In high school, my father encouraged me to take a class at UMass, one of the five colleges located in the Pioneer Valley where I grew up. It was a summer class about film and literature: specifically literature adapted into film. But it was much more than that: our professor, a kind, passionate man with a wide knowledge of both subjects, wanted us to understand film from the ground up. He was the first person who told me to use Wikipedia—a site I had no knowledge of in 2004—and he encouraged us to familiarize ourselves with film terminology. He introduced me to Graham Greene and “The Importance of Being Earnest,” and explained what a two-shot was. And on the first day of class, he screened for us the 1992 documentary Visions of Light.
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