While I was on the Stanford site looking up information on the new study by one of their researchers that found some Americans subconsciously associate black people with apes, I learned more about Stanford's award-winning graduate program in documentary film and video (which is VERY hard to located on their site). With the help of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts which was established in 2006, Stanford will soon be expanding to include an undergraduate major in Film and Media Studies.

Check out the clip below - "The Art of Filmmaking: Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes" - where faculty and students talk about the program and their current projects:

A 16-year-old girl spars in the boxing ring. A Catholic nun examines patients in a rural health clinic. A woman looks back on her life as a man. People with disabilities create art with found objects."

Personally, I have mixed feelings about going to film school. Maybe one should spend all that tuition money on actually making a few shorts and a feature. Then again, one can make a lot of industry contacts at film school, assuming that the faculty is filled with actual filmmakers, and not sad old farts who regurgitate facts from ancient text books and have no real-world experience. Still, you can learn a lot on your own by reading some books ("Rebel Without A Clue" by Robert Rodriguez remains a favourite of mine, as does Rick Schmit's "Extreme DV at Used Car Prices") and magazines (Filmmaker, MovieMaker), and also joining some online (indiewire.com, storylink.com) and real-world film communities (like my local Liaison of Independent Filmmakers of Toronto).

What I said about irrelevant instructors - that's exactly the sort of experience I had in my one year post-secondary media arts program. I encountered many totally lame instructors, some of whom were talentless egomanics with no actual work to show, just a bunch of theories to spout. However, I did have one good one - the tv studio teacher (Frances) who really knew her stuff backwards and forward and was able to impart it, and one interesting one - the ENG teacher (Jane) who was more of an artist than a journalist, so she taught us more about visual story-telling than hands-on technical stuff. When I went back for a visit ten years later, Frances not only remembered my name, but the job I got right after I left school.

If you really want to go to film school, I think a short program is a good idea, one year or less. Many schools have accelerated summer programs as well. Then get out, and get to work. These days - unlike when I was starting out - you can build up a body of self-financed work and get it seen by creating your own site and putting your work online. Of course, you need to do some promo stuff (such as search engine optimization and social media marketing) to let people know where to go and see it.

Maybe later, you can go back to school - possibly as a guest lecturer. And if you're serious about teaching, and have a good enough body of work, including some film festival entries/wins, and they may even let you into a Master's program without an undergraduate degree or diploma.

A lot of colleges have certificate programs (4 to 8 courses) that you can take in the evening and on the weekend. One thing I really like about these sort of part-time certificate programs is that they are usually more hands-on, and less theoretical. And of course, you get a piece of paper. At one of my local community colleges, George Brown here in Toronto, the continuing education department has an eight course program that leads to an Independent Filmmaking Certificate. How rocking is that? And what makes it even more attractive is that it is AFFORDABLE, especially if you take them one or two at a time:

Core courses (compulsory):
* History of the Cinema ($234)
* Write Your Own Screenplay ($261)
* Producing and Directing an Independent Digital Movie ($263)
* Digital Cinematography ($263)
* Digital Video Editing ($235)
* Video Production ($453)

Elective courses (chose two):
* Directing Actors for the Screen ($235)
* Film Production Assistant ($177)
* Introduction to Indian Cinema ($261)
* Production Design and Storyboarding ($235)

To get in, you don't even need to dig up your high school transcripts; if you're over 18, you can just walk up and register. You don't have to take all the courses and apply for the certificate; if you want, you can just take the classes that interest you. They also have a 7 course Screenwriting Certificate which covers both film and television.

I used to enjoy watching Daryn Kagan deliver the news over on CNN (before it's super sleazy tabloid downturn and disturbing pandering-to-the-right-wing swing), but then she started dating that lying unrepentant drug addicted racist sexist blowhard hypocrite Rush Limbaugh, something I found somewhat shocking.

Then I remembered than all sorts of usually sensible women have extraordinarily bad taste in men; still her with him was really scraping the bottom of barrell. Talk about sullying oneself. Years later, I'm trying to scrub my mind clean and purge it of the fearsome image of that doughboy pawing her (or anyone else, for that matter).

She left CNN on September 1, 2006, after a 12 year tenure when the network declined to renew her employment contract. In an interview with columist Paul Bedard on USNews.com the next month, she claimed that CNN wouldn't tell her why they let her go.

Um, Daryn, think about it. When it comes to being associated with freaky right winger haters spouting nonsense, perhaps they prefer the slightly less awful Glenn "I am not a journalist" Beck to the hugely less palatable Rush Limbaugh. Her amiable co-host, the hunky Clark Kent-look-alike Bill Hemmer also left and ended up at (gag) Fox News - guess a boy's gotta eat.

Anyway, she finally remembered that's she's actually fabulous, mustered up some self-esteem and ditched the scumbag (to the rejoicing of panting news fanboys/girls everywhere) and reinvented herself to prove that there are second acts in showbiz. She's now running DarynKagan.com, a very popular website that is getting quite influential. It even won the 2007 Interactive Media Award for Outstanding Achievement. Her latest cool project is a must-buy/read inspirational book, and here's the trailer for it:

A new study claims some Americans subconsciously associate Black people With apes. The absolute BEST part is that the subjects were UNIVERSITY STUDENTS:

Crude historical depictions of African Americans as ape-like may have disappeared from mainstream U.S. culture, but research presented in a new paper by psychologists at Stanford, Pennsylvania State University and the University of California-Berkeley reveals that many Americans subconsciously associate blacks with apes.

