TAKING STUDENTS THROUGH SPACE & TIME >>>
Talk about a globetrotter. Hirsh Diamant began life as a Ukrainian in the capital city of Kiev, eventually left as a dissident, at one point studied in Israel, and has acted in New York. Westward he continued from Big Apple to the Evergreen State, in part a desire to escape, in his words, "the crack capital of the world." For the next fifteen years he toiled as a farmer before ultimately going broke.
Fate has drawn Diamant to yet another capital - Olympia, back in academia as a teacher at Evergreen State College. The school's well-known reputation for an educational structure looser than its contemporaries lets this world traveller engage students across multiple disciplines.
"The world is so interesting and so complex," Diamant says. "Teaching so many things allows me to be interested in a lot of different areas."
With a focus on arts and cultural studies, Diamant designs his various courses in unique ways. Visual Literacy (which just wrapped for the summer) looks at the evolution of visual art and technology, commencing with drawing, then progressing to photography and the modern digital revolution. These, for Diamant, explore the three dimensions of space. When still pictures are linked together in a sequence, the fourth dimension comes into play.
This is the realm of cinema, for "film is a medium of time," Diamant states.
The man has seen his own progression as a filmmaker, from performing in his older brothers' home movies as a child to creating works like the stunningly beautiful NuWa Dreams (still a memorable entry from 2008's Olympia Film Festival). Diamant will keep alive his love for "the most captivating, the most enjoyable medium of the 21st century" by volunteering again at OFF this autumn.