New York Times 100 Most Notable Books List Includes Two Bennington Faculty Members (November 28, 2007) [Read more.]

Faculty Member Steven Bach Appears on National Public Radio's Fresh Air (June 4, 2007) [Read more.]

Bennington magazine, May 2005: Final Cut: The Making of “Heaven’s Gate” and the Unmaking of a Studio, a documentary based on the landmark book by Steven Bach, screened in February at the Berlinale, an international film festival in Berlin, Germany.

Bennington magazine, November 2004: The newly established Art History Project continued this year with a series of provocative lectures. Faculty members Donald Sherefkin, Andy Spence, and Steven Bach explored architecture, art, and film. Their lectures were entitled, respectively, “Notes on the History of the Window,” “Art of the ’50s and ’60s,” and “A Perspective on Film History." In addition, Final Cut: The Making of “Heaven’s Gate” and the Unmaking of a Studio, a documentary based on the landmark book by Steven Bach, aired on the cable channel TRIO in June. The documentary tells the behind-the-scenes story of one of Hollywood’s most notorious failures. Final Cut screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The documentary also played in October—on a bill with Heaven’s Gate—at the Film Forum in New York City.

Convocation, September 2003:

Steven Bach, a faculty member in film and literature, addressed the Class of 2007 at a convocation ceremony held in September, 2004. The following is an excerpt of his remarks.

Many of you will come to love Bennington, as I do, as a kind of ivory tower, a refuge of higher learning and self-realization that is sheltered from the chaos of what we call civilization in laughter or in tears. Vermont is, of course, the perfect cliché for the rural, green, untrammeled, unspoiled landscape in which self-realization becomes a reality rather than a dream, whether you’re a farmer, a painter, a writer, a sculptor, a dancer, an environmentalist, a Ben or a Jerry, or a cow. And it’s all true. But don’t get too settled or too sheltered. I have noticed in the 10 years I have lived here—after living a few other places less removed and rural—that it is all too easy to relax into seclusion, to wallow in it.

Seclusion is something to be cherished but used, and isolation is to be avoided like the plague, which won’t be hard to do if you just get up in the morning. I’m thinking of the advisee who told me last year that there was “nothing to do” at Bennington on a day when I was desperately trying to figure out how to attend the experimental play one of my students had directed, the concert of Sondheim songs another had mounted, and the art installation opening by a third—all in one not particularly unusual Bennington College evening.

An important caveat, however, is to keep the ivory tower in perspective with what Bennington is not and which—let’s be honest—some of you will miss. This is plainly not New York City or Chicago or Los Angeles. Some of you will find that comforting in this post-9/11 world, and some of you will be tempted to grow remote and isolated, but don’t get too snug or too smug, too settled or too self-contemplative. Your navel may indeed be the most fascinating thing on earth, but looking up from it once in a while can be instructive, especially if you’re worried about things—as I am—like Iraq, the environment, the Patriot Act, and the future of democracy and learning and social justice. Ask your teachers. It is unlikely that they’ll give you answers and they certainly won’t tell you what to think, but they will help you learn how to learn whatever it is you need to know.

If there is one thing truly unique about Bennington, it is the shared responsibility you accept for your education on coming here. There are no requirements, as you know, unless being bright, creative, industrious, and caring form a kind of Bennington template.... The lives you are learning to live are yours and so should be the choices that guide them. Don’t worry; no one will let you go into free fall, and your advisors and Plan Committee members will try to keep you on the most productive and enriching paths. But, to quote Garrison Keillor, you no longer have to do stupid things—you know what they are—just to annoy your parents. Now, if you do them, you’ll be doing them just because they’re stupid. Or you’ll set your sights higher than that.

How high? Well, how about this? Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that “the scholar is that man who must take up into himself [or herself] all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future.... This confidence in the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all preparation, to the American Scholar.” In other words, to you.