“Do you think it would be fun—” Fiona shouted. “Do you think it would be fun if we got married?” He took her up on it, he shouted yes. He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life.   --Alice Munro, “The Bear Came over the Mountain” (1999)

No debate: literary texts, whether they be novels, plays or short stories, have always been rich source material for the film adaptation. Although the literary work is usually considered the "original" and the film the "copy," sometimes it is the film that leaves the more indelible mark on the audience. Think Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) or Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972), both of which have eclipsed their literary counterparts to become artistic creations in their own right. In other instances, the literary and cinematic texts stand on equal ground as works of art that tell a compelling story. Such is the case with Sarah Polley's Away from Her (2006), a cinematic reimagining of Alice Munro's short story, "The Bear Came over the Mountain." Both are meditations on the drift in a marriage that mental illness--specifically Alzheimer's--can highlight. Both are poignant testimonies to the power of memory, forgetting, and selfless love. Join us to investigate how Munro's short story and Polley's film are deeply in conversation with one another. Is the book always better than the movie? Find out in this film study.

Representing KPU, I will be presenting the following session at this year's Teaching Professor Conference in St Louis:

Web Visibility Matters: A Social Media Primer for Academics

While some embrace social media as an extension of their professional practice, others remain unsure about how it can or should play a role. Welcome to your primer for web visibility: an interactive demonstration that will create meaningful connections between your teaching, research, and service activities and your “followers.” You will learn to take a controlling interest in your web real estate to prevent random sites and aggregators from constructing your professional identity for you, and how to use privacy settings to protect yourself and your students. Please bring a laptop to this session.

Learning goals:

• Identify the social media options best suited to your research and service

• Separate your professional profile(s) from your personal one(s) or unify them with a clear intention

• Populate professional profiles on a targeted selection of social media sites

• Create a customized strategy for SEO (search engine optimization)

My film study TALK will focus on the black comedy, notorious for pushing the boundaries of decency, good taste, and moral certainty. As a film genre, it encourages the viewer to find
humor in its twisted outlook on otherwise taboo subjects. In what other medium can you vicariously have your wife kidnapped so that you can extort a ransom from your wealthy father-in-law (Fargo) or swap murders with your two best friends to collectively get rid of your bosses (Horrible Bosses)? This two-part course will look at several cinematic variations on the black comedy, with a main focus on Damian Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014), an anthology film comprised of six shorts united by a common theme: revenge. Delve into the cathartic, visceral power of the black comedy in this film study. Isn’t it better to choose laughing over crying?
 

Join me, as the Alfred Hitchcock/Film Noir panel moderator, for the Northeast/Popular American Culture Association's 2016 conference at Keene State College. NEPCA is a community of scholars interested in advancing research and promoting interest in the disciplines of popular and/or American culture, with a membership of university and college faculty members, emeriti faculty, secondary school teachers, museum specialists, graduate students, independent scholars, and interested members of the general public. NEPCA is an independently funded affiliate of the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association. I also will be in attendance to promote KPU's forthcoming film studies journal, Mise-en-scene.

I will be facilitating a TALK (Third Age Learning at Kwantlen) film study on how narrative continuity is created through editing techniques. With the advent of DVD extras, home viewers now know that a feature film involves hours of footage that do not make it into the finished product. The process of determining the outtakes, deleting unnecessary scenes, reconfiguring censored material, streamlining the sequences, and creating overall narrative continuity is known as editing. As visual storytellers, filmmakers face space/time limitations that demand the average 2-hour feature film be created from, on average, 4 times that amount of footage. Editing, in the words of famed director Alfred Hitchcock, “means the assembly of pieces of film which, when moved in rapid succession before the eye, create an idea.” This three-day film study will look at how filmmakers create such ideas through editing techniques by screening and closely analyzing two of Hitchcock’s editing triumphs: Strangers on a Train (1951) and Rear Window (1954), along with Rope (1948, select scenes only). These three films are a master class in the creative possibilities of film editing.

In my role as editor-in-chief of Mise-en-scene, I will be attending the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association's 2016 national conference in Seattle, Washington, where I will be promoting KPU's forthcoming film studies journal and recruiting potential authors and reviewers. I will also be there to support two members of the Mise-en-scene editorial team, Paul Tyndall and Heather Cyr, who will be presenting their research papers at the conference.

I will be leading a three-part series on establishing your social media presence as an academic. Why leave your web presence to chance, when you have the power to coordinate your online persona, redirect traffic, and achieve SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? Discoverability can play a pivotal role in your research, citations, networks, and reach as a professional, provided you are SEO-savvy. This digital humanities workshop will guide you through the process of taking control of your digital footprint by populating your e-profile(s) and creating a personal website/landing page.

Over 500 people are expected to attend KDocs 2016, a community-based documentary film festival spanning two days. With an audience of KPU students, faculty, staff, alumni, community partners, and the general public, KDocs will provoke engagement, dialogue, and creativity, stimulating a critical examination of our complex world. Six exciting documentaries will be screened, followed by keynote speakers (Brandon Bryant, star of Drone and Founder, Project Red Hand; Caleb Behn, star of Fractured Land and Executive Director, Keepers of the Water; Kathy Corrigan, MLA, Official Opposition Deputy Chair and spokesperson for Advanced Education, Ivory Tower; Pablo Godoy, National Representative, UFCW Canada; National Coordinator, Students Against Migrant Exploitation (S.A.M.E.); Vice President, Ontario Federation of Labour, Food Chain$; David Hatfield, Leadership Consultant and Facilitator, The Mask You Live In; and William "Dub" Lawrence, star of Peace Officer) and panel discussions. As a representative of the KDocs board, I will be there to take care of our keynote speakers and to film the festival proceedings.