Gone With the Wind Remixed
By Abhay Malik
Nov. 3, 2011 12:42 a.m.
UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television is breaking new ground with an innovative interdisciplinary course.
TFT has created a new three-quarter-long course studying the classic story “Gone With the Wind.”
The class, which involves both the theater and film, television and digital media departments of TFT, will eventually create an entirely new production inspired by the iconic work called “Gone With the Wind Remixed.” The fall and winter quarters of the course will be spent developing the project, ultimately leading up to the final production during the end of spring quarter.
Laura Karpman, Emmy-winning composer, visiting assistant professor at TFT and lecturer at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, is teaching the class and said the three-part course will be using the classic film to create something completely new.
“We’re basically looking at “˜Gone With the Wind’ and analyzing it critically in every possible way, (from) aspects of production (to) looking at the issues brought up in the film, and we are, out of that, creating a multimedia work that will use technology to illuminate the issues of the film,” said Karpman.
Karpman said that the students are currently in the process of coming up with ideas for the production.
“The students are devising every imaginable kind of texture, using projections, holograms, Twitter, old-fashioned analog (and) acting. Every kind of discipline will be used in this performance,” she said.
According to Karpman, the production will be an installation, meaning that the audience will walk through a site and observe different parts of the project. It will likely be done in North Campus, in the area around Melnitz Hall, Macgowan Hall and the Broad Art Center.
Allyson Nadia Field, an assistant professor of cinema and media studies who is co-teaching the course with Karpman during the fall, said, “It’s not a performance of “˜Gone with the Wind.’ … We’re not just restaging “˜Gone with the Wind.’ We’re taking ideas from it and thinking of remixing those ideas into something new.”
Karpman said that theater Professor Sue-Ellen Case picked “Gone With the Wind” as the work to use because of its iconic stature and the social and production issues in the film.
She also said that one of the biggest goals of the project is to allow the different departments of TFT to interact with each other so that students of a variety of disciplines can work together to create the production.
Rhazes Spell, a second-year Design | Media Arts graduate student in the class, said that he especially enjoys the interdisciplinary nature of the class.
“From a student perspective, (what) might be one of the most rewarding things is that (the class) is one of the only opportunities I think most of us have had to work with such a broad spectrum of different backgrounds and talents.”
Field said another objective of the project is to stimulate the audience and get them to think about what a remix can mean.
“I think it’s taking something from the past,” said Karpman about the project, “and using it as a launching pad for the future.”
