Nathan's Thesis
Overwhelming Mother: Understanding Direction and Pure Cinema, Today. 457pp. Completed 2009; revised and expanded in 2017.
Nominated for the 2009 University of Washington Library Research Award for Undergraduates.
I've been asked about this for years, and see no reason not to share it now. No, I wasn't required to write a 457-page paper in college, but you can bet I wanted to. I love cinema. I love it. I noticed an absence of something in most film books and did my best to fill it, with enthusiasm, passion, and one massive bibliography.
From the back cover: The paper’s stated aim is to help the layman appreciate film as art, through a clear understanding of the craft of direction and its ultimate end, Pure Cinema. “Overwhelming Mother,” so named in accordance with Merriam-Webster’s definition of the latter word as “an extreme or ultimate example of its kind, especially in terms of scale” (example: “the mother of all ocean liners”), is divided into a prelude, five sections, and appendices. If you’re in a hurry to catch a bus, the entire point of this paper is contained within Section Two, Example One (pp 67-78). The rest is just for fun.
An introductory essay at the opening of the book helps delineate its aims:
You're a doll for even wanting to read this thing.
In 2009, I was riding the high of approaching the conclusion of two decades of schooling. I couldn't wait, but I also knew I could do more. There was an urgency within me, unrealized by academic life thus far.
I did two theses, not one; the other was an eight-by-eight foot photography mural utilizing more than 200 images, which I scrapped twenty-four hours before its due date and redid entirely using new images. There was a desire to push the limits of what I was capable of creatively.
This only needed to be ten or fifteen pages.
I was riding the wave of having won the University of Washington Library Research Award for Undergraduates the year prior, for my 2008 Geography: A Three-Part Paper. That one was "only" fifty-three pages, and followed the standard academic template for what papers should look like. It was well-researched, sophisticated, verbose, well-received by the professors who read it... and terrifically boring.
After the accolades it received, I felt the appropriate thing to do was take a risk and push myself in new directions. Another scholarly-voiced paper would be too stultifying. This new endeavor needed to feel fresh. It needed some juice to it.
Also, it was simply too large and dense and long to sustain such a dry writing style. I enjoy the academic approach and feel great about the earlier paper, but following the traditional mold of stating theses outright and then asking for the reader's attention for a further few hundred pages felt nonsensical. The better to follow structures used in mystery thrillers rather than papers: reveal the information slowly, dexterously, maintaining a hold and creating a journey. Let things rise and fall, and be exciting. Use bread crumbs. I wanted readers to stay up at night paging through this heap, not falling asleep five minutes into Chapter Two.
There's another reason for colloquial voicing here besides reader interest, a reason I find ultimately more important. It's to do with the intended audience.
Film takes the place today of what literature and theatre once were: art consumed on a large scale by the masses. I'm speaking to everyone here. I do not wish to shut out certain interested readers by staying within the exclusive realm of high-falutin' verbiage and exerting a status separation alienating the many filmgoers I wish to reach with this paper. That exclusivity limits the unprejudiced dissemination of insight I want to see.
Neither, however, do I wish to lose the interest of folks educated in words but not films by diluting the grandiose heights possible with the English language, just for the sake of reaching the masses. I think a middle ground is achievable by way of a certain tone, a voice welcoming in a manner both erudite and accessible, without compromise to either. You can be the judge.
I appreciate the scholarly validation of being nominated for the 2009 award, but feel it's appropriate it didn't win; the aims here are different. The real victory is if you, dear reader, walk away from this pile satisfied, with perspective, knowledge and a smile.
As for the content itself, there is the temptation, as with all books on cinema, to update with the thoughts on changing trends and newer pictures. Aside from minor updates and footnotes, I’m choosing to leave this document as an observation of the landscape in 2009, in part because the perspective ended up being an ideal one for reasons both tragic and ideal: Oliver Stone has stopped making the masterpieces we discuss here; Tony Scott passed not long after making his two most artistically daring works, which we detail at length; Michael Bay has gone further into his exploration of aesthetics divorced from form as discussed in our appendices; and crucially, the discussion of Pure Cinema and Terrence Malick as its ultimate contemporary arbiter now reads as remarkably prescient.
Malick’s 2011 Tree of Life and uncharacteristically prolific current decade (in which he also completed a one-of-a-kind trilogy of freeform explorations on contemporary ennui with To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song) reveal his concern with precisely the concepts we emphasize in his earlier work here. The content is more timely than I could possibly have hoped. My only addition in response to this is an additional appendix on the aforementioned trilogy.
Enjoy!
Available on request– email me! 457pp. Print version (paperback): $80. Ebook: $15.
Click here for Nathan's Resume and CV.
