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Getting to Know: Scott MacDonald

By Robert Marston '17

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Position: Visiting Professor of Art History

At Hamilton: Since 1981

What is a very obscure interest of yours? 

The history of taxidermy and habitat dioramas.

What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, and didn't?

I'm ashamed and embarrassed to admit this but Don Quixote. Did I choose the wrong translation?

What movie do you always have to defend not liking?

Casablanca and It's a Wonderful Life (except for one terrific scene, when the drugstore guy hits the Jimmy Stewart character).

Which filmmakers' new work do you most eagerly anticipate? 

At the moment, James Benning, Bill Morrison, Kelly Reichardt, Robb Moss, Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Sharon Lockhart, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, Richard Linklater, Pawel Wojtasik, Ross McElwee, Laura Poitras...

What is a movie you want to recommend?

Boyhood and Dawson City: Frozen Time (the new Bill Morrison film). 

What books do you find yourself returning to again and again? 

These years it's films I return to more than books, especially the ones I teach. I find that many of my physical gestures are echoes of Norman Bates, Spalding Gray, Buster Keaton...

What is something you know now that you wish you had known when you were 20?

That your college years aren't the "best years of your life."

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