FILM PIONEER AT UWT >>>

By now scores of students have jettisoned all thoughts of homework and rushed headlong into the wild blue of summer. Instead I've gone back to school.

Already five years have elapsed since graduating from the University of Washington's Tacoma campus, and some of my best memories from that time involve sitting in on Dr. Claudia Gorbman's film lectures.

UW also left its mark on her. "It was either ‘77 or '78," Gorbman laughs. In one of those years she received her doctorate in Romance Languages and Literature, thus setting her on a career path that would ultimately lead her back home. "I was in Indiana [in the late 1980s]," she recalls. "I heard the University of Washington was going to open two new campuses, and it was a very exciting prospect for me."

Dr. Gorbman fearlessly embraced the challenge to "invent a new university with eleven other adventurous souls [fellow faculty]," and took up her new position in 1990. She likens those breathless early days to the Wild West, with she and her small staff as "pioneers."

One can imagine the film professor's struggles with securing suitable film projection equipment for a classroom in the early ‘90s, particularly if that classroom belonged to a school in its infancy. Dr. Gorbman had to pull films from her own collection to screen for students. 

Two decades later, and UWT keeps morphing and gobbling up Pacific Avenue block by block. Yet this teacher's infectious passion for her subject remains one of the few constants on campus. It certainly wore off on me: I still remember Gorbman pausing a movie mid-scene to revel in its "delicious" lighting design.

"After all these years, the main mission is to always communicate enthusiasm about learning. And the minute you lose that, you shouldn't be teaching anymore," she says.

Besides "hanging out in the woods" with her dogs and partner this summer, she is co-editing a heavy-duty anthology entitled - get ready - The Oxford Handbook of New Audio-Visual Aesthetics.

It should make for one delicious read.