The experience of watching Professor Jimmy Joe Roche’s short films is very odd and often visceral. In one film, entitled Peacing Out, a rainbow-colored Roche slides slowly towards the camera, fingers outstretched in the universal symbol for peace, for a duration of two and a half minutes. In another, Lean Cuts for Osama Bin, Roche portrays a man with a personal, violent message for Osama Bin Laden, set over a picture of a landfill.
According to Roche, his non-traditional method of filmmaking is very deliberate.
“The predominant aesthetic that I’ve used for the last five years has really been anti-aesthetic. . .I work a lot with this idea of media that’s been discarded or damaged, piecing it together like a patchwork that’s hard to pin down,” he said.
Though many of Roche’s films do not have plots in the traditional sense, they do follow certain narratives. This is the case in “Brown Centipede Jizzum,” one of Roche’s short films.
“It’s a story about recontextualizing an aesthetic, doing something like creating this head that’s morphing in a way that almost feels like oil paint, but at the same time there’s enough digital there to know that it’s something else.” he said.
Teaching is a significant aspect of Roche’s identity as an artist. For Roche, art is about more than just the creation of individual projects; it is a communal experience.
“The more I teach the more I realize it’s not just about making art. . .It’s about making art, teaching art, and facilitating art. . .Teaching has helped focus me on this idea of the artist being multifaceted,” Roche said.
Roche began teaching film at Hopkins in 2010. His “Introduction to Filmmaking” class is yearly staple and he lectures on filmmaking at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) as well. As an artist, Roche engages in mediums beyond just film, including sculpture and visual art.
Many of Roche’s short films feature disjointed, crackling sound effects, which, to Roche, are an important part of his craft.
“One thing that I try to create a lot in my films is this tight interaction between sound and pictures. I think a lot of filmmakers in narrative films don’t get as deep into linking picture and sound as they can. . .” Roche said.
As much of Roche’s work is in short film, many of his older pieces are featured on YouTube, a platform that really helped shape his career.
“I think it’s really important that there exists a community of filmmakers. . .outside of the larger film industry. In order to have a truly engaging dialogue something has to be in opposition to that industry,” he said.
Though he is interested in teaching other art forms, Roche is most deeply connected to film.
“I think the deepest sort of philosophical view of the world I have is through film. I’m always thinking about reality and philosophy and cinema and the moving image and how they all relate to one another,” he said.
Roche has been teaching film for over 10 years now working in New York and later at MICA before arriving at Hopkins.
“I started teaching at Hopkins because it’s a wonderful place to teach, and I think the students are really talented and excited about filmmaking. . .as a person who’s passionate about it it’s great to be in an environment where people are so invested in learning about filmmaking,” he said.
Even if students do not continue making films after his class, Roche believes they still leave with important insights.
“Moving images and film are a language, and it’s a language that we all speak. . .by studying filmmaking you learn things about that language that were always sort of inside your head. You learn this more rich way to interface with something that we all communicate with,” he said.
Roche also views filmmaking as a way that students can better understand themselves.
“I try to relate what we’re doing to having a richer understanding of yourself, the way that the media we consume affects the way that you’re living basically adding a kind of metaphysical underpinning to ‘let’s learn how to make film,’” he added.
Sophomore Daniel Contaldo, who is currently taking Roche’s intermediate digital filmmaking class, expressed his enthusiasm about the experience.
"What I love most about him is that anything we produce, any short clip we're showing in class, he'll spend 5 minutes looking at one shot and showing it over and over to the class, finding the beauty in it, even when it's clearly an amateur shot that a student did"
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