Ithaca College

Marlena Grzaslewicz, Pendleton Endowed Chair and Assistant Professor in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts, worked on the upcoming PBS special, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & The World. The film, part of the American Experience series, will air on Monday, May 10 at 9 p.m.

Into the Deep was written and directed by Ric Burns. In March, Grzaslewicz invited Burns and three other collaborators who worked on Into the Deep to Ithaca for a seminar that focused on the interconnectedness of image, music, and sound in the filmmaking process. Grzaslewicz served as dialogue editor for the film.

About Into the Deep:

A fantastic sea adventure, a cautionary economic and environmental tale, and a mythic saga of man and nature, Into the Deep: America, Whaling & The World tells the epic story of three centuries of American whaling, from the dawn of the 17th century to the end of the First World War - interweaving the riveting tale of the doomed whaleship Essex, and the deeply moving story of Herman Melville - whose own real life and imaginative voyages into the deep would give rise to one of the greatest works of literature ever created by an American.

Narrated by Willem Dafoe, and featuring the voices of Robert Sean Leonard, Josh Hamilton, Vincent Kartheiser, Callie Thorne and Philip Bosco, the film chronicles the savagely primal, limit-testing hunt for the mammoth creatures whose oil lit the streets of London and Paris, fueled the engine of the Industrial Revolution, and created the first truly global enterprise America would know.

To watch a trailer of the film, visit: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/whaling/