the subtle and steady presence of Miriam, his
wife, one of the most gracious and open-hearted contributors to our common life in
this community. But just how easily “the journey-proud gene” fits in with the
demands and conditions of daily life on the home front remains something of a
question, as Homer’s Odysseus came to recognize a long time ago.
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Not that Ted is another Odysseus, not exactly; the thought would amuse him,
though it might not amuse the runaway Irish author James Joyce, who was an exile
all his life and maybe for that reason inclined to entertain such inappropriate and
inadvisable analogies. That said, beginning early on Ted has certainly had his
odysseys, and had already rushed his way through several potentially full-blown
careers before he ever set foot here in 1978, back in the day. One of the first things
you noticed about him was that, like Louis Armstrong, he knew what it means to
miss New Orleans, and that he also knew quite a few things about autumn in New
York. He wasn’t from around here, and he was hard to place altogether. His
childhood had been spent in New Orleans, and like many people from that region of
the country, he had a rueful comic sense of the sudden pleasures of excess and the
costs of unshakeable regret and nameless longing – not just the prices of the bigticket items, but the small carrying charges bled daily out of your emotional savings
account. In the words of Robert Johnson: “Woke up this morning, I looked around
for my shoes / You know I had those mean old walking blues.” When the time came
for him to leave home to go to college, Ted left for Texas, completing his
undergraduate degree at Baylor University, where he also worked on productions of
dramatized versions of Wolfe’s Of Time and the River and Faulkner’s novel As I Lay
Dying. From then on, he kept managing to turn up wherever the cultural action was:
first at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where the arts were in the process of
colliding in unsettling and productive ways (as in the Intermedia program in which
his friend Hans Breder would work for a long time, and with which figures like Vito
Acconci and Nam June Paik would come to be associated). It was at Iowa that Ted
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got his Master’s degree and his Ph.D., and he taught there for a few years in the
Department of Speech and Dramatic Art, where he and others, including Breder,
wrote and produced plays and mixed-media performances. (Since that time, he’s
written more plays of his own, several of which have been produced at Iowa City,
Barcelona, Dallas, and Middlebury.)
In 1969 he left for the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as an
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Radio,
Television, and Film. This was a great moment in the history of that university, and
while he was there Ted formed close friendships with a number of distinguished
literary thinkers and cultural interpreters, among them two of the commanding
figures of the postwar period in American intellectual life: William Arrowsmith and
Roger Shattuck, both of whom decided to spend their summers right around here, in
Lincoln, Vermont, where Shattuck ultimately came to live year-round until his death
a couple of years ago. Ted moved north from Texas in 1971, to New York University,
where he accepted an appointment as a Professor and Chairman of the Department
of Cinema Studies in the School of the Arts and the Graduate School of Arts and
Science; his colleagues there included Jay Leyda (among other things, a leading
scholar of Herman Melville, Soviet cinema, and the films of Eisenstein), Annette
Michelson (one of the founding editors of October, a highly influential and
demanding avant-garde cultural journal), and William K. Everson (who knew more
about the history of silent film than anyone and assembled an incomparable
collection), as well as the director Martin Scorsese’s most admired teacher, Haig P.
Manoogian, to whom the film Raging Bull is dedicated. During this period, Ted was
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also invited to be a visiting lecturer at the State University of New York at Purchase,
a new university devoting much of its energy to exploratory developments in the
visual arts. In the mid-seventies, Ted assumed one of the most important positions
in the international world of cinema when he accepted an appointment as Director
of Film at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; this was the job he held just
before he came to Middlebury, and it also permitted him to serve as a visiting Henry
Luce Professor for a year at Harvard.
When Ted first appeared on the scene here, he served, ultimately for more
than a dozen years, as Dean of Arts and Humanities, and as Dean for Project
Development; over the years he has taken on innumerable important teaching and
administrative positions – really many too many to list here, but including, for
example, Director of the Arts, Chair of the Department of Theater, Dance, and
Film/Video, Professor of Theater and Art, Chair of Music, Head of the Commons
System and of International Studies, as well as Faculty Head of Ross Commons.
Since 1997, he has been Fletcher Professor of the Arts; and since 2002, Professor of
Art and of Film and Media Culture. Although he had held tenured positions at two
major universities before he arrived here, Middlebury thought that he had better be
reviewed for tenure once again before his name was included on the payroll. He
made it through.
