Sam Holdren is a WVSU film grad who recently received his MFA in film from Temple University. At the 2008 WV International Film Festival he presented three recent films he has worked on - “Play,” “Audition” and “Paradigm Shift.” I had previously seen the first two, and finally got to see “Paradigm Shift” this weekend. I thought that it was one of the best short films I have seen in a long time and certainly worthy of the awards it has recently received.

As always, all the technical parts of the film are professional - cinematography, acting, editing, etc. I found this film particularly interesting because it deals with a retiring history professor, an activist, who is trying to shake up his apathetic student, and by doing so is forced into early retirement, like my activist friend Sandy Berman.

The profs teaching assistant is named “T.K.” standing for “Thomas Kuhn,” the author of one of the most important post WWII books, ” The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The prof is fully aware of this book even though even T.K. himself is not. Nor is anyone else in the film. The administration of his university is threatened by the prof’s assignment for his students - a plan to murder the president. Apparently the administrators and the students are not part of the “paradigm shift” that made the history professor an activist so many years earlier.

The director of the film apparently plans on making a feature film. I hope he doesn’t. The film is fine the way it is. Recently I have seen several films that could have been a lot better as shorts - John Sayles “Honeydripper” and the WV i ndie film, “The Comic Book Lady.” Unfortunately, if both had been released as shorts, I probably wouldn’t have seen either one because of the problems distributing short films these days. However, both films would have been much more enjoyable if they had been short and to the point.

Sam is a fine filmmaker, and I am sure he has written some screen plays that he hopes to make into films. I hope he learns the important lesson from “Paradigm Shift” that a good story requires sympathetic characters. In both “Audition” and “Play”, the action focuses on characters who are real jerks. Apparently, some people can cross the empathy chasm and focus on real jerks, e.g., the super jerks in “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” and many other films. The Sixties prof in “Paradigm Shift” is a bit of a weirdo, but during the few minutes of the film, one sees quickly that he is standing up for what he believes in. Hopefully, the students who saw the f ilms at the various film festivals where it was shown will investigate the work of Thomas Kuhn who was one of the people who really made the Sixties happen in the intellectual world.

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