“My Students were Teenage Zombies”

Update: A much better post about this course and its use of the blog was written by Luke Waltzer here, read that instead.

Mikhail Gershovich’s “Fear Anxiety and Paranoia” film class had some unexpected visitors: student zombies! Something Tom Woodward and I have always known existed, but it is horrifying to finally see them emerge in all their blood besmirched glory at CUNY’s Baruch College.
As Mikhail himself notes in the comments of the post containing the image below:

In Business Policy 5100, students wear suits when they present. In my class, they dress up like zombies and pretend to eat each other. I love it. It was oddly appropriate that you presented on key ideas in zombie movies made up as though you just walked off the set of one.

Absolutely brilliant, I am jealous of such a fun group, and from what I understand this was the first presentation, which sets the bar so very high! What’s more is that Mikhail’s course looks to be absolutely fascinating, deal with everything from Noir to Neo-Noir to Cold War and Zombie films. With gems like Fritz Lange’s M, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate to name just a few. Just reinforces what I’ve always thought, film remains the highest form of art to date and teaching film the greatest experience ever—almost a guilty pleasure, especially with an awesome syllabus like this one.

Kudos to Mikhail and his all-too-cool students for embracing the zombie madness, and having some real fun with it! And major props to whoever did their makeup, the close-ups confirm that it is a professional job—is Tom Savini auditing this class?

zombie presentation at Baruch

zombie presentation at Baruch


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3 Responses to “My Students were Teenage Zombies”

  1. Luke says:

    We both said “kudos” in our posts.

  2. Mikhail says:

    You will now both be known as the kudos brothers.

    Thanks for the post, Rev. This class has been a blast so far and I appreciate the encouragement. As a beginning “blogfessor,” teaching out in the open like this for the first time, I’m learning a ton about what a course blog can do. (Now to get my students to comment on one another’s posts.)

    I’m also discovering that the Internet and streaming video have forever changed the teaching of film in an amazing way. Teaching film is always a heavy lift due to the logistics of screenings and availability of material, but things are now much simpler. There’s so much more out there to work with than there was the last time I taught film before the age of YouTube. Google Video, YouTube, archive.org and, especially Netflix (a “a textbook” for my class) and swank.com have made a ton of primary and secondary material available. Who knew that you could watch all of “I Married a Communist” on Google video?

  3. Pingback: Our Course Blog Will Eat Your Brains at cac.ophony.org

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