Nominated for the 2009 University of Washington Library Research Award for Undergraduates.
I've been asked about this for years, and see no reason not to share it now. No, I wasn't required to write a 457-page paper in college, but you can bet I wanted to. I love cinema. I love it. I noticed an absence of something in most film books and did my best to fill it, with enthusiasm, passion, and one massive bibliography.
From the back cover: The paper’s stated aim is to help the layman appreciate film as art, through a clear understanding of the craft of direction and its ultimate end, Pure Cinema. “Overwhelming Mother,” so named in accordance with Merriam-Webster’s definition of the latter word as “an extreme or ultimate example of its kind, especially in terms of scale” (example: “the mother of all ocean liners”), is divided into a prelude, five sections, and appendices. If you’re in a hurry to catch a bus, the entire point of this paper is contained within Section Two, Example One (pp 67-78). The rest is just for fun.
An introductory essay at the opening of the book helps delineate its aims:
You're a doll for even wanting to read this thing.
In 2009, I was riding the high of approaching the conclusion of two decades of schooling. I couldn't wait, but I also knew I could do more. There was an urgency within me, unrealized by academic life thus far.
I did two theses, not one; the other was an eight-by-eight foot photography mural utilizing more than 200 images, which I scrapped twenty-four hours before its due date and redid entirely using new images. There was a desire to push the limits of what I was capable of creatively.
This only needed to be ten or fifteen pages.
I was riding the wave of having won the University of Washington Library Research Award for Undergraduates the year prior, for my 2008 Geography: A Three-Part Paper. That one was "only" fifty-three pages, and followed the standard academic template for what papers should look like. It was well-researched, sophisticated, verbose, well-received by the professors who read it... and terrifically boring.
After the accolades it received, I felt the appropriate thing to do was take a risk and push myself in new directions. Another scholarly-voiced paper would be too stultifying. This new endeavor needed to feel fresh. It needed some juice to it.
Also, it was simply too large and dense and long to sustain such a dry writing style. I enjoy the academic approach and feel great about the earlier paper, but following the traditional mold of stating theses outright and then asking for the reader's attention for a further few hundred pages felt nonsensical. The better to follow structures used in mystery thrillers rather than papers: reveal the information slowly, dexterously, maintaining a hold and creating a journey. Let things rise and fall, and be exciting. Use bread crumbs. I wanted readers to stay up at night paging through this heap, not falling asleep five minutes into Chapter Two.
There's another reason for colloquial voicing here besides reader interest, a reason I find ultimately more important. It's to do with the intended audience.
Film takes the place today of what literature and theatre once were: art consumed on a large scale by the masses. I'm speaking to everyone here. I do not wish to shut out certain interested readers by staying within the exclusive realm of high-falutin' verbiage and exerting a status separation alienating the many filmgoers I wish to reach with this paper. That exclusivity limits the unprejudiced dissemination of insight I want to see.
Neither, however, do I wish to lose the interest of folks educated in words but not films by diluting the grandiose heights possible with the English language, just for the sake of reaching the masses. I think a middle ground is achievable by way of a certain tone, a voice welcoming in a manner both erudite and accessible, without compromise to either. You can be the judge.
I appreciate the scholarly validation of being nominated for the 2009 award, but feel it's appropriate it didn't win; the aims here are different. The real victory is if you, dear reader, walk away from this pile satisfied, with perspective, knowledge and a smile.
As for the content itself, there is the temptation, as with all books on cinema, to update with the thoughts on changing trends and newer pictures. Aside from minor updates and footnotes, I’m choosing to leave this document as an observation of the landscape in 2009, in part because the perspective ended up being an ideal one for reasons both tragic and ideal: Oliver Stone has stopped making the masterpieces we discuss here; Tony Scott passed not long after making his two most artistically daring works, which we detail at length; Michael Bay has gone further into his exploration of aesthetics divorced from form as discussed in our appendices; and crucially, the discussion of Pure Cinema and Terrence Malick as its ultimate contemporary arbiter now reads as remarkably prescient.
Malick’s 2011 Tree of Life and uncharacteristically prolific current decade (in which he also completed a one-of-a-kind trilogy of freeform explorations on contemporary ennui with To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, and Song to Song) reveal his concern with precisely the concepts we emphasize in his earlier work here. The content is more timely than I could possibly have hoped. My only addition in response to this is an additional appendix on the aforementioned trilogy.
Enjoy!
Available on request– email me! 457pp. Print version (paperback): $80. Ebook: $15.
Click here for Nathan's Resume and CV.
| nathan_vass_1_page_resume_with_links.pdf |
| 2022_nathan_vass_cv_complete.pdf |
