Dr. Rich Ness is retiring this June. He has been teaching film at Western for twenty-five years. Generations of students have been introduced to the world of cinema in Dr. Ness’s many sections of Introduction to Film, where they got their first look at classics like Hitchcock’s Rope, Welles’ Citizen Kane, and Ashby’s Harold and Maude. One of his most popular and innovative courses is the Hollywood Studio System, where students take on roles as studio creatives and executives, move fictional movies through production, make deals, and learn along the way about the actors, directors, editors, cinematographers, set designers, costumers, composers, and others who made some of the greatest films of the twentieth-century.

Dr. Ness specializes in film and music, and taught advanced courses that focused on the role of sound and movie music, but it should not be forgotten that during his time at Western, Dr. Ness has been a hugely productive scholar, presenting at national and international conferences, placing his articles in some of the world’s most well-known film journals, and writing reference books as a solo author including the truly mammoth Encyclopdia of Journalists on Film and From Headline Hunter to Superman: A Journalism Filmography. He also authored the monograph Alan Rudolph: Romance and a Crazed World for the Twyane Filmmaker Series.

In addition to his teaching and scholarship, Ness has made huge contributions both to the official film minor but also to the culture of film in Macomb through his curation of several film series over the years, particularly the beloved summer film series here on campus.

The Mirror & the Lamp reached out to Dr. Ness to ask a few questions about his long career at Western and his plans for retirement.

M&L: What is your background in film, and how did you first come to Western?

RN: If I really want to go back to the beginning, my background in film probably started when I got a job running projectors in the theater in Nevada, Iowa, while I was in high school. As an undergraduate at Iowa State I ran the university film program and began writing film and arts reviews for both the campus and city papers. I decided to pursue my Master’s at Iowa State, and, as a result of my teaching assistantship and guest lectures in some film classes, I was hired to teach film courses full time while working on my degree. I taught there for four years, but unfortunately ISU at the time was going through the kinds of budget cuts and restructuring that Western is experiencing now, and a year after I completed my masters the university eliminated the Telecommunicative Arts department in which I was teaching. This turned out to be the incentive I needed to earn a Ph.D.

I was accepted into the doctoral program at Wayne State in Detroit, with an emphasis in Film Studies. Because I had already worked as a full-time teacher, my assistantship at Wayne State consisted of teaching film courses as the sole instructor, including some Master’s-level classes. At the time I entered the doctoral program I had also written two books in the field. Since then I have written a third book and my work has been published by Cahiers du cinema, the Hitchcock Annual, Cinema Journal, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, the IJPC Journal, Miranda, the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, the Sage Encyclopedia of Journalism, and in anthologies on Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, Michael Moore, Ingmar Bergman, movie soundtracks, and scandal magazines. I have also presented at numerous national and international conferences, and I was invited to be a guest panelist at the Locarno film festival in Switzerland in 2004. While completing my Ph.D. I was hired to teach at Western, earned tenure, and have been teaching here for twenty-five years.

M&L: What have you most enjoyed about your career teaching film?

RN: Watching students in the class screenings experiencing a film for the first time and discovering how much they get into it, especially one they didn’t think they would like, such as a silent or old classic black and white film. I occasionally get emails from former students thanking me for turning them on to a particular film, genre, or filmmaker, and to me that is the real reward of teaching.

M&L: Looking back, what contributions to the students and the department are you most proud of?

Along with Sharon Evans, the former chair of the Broadcasting department, I helped create and send to the curriculum committee a slate of classes that made a huge contribution to the current film minor. It was a real challenge to develop the minor because it involved working across two colleges, with two deans and two department chairs. I’m proud of my contribution to making film a vibrant part of the curriculum at Western.

M&L: What will you miss the most about the work you do?

RN: Nothing, since I don’t plan to stop doing it! My retirement from Western is just the end of a chapter in a book that I hope continues to be written. Or perhaps more appropriately, the end of one reel while I await the cue marks for the changeover to the next one.

M&L: What are you most looking forward to in retirement?

RN: Having more time to write. I have a number of projects that I’ve had to put on the back burner while teaching full time, and I am looking forward to getting back to these.