Amelia Christopher, Special to The Denisonian–
The Cinema House, a quiet, unassuming building, sits in a cul-de-sac of five small, white houses. Inside, however, is anything but unassuming.
The house hosts a small library, classrooms, and a large movie viewing room. The building also houses the offices of the Denison cinema faculty, including that of Michael Morris.
Perpetually clad in black, Morris has been a staple of the Cinema House for four years. Morris is a professor of “anything on the making side” of cinema, from Elementary Cinema Production to Junior/Senior Seminar to Screenwriting.
“I kind of found filmmaking by accident, honestly,” Morris said. While he was in college, he had a deep interest in music. “All I was interested in doing was being in a band,” he said. In search of a sound production class, he found himself in a film class instead, and fell in love with the discipline. “I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a film school at the local university. I think I’ll go and study that,’” Morris said.
“Similar to finding filmmaking by accident, I think I found teaching by accident,” said Morris. Knowing that his schooling hadn’t ended in undergrad, Morris enrolled in graduate school, and found himself wondering what would come next.
“I was making films that might not be commercially viable,” said Morris, and he wasn’t “interested in getting paid to make somebody else’s movie.” So Morris turned to teaching, where he could create on his own terms while instructing young filmmakers. “It wasn’t something I realized I would love so much,” he said.
Before coming to Denison, Morris taught at the American University in Cairo. “I had been at an art residency in upstate New York with a guy who had taught in Abu Dhabi,” said Morris, which inspired him to apply to international institutions. In 2020, just before COVID-19 , he got an offer to go to Cairo.
“It was amazing,” he said. “I felt like I really was satisfied with the work I was doing in that [film] department.” During his work revitalizing the long neglected film department, Morris worked with students making “some really great work” in a place where filming could put them in jail.
“They could literally be arrested and just disappear if a cop saw them with a camera somewhere.” Morris said that “it felt a little subversive to be teaching filmmaking there in a very authoritarian society and to emphasize freedom in the classroom.”
After teaching in Egypt, Morris came to Denison drawn by a tenure track, but also by the continued use of 16-millimeter film in the curriculum.
“Denison is one of only a handful of universities that still has any facilities to support celluloid filmmaking,” said Morris. The curriculum has since changed to focus on digital filmmaking, but Morris’s interest in 16-mm film remains. “That’s something that I specialize in,” he said.
As a professor, Morris said he loves giving students “the opportunity to find how to express [themselves] and to give permission to be creative.”
“He’s very supportive,” said Tyler Nguyen ‘27, a student and teaching assistant of Morris.
Apollo Solihin, a sophomore student and advisee of Morris, said that “the way that he talks, the way that he communicates with [the] students is very engaging.”
Morris doesn’t want to simply tell students what to do. Ultimately, Morris said, the goal is for students to “become creative people who make things for their own purposes and not because I’m telling them to.”
Editor’s Note: The professor spotlight is a recurring feature. Send an email to [email protected] if you would like to suggest a professor to be featured.