At the time, there were no film courses at the college, no film equipment, and
no professional screening facilities. In town, in the days before its dazzling
transformation into the multiplex Marquis Theater, there was the one-screen
Campus Theater, where the reels of current second-run films were often screened
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out of sequence, making for some puzzling viewing experiences. I don’t know if this
really mattered much to Ted, who has always maintained a passionate interest in
experimental film and non-linear narration, but he did think that the college really
needed to have something better. He began to address the evident lacks that he
perceived by consulting with the technicians who had worked to set up the film
screening theater at MOMA, and had Dana Auditorium reconfigured to permit the
projection of 35mm films, which allowed for some U.S. premieres of significant work
by contemporary filmmakers (Chantal Akerman, for instance). There are now three
professional screening theaters at Middlebury, all with state of the art equipment,
which of course has now come to include the capacity for high-resolution projection
of Blu-Ray DVDs. There is, as well, an actual production studio, and equipment that
makes possible the creation, from start to finish, of film work of exceptionally high
quality. None of the institutions to which we now and then compare ourselves can
begin to approach our resources in these areas. The network of department
graduates employed in significant positions in film and television is extraordinarily
impressive. The Department of Film and Media Culture now contains six faculty and
two staff members and somewhere around forty majors, who may enroll – as can
students working in many other disciplines – in a wide range of courses in film
production and film history and analysis. These history and analysis courses, which
call for a familiarity with film aesthetics and the conditions of film production,
proceed from the assumption that some works of film require the same kind of
sustained scrutiny that in the past was reserved for serious works of literature, and
that learning to read a film as a work of art involves acquisition of a background of
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knowledge and a range of critical skills comparable to those required to make sense
of and evaluate a serious work of literature.
Speaking of seriousness in such matters: the roster of speakers that Ted has
brought to Middlebury over the years reads like a Who’s Who of major figures in the
field. Just off the top of one’s head, one could name Robert Wise, Laura Mulvey, Erik
Barnouw, Stan Brakhage, Dudley Andrew, Annette Michelson, Jonas Mekas , Chantal
Akerman – there’s no time now to identify all of these people for those who might
not be familiar with the various kinds of achievement they represent, and there are
many more who might be included. P. Adams Sitney, the world’s leading authority
on American experimental film (who currently teaches at Princeton), has lectured
here numerous times and has offered remarkably comprehensive courses in which
he traced all the strains of the history in great detail. When he was curator of Video
Art at the Whitney Museum, John Hanhardt was invited by Ted to teach a winter
term course in the evolution of the medium, a course in which, day after day, he
presented virtually the whole archive of the Whitney’s holdings; even if you lived
right down the block from the Whitney, you could never have had access to such a
wealth of examples. I could go on, but you get the idea.
As for Ted’s own publications and his contributions to the field, which have
made him a figure of great stature, highly respected by people who actually know
something: once again, the list is long, and time is short; but here are a few
examples. In addition to producing many articles on issues in film history and
aesthetic and on individual directors like De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni, and Eisenstein,
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he has edited, with extensive notes, William Arrowsmith’s study of Antonioni
(published by Oxford University Press), as well as a compilation of the journals of
the filmmaker Robert Gardner (published by Harvard), and a collection entitled
Masterpieces of Modern Cinema, brought out by Indiana University Press; he’s also
the author of Buky Schwartz: The Seeing I, a combined monograph and catalogue of
works by the celebrated video artist, one of whose installations is permanently on
view in the Mahaney Center for the Arts. It is also worth pointing out that Ted has
been a Trustee and an emeritus Trustee of the American Film Institute for the past
thirty years, and also serves on the Board of Advisers for Anthology Film Archives in
New York (a repository of rare experimental work), and on the Board of Advisers
for the Vermont International Film Festival.
In the end, perhaps Ted’s most curious contribution to the history of modern
American culture, broadly conceived – though it is surely not the contribution for
which he would like to be most remembered – is a text that has come to be known
as “The World According to Chief Seattle.” As Ted himself has explained, “this text,
written in 1970 as the narration for an ABC-TV television documentary and
incorrectly attributed to Chief Seattle, has been reprinted many times, translated
into a number of languages, cited by such people as Buckminster Fuller and Joseph
Campbell, been the source for many musical pieces, including chorales and
oratorios, and also featured in several television programs.” Since its initial
appearance, the fraudulence of this text, its essential fictitiousness, has been
established and re-established many times; nevertheless, appropriated as a
foundational ecological document, it continues to circulate through the culture as an
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authentic nineteenth-century historical expression, appearing regularly on
calendars, advertisements, and promotional materials of many kinds, and very likely
in quite a few textbooks. If there were any justice in the world, by now the
widespread dissemination of this made-for-TV narration would have made Ted a
very rich man indeed.
It has not, and as the record plainly shows, that is not the only thing he has
brought to the party. The only reason I’m up here is that he’s about to get up to
leave: soon, but not just yet. I’ve been thinking that if I had to come up with a title
for a commemorative portrait of him that might be hung somewhere – in Axinn, say,
where the film people live – it might be “Serene Velocity.” That’s the paradoxical title
of a film by Ernie Gehr that Ted has always admired. It’s an experimental film of
some duration that shows a long corridor down which the camera moves with
incalculable slowness, by fractions of an inch, in the manner of Zeno’s Paradox,
which asserts that to cover any distance you have to cover half that distance first
and before you can cover half that distance you have to cover a quarter of it, and so
on . . . making it impossible for you ever to arrive finally, once and for all, at your
destination. Watching this film is like watching a still photograph that is striving to
become a movie, or watching a perfectly adequate established point of perspective
that somehow just can’t get comfortable with staying fixed; and Ted’s like that. And
being in his company can make you a little like that, too. After sitting still for quite a
long spell now – courteous, a little shy, with his familiar half-smile – he’s about to
make some kind of move. We wish him well, but we hope he’ll stick around the
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neighborhood a while longer. If we can find a way to visit, he’s still got some things
to show us, things that we may find, in time, we can’t forget.
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