Professor of Art and Art History Judith Wechsler leads a double life. As a professor here at Tufts, her lifestyle may seem typical, bounded by the block schedule and the four walls of the classroom, but she is also an artist in her own right: an accomplished filmmaker. Most of her films are in French, so unfortunately, though there are 22 of them, only a few are translated into English. Therefore, her work risks becoming severely divided between France and the U.S.; filmmaking and teaching. Yet, Professor Wechsler does not allow these two realms to exist separately, and instead finds a way to synthesize the two ambitions in an overarching love of art, and more specifically, French art.
On Nov. 19, Wechsler will be honored with the title of Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, a prestigious honor she will share with other American artists such as Toni Morrison, Meryl Streep and Alan Ginsberg. The award is given to those who have made a significant contribution to French culture. Both through her work as a filmmaker and the books she has written on French art, the government's recognition of Wechsler's work is much deserved.
Though the award is for a side of Wechsler's career that many students here at Tufts don't get to see, her lectures in Origins of Modern Art and Historiography and Methodology of Art History reflect the principles with which she approaches filmmaking, and sometimes she incorporates her films into her curriculum. Since she began by teaching, the transition from a career as a professor to that of a filmmaker came about unexpectedly, like many important decisions in Wechsler's life.
It wasn't even until her junior year at Brandeis University that she decided to pursue art history. "I had heard Meyer Shapiro lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and I thought Ah! That's what I want to do," Wechsler said.
This discovery, so vital to the path she would later take, was greatly influenced also by a trip Wechsler took to Paris when she was 20 years old.
"Coming home from my junior year abroad in Israel, I stopped in Paris and, like I suppose most people who go to Paris for the first time, I fell in love with it. It was just so beautiful and the museums were so great," she said.
In her senior year at Brandeis, she took all art history classes so that she could apply to graduate school, ending up at Columbia University studying under Meyer Shapiro, her original influence. Her passion for French art was a driving force in her education. She said, "Once I went I knew I was going to have to keep going back."
And she did go back. In fact, she goes back three to four times a year, traveling there every winter and summer break, but also flying out for two short trips every spring and fall, to attend a meeting of the "Daumier Committee." She is one of four members who determine the authenticity of submitted pieces by Honoré Daumier, the great 19th century French artist. These short trips are demanding in the schedule of a professor, yet she manages to balance the two obligations.
"I'm going next week actually, for a one day meeting, and then I fly back so as not to miss my classes," she said.
Though traveling to France four times a year may seem luxurious, these trips are monopolized by work. Out of 14 years of work, all but one of the films she has made have been French, filmed with a French production company in France, for French television and French museums, so her time in France has been overwhelmed by filmmaking. These films include one on a 19th century French Jewish actress named Rachel, films on Daumier and Cezanne, a film commissioned by the Louvre Museum called "Drawing the Thinking Hand" (1996) and a film called "One Must be of One's Time" (1999), one of Daumier's few famous lines.
Most recently, she completed a film, "Monet's Water Lillies," commissioned by the Orangerie, home to his infamous water lily masterpieces. Her work will be shown two to four times a day at the museum, and will have its American premiere at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Dec. 5.
Her entrance into filmmaking happened while she was teaching at MIT, where she had her first ongoing academic appointment. There, she worked on finding a connection between art and science, which culminated in a book published by MIT Press called "On Aesthetics in Science" (1978).
While on a visiting committee to the Department of Architecture, through which art history was taught, she was invited to join a project proposed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for an orientation center featuring films that would "introduce the general public to ways of thinking about art, and ways of looking at art." Though the project fell through, Wechsler began to experiment with filmmaking, making a film called "Daumier, Paris, and the Spectator" in 1976, and then the next year another called "Cezanne: The Late Work."
"I learned a tremendous amount about filmmaking, and I learned about how you can present art history visually, because in film it's the image that drives the film, not the text, and I found that I loved thinking that way. For me it was an extension of doing art history and an extension of teaching, and I've gone on to make another 20 films since then," Wechsler said.
