Rasmussen, Randy 1953–

(Randy Loren Rasmussen)

PERSONAL:

Born February 22, 1953, in Towner, ND; son of Loren (a postal clerk and county justice of the peace) and Vi (a school secretary) Rasmussen. Ethnicity: ‘Caucasian.’ Education: University of North Dakota, B.A., M.A. Politics: ‘Independent, with Democratic leaning."

ADDRESSES:

Home—Grand Forks, ND.

CAREER:

University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, bookstore clerk, 1979-99, library binding specialist, 1999—.

WRITINGS:

(Under name Randy Loren Rasmussen) Children of the Night: The Six Archetypal Characters of Classic Horror Films, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 1998.

Stanley Kubrick: Seven Films Analyzed, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 2001.

Orson Welles: Six Films Analyzed, Scene by Scene, McFarland (Jefferson, NC), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

Randy Rasmussen told CA: ‘My primary motivation is probably a desire to add my voice to the long list of published interpretations of subjects that interest me. Movies interest me in part because they are exercises in storytelling. Anyone who offers an interpretation of a movie, whether a five-minute summary to an acquaintance or a book-length analysis to the general public, is in some small sense a storyteller. Everything we learn secondhand comes to us via a story, whether fiction or nonfiction. Every personal experience we subsequently transmit to other people is done via a story. Distortion, misinterpretation, faulty or selective memory, and bias are inevitable. And yet the process of storytelling is still valuable, even essential, and certainly passionate.

"Genre films, including horror films of a given period, are variations of each other, telling and retelling the same basic story elements: elaborating, reinforcing, overturning, and/or reshaping. Like multiple eyewitness accounts of the same incident, they are interesting to me as much for their differences as for their similarities.

"The films of Stanley Kubrick and Orson Welles are often about conflicting stories. Strong impressions are generated, then challenged, modified, overturned, or reaffirmed. For me, the raw power as well as potential deception and other pitfalls of storytelling are vividly explored in the works of these two filmmakers. Writing about their work was a way of sorting out my own thoughts on the subjects they explore. Getting published was a bonus.

"Too many filmmakers, writers, composers, and other artists have influenced me to credit them all here, but historian Germain Tillion's thoughts on the dilemma of objective versus subjective perspectives, as expressed in her book Ravensbruck, remained in the back of my mind as I wrote my little film studies."