In addition, the findings show that society is more likely to condone violence against black criminal suspects as a result of its broader inability to accept African Americans as fully human, according to the researchers.

Co-author Jennifer Eberhardt, a Stanford associate professor of psychology who is black (and a new personal role model for me), said she was shocked by the results, particularly since they involved subjects born after Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. "This was actually some of the most depressing work I have done," she said. "This shook me up. You have suspicions when you do the work—intuitions—you have a hunch. But it was hard to prepare for how strong [the black-ape association] was—how we were able to pick it up every time."

The paper, "Not Yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization and Contemporary Consequences," is the result of a series of six previously unpublished studies conducted by Eberhardt, Pennsylvania State University psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff (the lead author and a former student of Eberhardt's) and Matthew C. Jackson and Melissa J. Williams, graduate students at Penn State and Berkeley, respectively. The paper is scheduled to appear Feb. 7 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is published by the American Psychological Association.

The research took place over six years at Stanford and Penn State under Eberhardt's supervision. It involved mostly white male undergraduates. In a series of studies that subliminally flashed black or white male faces on a screen for a fraction of a second to "prime" the students, researchers found subjects could identify blurry ape drawings much faster after they were primed with black faces than with white faces. The researchers consistently discovered a black-ape association even if the young adults said they knew nothing about its historical connotations. The connection was made only with African American faces; the paper's third study failed to find an ape association with other non-white groups, such as Asians. Despite such race-specific findings, the researchers stressed that dehumanization and animal imagery have been used for centuries to justify violence against many oppressed groups.

"Despite widespread opposition to racism, bias remains with us," Eberhardt said. "African Americans are still dehumanized; we're still associated with apes in this country. That association can lead people to endorse the beating of black suspects by police officers, and I think it has lots of other consequences that we have yet to uncover."

Historical background

Scientific racism in the United States was graphically promoted in a mid-19th-century book by Josiah C. Nott and George Robins Gliddon titled Types of Mankind, which used misleading illustrations to suggest that "Negroes" ranked between "Greeks" and chimpanzees. "When we have a history like that in this country, I don't know how much of that goes away completely, especially to the extent that we are still dealing with severe racial inequality, which fuels and maintains those associations in ways that people are unaware," Eberhardt said.

Although such grotesque characterizations of African Americans have largely disappeared from mainstream U.S. society, Eberhardt noted that science education could be partly responsible for reinforcing the view that blacks are less evolved than whites. An iconic 1970 illustration, "March of Progress," published in the Time-Life book Early Man, depicts evolution beginning with a chimpanzee and ending with a white man. "It's a legacy of our past that the endpoint of evolution is a white man," Eberhardt said. "I don't think it's intentional, but when people learn about human evolution, they walk away with a notion that people of African descent are closer to apes than people of European descent. When people think of a civilized person, a white man comes to mind."

Consequences of socially endorsed violence

In the paper's fifth study, the researchers subliminally primed 115 white male undergraduates with words associated with either apes (such as "monkey," "chimp," "gorilla") or big cats (such as "lion," "tiger," "panther"). The latter was used as a control because both images are associated with violence and Africa, Eberhardt said. The subjects then watched a two-minute video clip, similar to the television program COPS, depicting several police officers violently beating a man of undetermined race. A mugshot of either a white or a black man was shown at the beginning of the clip to indicate who was being beaten, with a description conveying that, although described by his family as "a loving husband and father," the suspect had a serious criminal record and may have been high on drugs at the time of his arrest.

The students were then asked to rate how justified the beating was. Participants who believed the suspect was white were no more likely to condone the beating when they were primed with either ape or big cat words, Eberhardt said. But those who thought the suspect was black were more likely to justify the beating if they had been primed with ape words than with big cat words. "Taken together, this suggests that implicit knowledge of a Black-ape association led to marked differences in participants' judgments of Black criminal suspects," the researchers write.

According to the paper's authors, this link has devastating consequences for African Americans because it "alters visual perception and attention, and it increases endorsement of violence against black suspects." For example, the paper's sixth study showed that in hundreds of news stories from 1979 to 1999 in the Philadelphia Inquirer, African Americans convicted of capital crimes were about four times more likely than whites convicted of capital crimes to be described with ape-relevant language, such as "barbaric," "beast," "brute," "savage" and "wild." "Those who are implicitly portrayed as more ape-like in these articles are more likely to be executed by the state than those who are not," the researchers write.

The way forward

Despite the paper's findings, Eberhardt said she is optimistic about the future. "This work isn't arguing that there hasn't been any progress made or that we are living in the same society that existed in the 19th century," she said. "We have made a lot of progress on race issues, but we should recognize that racial bias isn't dead. We still need to be aware of that and aware of all the different ways [racism] can affect us, despite our intentions and motivations to be egalitarian. We still have work to do."

For Eberhardt, two stories of race exist in America. "One is about the disappearance of bias—that it's no longer with us," she said. "But the other is about the transformation of bias. It's not the egregious bias anymore, but it's modern bias, subtle bias." With both of these stories, she said, there is an understanding that society has moved beyond the historic battles centered around race. "We want to argue, with this work, that there is one old race battle that we're still fighting," she said. "That is the battle for blacks to be recognized as fully human."

This research was supported by a Stanford University Dean's Award to Jennifer Eberhardt.