The Cleveland Memory Project

Filmmaker, Robert C. Banks, Jr. discusses his proudest accomplishments as an artist. A lifelong Clevelander, Banks attended the Cleveland School of the Arts (CSA), where he learned many of the fundamentals of art and film. Despite having spent some years pursuing higher education at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland State University, and elsewhere, Banks credits much of his filmmaking expertise to self-education and collegial exchanges from within the Cleveland art scene.

The artist also discusses several of his own films, his views on filmmaking as an art and as a profession, the state of art and filmmaking in Cleveland, and his approach to teaching film students at Cuyahoga Community College and elsewhere. As a filmmaker, Banks prefers to work with celluloid film and extensively discusses the shift from celluloid to digital production, weighing the pros and cons of each. Banks discusses his work in the context of punk rock and the do-it-yourself ethic.

*Portrait of the artist courtesy of Herb Ascherman.

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