This week on my “spring break” I am reading Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars. In the introduction he refers to the inevitable creative ways in which people who cope with disease or development disorders learn to not only exist in the world but thrive. Thus while one may be horrified by the ravages of developmental disorder or disease, one may sometimes see them as creative too – for if they destroy particular paths, particular ways of doing things, they may […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film

Today I leave you with a quote that I came across from scraps of paper in a binder I recently cleared out for a project I needed to put together in paper form. Wait – what’s that, you ask  – paper? I thought we got rid of that in the 21st century. . . that and film . . . aren’t all those things digital representations now? Jean Epstein, For a New Avant-Garde: Each of us, I suppose may possess some […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film

I am currently matriculated in an MFA program in Production (after already completing an MA program in Film Studies). As part of my directing class we are reading Judith Weston’s Directing Actors. Before going back to school I spent several years in the acting world and it’s interesting approaching it completely from the other side (I have always had one foot in production). I have often myself been plagued by the preconceived notions that actors are not dedicated enough or […]

Categories: Jennifer Dean, ZiR • Tags: film