The Princeton Atelier, founded by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison 12 years ago, is all about the creative process – bringing professional artists to campus to develop a project in collaboration with students.
So when a documentary filmmaking course set out to capture the “mystery of the Atelier,” in the words of instructor Katherine Carpenter ’79, it was no surprise that the course participants learned to expect the unexpected. On one key day of filming late in the course, Carpenter said, “We had six camera crews at work, and none of them were where they had thought they were supposed to be.”
Fourteen students signed up for the course with Carpenter, a visiting Ferris professor and veteran documentary filmmaker whose latest production is A Year on Earth. The students worked in small groups to produce a series of five-minute documentary videos tied to the Atelier process.
One team focused on an Atelier in which actress Maria Tucci, dancer Allegra Kent, and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn worked with student actors, singers, and dancers in a production that combined elements of Euripides’ Alcestis and A Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare. “In the end, it was a powerful story,” Carpenter said. “It did what an Atelier is supposed to do. The students filming saw how, out of chaos, in the end the pieces did come together.”
The students taped a one-hour interview with Morrison, the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Humanities, who moved to emeritus status at the end of the term. The students’ videos may be posted on the Atelier Web site during the summer, Carpenter said.
Tom Bender ’06 said the class’s work was “unusual and worth filming,” but some shoots were difficult to schedule and “somewhat intrusive” to the Atelier participants. He described the experience as “the sort of hands-on, production-oriented course that Princeton needs more of.” One of the students will work this summer with documentary filmmaker Al Maysles, who attended a class session; three others will have summer jobs in television or film.
Carpenter said she realized the class was “really getting it” when one student borrowed the camera equipment for a weekend, then acme back with an idiosyncratic short film about cheerleading. “I had no idea that, simmering below the surface of this physics scholar, was a quirky filmmaker waiting to be born,” she said.
This was originally published in the June 7, 2006 issue of PAW.