She made roughly a film each year, a hugely ambitious endeavor, while teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she worked for nine years.
"I had a lot of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, and so I was able to take off a number of semesters," said Wechsler.
Now that she is teaching at Tufts, she is more hesitant to enter the whirlwind of filmmaking. Though she has no plans for a new film, she is now in a transition period
"I'm teaching a new course, I'm writing, and maybe in a year or so I'll start to think whether I want to write a longer piece, a more substantial piece of research, or whether I want to do another film, though at the moment I'm more inclined to write," she said. "I really have to be passionate about a film idea to do it because the work that's involved is enormous."
Wechsler explained that though the actual filming takes only five to 10 days, a condensed period of time meant to reduce costs, the preparation for a film can take up to two or three years - until the funding and the script are all settled, with all of the rights negotiated. Though Wechsler says she will return to filmmaking eventually, having just finished her Monet film, she said, "I don't want to spend my time and energy doing all of the administrative work that it takes to actually make a film, to get to the creative part of making a film."
This creative aspect is what Wechsler is most interested in, and her atypical filmmaking style speaks to her creative inclinations. She explained the process of one of her films, entitled "Jasper Johns: Take an Object" (1990), a film on the leading American artist in which she sought to indicate something about the artist's process and style in the elements of the film.
"What I'm interested in is the form of the film, which is to say the way it's filmed and the rhythm with which it is edited," she said, "So that the style of the film corresponds in a way to the style of the artist I'm filming, so there's a certain variety in the ways I've approached filmmaking."
Her films don't typically rely on text, demonstrated in "Jasper Johns," a collaboration between Wechsler and Hans Namuth, a photographer known for his photos on Jackson Pollock. Wechsler sought to demonstrate Johns' own experimentation with "fragments and associations" in the style of her film. The main text came about when Wechsler approached John Cage, the experimental composer, with the idea to rearrange Johns' statements and writings according to Cage's own "I Ching chance processes," which culminated in an event at Paine Hall at Harvard.
The film opens with old footage of Johns working in his studio and then shifts gracefully into lovingly conducted shots of Johns' works set to the poetic phrases Cage recites, ending with scenes of Johns at the time of filming, as he works on a series of etchings. The film communicates something about Wechsler's vision.
"If I'm making a film about an artist I read everything I can, I immerse myself, I don't think that's how most filmmakers who get a commission to make a film on art work," she said.
Though some films are more didactic than others, fitting the different functions of each commission, Wechsler strives to have her films reflect some underlying theme in the artist's work, whether it goes unnoticed or not.
"Filming for me always has to suggest a way of looking. So for the museum audience to look more carefully at the work, I never speed across a work, I never pan back and forth - every camera move has to have a real purpose. I don't do camera moves for their own sake," she said.
Despite her success, and now the recognition by the French government of her accomplishments, Wechsler always returns to teaching as a love that is impossible to abandon. When asked whether she finds it tiring to lead a life so dissected by two ambitions and two countries, she said, "I've gotten very used to coming and going and I like it - I like switching languages. I've done this also in Israel because I've studied there and I've taught there twice as a visiting professor."
As a speaker both of Hebrew and French, Wechsler is able to immerse herself in foreign cultures as if they are a second home, and to connect her time abroad with her teaching here in the U.S., saying, "I like very much going to another country, speaking the language, communicating with students and with others. It's very exciting, so for me it's not a contradiction."
Just as she is tied to France and the U.S., a dweller in both worlds, Wechsler has found a way to connect the two very different disciplines of film and teaching. She has drawn a relationship between the two mediums of thought so that each is meaningful to the other, reflexively enhancing one another. Instead of reducing each to half of a career, she has made an interdisciplinary, international lifestyle for herself, all while managing to remain eloquent, calm and humbly cheerful.
"It's very demanding, but I love to work. It's exciting."
