Student Documentary Filmmaker Zac Grigg Wins Spot in 2012 Virginia Film FestivalOctober 2012

"Willie"  • A film by Zac Grigg

"Willie," a film by English major (Film Studies concentration) Zac Grigg has been chosen as an official selection of the Virginia Film Festival. The film will be screened at 11 a.m., Sunday Nov. 4, in the Newcomb Theater Hall on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

See a Charlottesville television interview of Zac at the Virginia Film Festival in Charlottesville.

About the film
Willie Greenough is a model maker in Charlottesville, who has been creating three-dimensional models of homes and buildings for 14 years. This documentary follows Willie through his latest creation, which reveals a close friendship with a local architect as well as the role of the community at Innisfree Village in Willie's life. His unique approach to model-making has helped shape Charlottesville and its surrounding area as it appears today. Though autism is a development disability, Willie shows that, despite his challenges, we are more alike than we are different.
See the trailer for "Willie."

ZAC GRIGG is an English major with a concentration in Film.  This is hardly his first movie.  He writes, directs, videos, and edits films for other classes and for fun.  Film is Zac’s passion; getting lost in the creation of a movie and spending hours perfecting it is all absolute bliss in his opinion.  Zac intends for film to be his career and way of life in the future.   He spent time making movies in New York this summer, and can see himself living there permanently, as he loves cities.

Zac also loves the classic film "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," spending reflective quiet time on his own, and is generally easy—going and positive about everything.  Except wet grass. He hates wet grass.—Sally Grace Holtgrieve

Back to top

May 2012
NEWPORT NEWS-- Love, loneliness and song all were on the minds of Hampton Roads elders whose stories Christopher Newport University journalism students documented in recent months.
    Grow in love. Don’t fall in love, one elder advised.
    “I really miss him," a widow said of her late husband.  "I would go anywhere and do anything to get him back."
    Another said, “See, I’m 77 years old, so I sing while I got a chance."
    Their videos and stories have just been published online in The Wisdom of Age Project / Hampton Roads.
    Students fanned out from Hampton to Williamsburg, spending three months regularly visiting elders in their homes, at a daycare center and even along railroad tracks, where one man helps out homeless people. Each student worked with one elder or one couple.
    “Our goal is to challenge ageist stereotypes,” according to Terry Lee, the CNU professor who began the project three years ago. “We spend time getting to know elders, hearing their stories. Spending time and listening are the keys. We learn that elders have complicated lives like everyone else, and that they can be happy and eager to learn themselves.”
    Stereotypes about elders—that they are simply financial burdens, that they have no zest for life, that they are boring—evaporate once students visit their elder a few times.
    One student documenting the stories of a retired mental health worker learned a lot. “Spiritual Existence,” “Life at Its Most Elemental” and “Don’t Fall In Love With Me!” are the titles of three of the eight films she produced.
    Stories of Vietnam, Egypt and the seas are documented by another student who spent time with a retired U.S. Navy captain. “You know, a lot of people in my family really do not recognize what I did in the past while I was in the military,” the captain told her.
    Several elders expressed their thanks not only for providing family stories to share and pass on, but for the experience of “reaching back into the past to remember all of those good (and bad) times,” as one elder reported. Another elder wrote about his experience, “She caused a wonderful adventure for each of us, for which I will always be grateful.”
    Lee has taught the course three times and will teach it again next spring semester. “For me, documentary work of this nature is of a high moral order. Students become part of their elder subject’s life, coming to appreciate both their joys and their struggles. Then the tough work begins, because framing one’s life in a short video or narrative, I assure you, is not easy.”
    Lee said that students also learn some tough life lessons. Three years ago, the wife of one student team’s elder died early in the project. “The whole class was upset,” Lee said. “Should the students continue their project with the bereaved husband? Were they intruding? There were mixed feelings, and the two students documenting his story were at an impasse. So I said, ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ They did, and he wanted more than ever for them to do the project.”
    The students did, they attended his wife’s funeral service, and they still visit him, Lee said. (That film, "Where's Jesse?" is online.)
    Videos and narratives in The Wisdom of Age Project are available online at www.wisdomofageproject.org/hr.

Back to top

Spring 2013 Senior Seminar
M W 6 p.m.
Dr. Mary Wright

Monster Narratives

This Senior Seminar focuses on the broad topic of monster narratives, pervasive throughout oral and written texts, which exposes (celebrates) the “freaks” and “weirdos” that exist at the centers and margins of the cultures of all pre-literate and literate people. Because the rhetoric of monstrosity is a social strategy designed to police behavior and purge what is identified as evil, the monster can be traced throughout history, religion, and literature, coiled at the pit of any cautionary tale, an unseen entity ready to strike the innocent and fearful. To examine the narrative formula is to reveal cultures negotiating loss, beset with anxieties and fantasies, obsessed with a rhetoric of terror and fear, and adept at using the discourse of monstrosity as a social tool, a sanctioned way to promote racism, homophobia, sexism, and religious intolerance.

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Maria Tatar, trans.
Dexter is Delicious, Jeff Lindsay
A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
Perfume: The Story of a Murder, Patrick Suskind
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn
Mistress of the Art of Death, Ariana Franklin

Back to top

Spring 2013 Senior Seminar
M W F 1 p.m.
Dr. Jean Filetti

Writing Trauma

The course title comes from Dominick LaCapra’s theoretical distinction between writing about trauma, which is reconstructing the past objectively and is the realm of history, and writing trauma, which “indicates some distance from trauma [ . . . ] .  Trauma indicates a shattering break or cesura in experience which has belated effects.  Writing trauma [ . . . ] involves processes of acting out, working over, and to some extent working through in analyzing and ‘giving voice’ to the past—processes of coming to terms with traumatic ‘experience,’ limit events, and their symptomatic effects that achieve articulation in different  combinations and hybridized forms” (Writing History, Writing Trauma 186).
Course readings include both fiction and nonfiction accounts of trauma and discussion will cohere around such questions as the following:

Why study the literature of trauma in a post-9/11 world?
In what ways is the literature of trauma a marginalized literature?
What purpose does recounting the horror serve?  Are these purposes the same for the survivor and for society?
How might trauma be further interrogated by examining the roles of perpetrators, collaborators, profiteers, bystanders, resisters, rescuers, and those who fall into what Primo Levi calls, “a gray zone, poorly defined, where the two camps of masters and servants both diverge and converge,” a reference to “the prisoner-functionary,” the Jewish prisoner, for example, who, albeit a victim, turned on other prisoners and became a perpetrator? (The Drowned and the Saved, 42).
Regarding trauma, what is ethical to tell and who should do that telling?
What does it mean to survive trauma?
Who is the survivor’s audience?
In what ways does the survivor’s sense of community shape his or her testimony?
How is the survivor’s account accessed and influenced by the non-traumatized reader?
What messages in our society conspire to keep the survivor’s voice silent?

Required Readings:

Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Eli Wiesel’s Night
Tim O’Brien’s If I Die in a Combat Zone
Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina
Ghassan Kanafani’s All That’s Left to You

Back to top