If you were one of the approximately 600 audience members who attended the premiere of Enter to Learn, Go Forth to Serve: The First Hundred Years of Keene State College over Homecoming Weekend, you know what a hit it was.
The film touched many hearts. One of the film’s creators, Larry Benaquist, had a doctor’s appointment a couple of days after the premiere. When the nurse came into the waiting room and called for “Larry Benaquist,” three other people there leapt to their feet and applauded him. They told him that they saw the film on Friday and loved it. It’s that kind of film.
If you weren’t able to make it that weekend, don’t despair. There are lots of plans to make the film available later, including as part of the KSC Film Society’s offering next month. The public is invited to any of the free showings at the Putnam Arts Lecture Hall at 7 p.m. from Sunday, Nov. 28, through Thursday, Dec. 2. Don’t miss it!
KSC senior and student archivist Ryan LaLiberty was in the Colonial for the premiere and was so impressed that he wrote a review:
On Friday, October 1st, the first night of Homecoming Weekend, Keene State premiered Enter to Learn, Go Forth to Serve: The First Hundred Years of Keene State College, an amazing documentary from Larry Benaquist and Lance Levesque chronicling the history of our institution since it’s inception in 1909. Finally completed in September after three years of intensive work, the film, pushing two hours in length, opened to a full house at the historic Colonial Theater in downtown Keene. The audience consisted of alumni, KSC faculty and staff, and current students and their families. Present too were the community members that President Helen Giles-Gee, in her opening remarks, praised as essential to the prospering of the school and the creating of the film, a film that was anything but simple to make.
The film was originally intended to debut last year, during Centennial Reunion 2009, but its scope and complexity understandably pushed it beyond that date. In fact, it was wrapped up just a week or so before the premiere. Given the breadth of stories in the past 100 years of the College’s history, the process of selecting those worth telling was not easy. The goal was to produce a condensed feature film and not a multi-volume work of staggering length that could devote hours to a variety of individual topics. While the film attempts partially to visualize James G. Smart’s Striving: Keene State College, 1909-1984: The History Of A Small Public Institution, the book does not serve as the ultimate outline to the film. Simply, it cannot; over 20 historically-relevant years have passed since the publication of Smart’s book. In addition to this, the film expands on the mass of information that Smart provides.
While the film tells the story as a line of trends, of pinnacle events that changed the school, the minutiae of daily life, those both mundane and extraordinary, are not left out entirely. Throughout the film, Benaquist and Levesque reveal a variety of little-known yet ever-so-interesting details about the school’s history. This writer was entirely unaware that Keene State College, in the incarnation of Keene Normal School, never actually barred males from attending in the earlier years; it was only a variety of socioeconomic reasons, and no actual ruling, that prevented any men from graduating until 1931. And who knew there was a Woman’s Rifle Club as well as a Banjo & Mandolin Club? Perhaps most amusing, although frightening as evidence of the absurd paranoia of the age, was the story of President Lloyd Young, during the reign of McCarthyism, being forced to speak in front of the State’s attorney general to quell the uproar after the Monadnock (the student newspaper later to be known as the Equinox) reported, as a joke in its April Fool’s issue, of a communist cell on campus.
With this episode and the many others pointed at throughout the film, Benaquist and Levesque do more than just simply relay the linear history of the institution, though they do this quite well. Rather than point towards and reflect benevolently on some mythical and absolutely perfect sanity that created the school, the film notes instead the zaniness that abounded at various times throughout the institution’s history. Benaquist, in his opening remarks, described their job as the stitching together of “the crazy quilt that is the history of an institution like this.” Truly, as we are shown in their film, the quilt of Keene State College is indeed quite crazy and quite surprising, and yet is all the more endearing because of it.
As the film ended with a lovely quote from Leo Redfern reflecting on the “golden days” of Keene State, applause began and was sustained throughout the entire credits. Benaquist did not overstate the point when he remarked that there were too many people to thank personally; the credits were staggering in length, containing faculty and staff, recent and distant alumni, students from all classes, and community businesses and civilians. Finally, as the credits too came to a close, alone on the screen appeared “Copyright 2010 Keene State College.” The applause grew to an uproar as the house lights began to shine again.
“This is your story,” President Giles-Gee remarked in a speech before the film, and truly now, with this internationally-recognized symbol, our ownership was rendered clear. This was our story: faculty, staff, alumni young and old, and current students. This was our film and our history, flawlessly relayed by Benaquist and Levesque. And yet, as the past flows so imperceptibly into the future, our history, our crazy history, is still unfinished. Only the processes of time can tell what the next 100 years will bring.
—Ryan LaLiberty