FTT was saddened to hear of the death of our former colleague, Professor Jill Godmilow, on September 15. While we wait for news of a memorial, we wanted to share this tribute by Ricky Herbst, the DeBartolo Performing Art Center’s Cinema Program Director, adjunct faculty in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, and former student of Jill's:
Jill Godmilow landed at The University of Notre Dame in 1992 with the force of a resistance fighter and the curiosity of a New Yorker suddenly in the hinterlands. It marked her return to higher education, which she held in the highest regard since the day in 1961 she got off the bus in Madison, Wisconsin, and enrolled there rather than trek all the way to Berkeley. After her many years of filmmaking, Jill had tried her hand at teaching with Bill Nichols and enjoyed it. Seeing the rapid evaporation of funding for art like hers, she found a steady paycheck and Cadillac health insurance at the academy, a personal oasis that had been corporatized since her days as a student. She found that appalling in the 1990s to say nothing of today’s landscape. Jill and Notre Dame were an odd couple, but the relationship worked–largely because Jill changed Notre Dame’s culture for the better.
In response to the difficulties she and other female faculty members faced, she founded WATCH, a woman-centered organization at the University. WATCH wasn’t an acronym, but Jill tried to backfill it with ‘Women’s Alliance to Chuck Hegemony’. It didn’t stick. Jill and the female colleagues she helped organize created a famous handbook specifically by and for women containing information on promotion, tenure, campus culture, and many other aspects of life as a faculty member. Her effectiveness as an organizer stemmed in part from her sense of fun and rebellious free-spiritedness. Jill also co-founded NDPFSA, the Notre Dame Progressive Faculty/Staff Alliance, which continues to this day, in response to policies both on and off campus that required addressing while offering a point for people to share, activate, and actualize their progressive political beliefs. She was also a regular and very vocal participant in numerous demonstrations on and off campus for local, regional, national, and international justice issues. At a time during extreme closeting of sexuality and politics generally, her university biography, which she called her logline, itself was a chance for viz: Independent filmmaker focusing on feminist, gay, labor, and art issues, primarily in nonfiction formats.
As an educator, Jill vociferously fought against conventional film-making, becoming a magnet for students interested in serious films and students interested in serious politics. Many students spent endless hours with Jill, sometimes well into the night, in the long top floor of O’Shaughnessy Hall Jill converted into a loft that housed her office, her classroom, Steenbecks, and various props from past films. There, she smoked incessantly well after bans were in place while helping students cut their films, organizing events, storytelling, and trying to fix this fucking place (with ‘place’ being everything from her department to the United Nations).
With her high demands and rigorous aesthetic, she challenged students to reconsider ways of knowing and to understand how film can constitute an act of resistance. With great dedication to her students, she became very involved in every aspect of their films. She gave wonderful (and sometimes fabulously outrageous) advice to students about pursuing a life, whether in film-making or just making your way. Jill also worked outside of her comfort zone allowing herself to learn alongside students, using the phrase ‘I STAB’ before ideas that weren’t fully cooked and perhaps ultimately didn’t belong on the menu. She also taught what she loved and brought unconventional writing into the classroom to break staid, empty language that she feared dominated the academic world.
Jill regularly brought the most interesting filmmakers to Notre Dame, giving accomplished and nuanced introductions for each filmmaker. She expanded the Student Film Festival, where many of her students showed their first serious films. She made a DVD of the best of those student films which was distributed by FACETS Multi-Media in Chicago, founded by Milos Stehlik.
Jill was an irrepressible person, who, impressively, could make friends with the most unlikely people across ideological borders. She could, and would, engage with anyone, even if she thought they were a ‘big nothing’. She found something–usually the best–in everyone, and did her best to extract it from them so they could share with the world. We all miss our amazing friend and colleague, and we are all grateful for the gifts she taught and left us.
