"He seems to have a limitless amount of time and energy to offer his students - and can be found more often than not in the film editing lab, critiquing and troubleshooting computers when projects are due. His classes are generally a lot of work, but well worth the time and effort for the self-motivated student who is looking for a professor with a commitment to one-on-one teaching."
- The College Voice

"The Madonna of David Tetzlaff's [essay] is shallow, untalented, all hype and salesmanship (a not atypical white male perspective) Lumping all her fan groups together, Tetzlaff claims that what people really love about her is her power and her conscious self-commodification. He looks not to the struggles of feminists but to the shifting requirements of capital to explain women's entry into the workplace. Taking the wind out of postmodernist claims about what is radical, he argues that the old patriarchal feminine marked by binaries such as 'virgin/whore' or even male/female in fact now impedes the market, whereas postmodernism is good for business."
- Lynne Layton, review of The Madonna Connection in The Women's Review of Books, 12/92

"[Madonna is] perceived alternately as a supremely cynical opportunist and as a cultural heroine. In what is by far the best essay in the collection, David Tetzlaff argues that this contradiction is the result of a division in Madonna's message. Morally, her songs and videos are transgressive; economically, they are nothing if not a paean to the spirit of the Eighties. But because she is a woman, the economic message "empowers" her female fans, even as her exhibitionism titillates the males. This combination would appear, in contemporary America, to be invincible."
- Robert Worth, review of The Madonna Connection in The Guardian, 11/17/92

"Apapapapapapapapapapapapapapapapa Ooh mow mow Papa Ooh mow mamow!"
- The Trashmen, "Surfin' Bird"

David Tetzlaff
Associate Professor of Theater, Film Studies

• Moving Picture Production
• Cultural Studies
• Postmodernism

David Tetzlaff teaches courses in moving picture production and film studies. In the Fall of 2001 he was named one of the College's "Five Outstanding Professors" by The College Voice.

Professor Tetzlaff is versed in many different types of production work, from conventional fictional narrative, to documentary, to experimental film. His own filmmaking of note has primarily been in documentary form.

He has co-authored four documentaries for public television with his colleague Dirk Eitzen of Franklin and Marshall College. Two of these, Tales of the Rails and The Amish and Us, have won a variety of major awards, including an NEMN Golden Apple and a Gold Hugo from the Chicago International Film Festival.

Prof. Tetzlaff has also been involved in a student/faculty collaboration, in which he served as editor for Left Behind, an award-winning documentary on the AIDS crisis in Africa, photographed and directed by Christof Putzel, '02. His most reccent film credit is as editor of Persistence of Vision, a documentary on African-American abstract expressionist artists.

He has also worked to help build a filmmaking community in southern New England by serving as a pro bono technical and artistic consultant on several locally produced no-budget independent films.

The picture at left is Tetzlaff's cameo as a confused tourist in The Amish and Us.

Professor Tetzlaff is not only a media maker, but a media scholar. His dissertation on The Politics of Postmodernism Popular Culture, included analyses of MTV, Miami Vice, USA Today and other icons of '80s pop culture. He was part of a small group of doctoral students at The School of Journalism and Mass Communication at The University of Iowa that transformed the academic journal published by the School - The Journal of Communication Inquiry - from basically an in-house publication to an internationally known and respected journal. At JCI, he was instrumental in producing two groundbreaking issues - the first collection of essays devoted to the study of MTV and the first collection of essays devoted to the work of British cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall to be published in the United States.

Tetzlaff's own essays have been published in The Journal of Communication Inquiry, Media Culture and Society, and the books Culture and Power, The Madonna Connection, and The World Wide Web and Contemporary Cultural Theory. He also has an essay on the Arnold Schwarzenegger film "Commando" (which he likes a lot) in the book New Hollywood Violence, , and an essay contextualizing the documentary film Fahrenheit 9/11 in the tradition of dystopian literature, to be published in a forthcoming anthology on the work of Michael Moore.

In all of his academic work he has been concerned with how popular culture affects our concepts of the social, the ways it reinforces or challenges relations of domination and power. Among his intellectual influences are The Frankfurt School, Situationism, Jean Baudrillard, Lester Bangs, and, of course, the Kingsmen's version of "Louie, Louie."

In addition to his work in film and television, Prof. Tetzlaff has also done creative work, teaching and scholarship in "New Media" and is a fellow in the College's Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology.

He defines his approach to film/media education:

"I believe that the primary goals of a Film Studies curriculum should be the cultivation of critical thinking, creative problem solving, intellectual independence and social awareness. We are all constantly bombarded with media messages that solicit us, condition us, frame our conceptions of the world. Even if we were somehow magically immune to media ourselves, we would still live in a society and culture profoundly shaped by filmic images and representations. The skills required for a successful career as a filmmaker are basically the same as the skills required to be an informed media consumer - the ability to think the medium and apply general principles to specific situations. I believe the integration of theory and practice is essential in teaching these skills. If you want to understand how to make films, watch films with an analytical eye. If you want to understand what you see on the screen, make your own productions while maintaining the same critical sensibility. Practice is adrift without theory, but theory is sterile without practice. Film education should be hands-on, but at the same time it must be minds-on. "

Visit the Film Studies program web site.