In rereading Pierre Bourdieu, I just came across this wonderful quote, which in my view gets at a central methodological problem in film studies today:
It is no accident that, when certain intellectuals denounce the contempt which the cultivated classes or other intellectuals evince for “mass culture,” they are led to credit the working classes with […]
I won’t bug you with every DVD release notice, but this week’s dovetails with my renewed interest, scholarly and otherwise, in documentaries of the mid-20th century. First is a fascinating sounding series of British pseudo-documentaries directed by Peter Watkins. I’ve yet to see them (Netflix queue here they come), but I’ve been studying the postwar […]
John Holbo has an interesting discussion on the relevance of copyright law to humanities scholarship. Why, he asks, are cultural and literary studies scholars not up in arms over the latest moves to extend intellectual property further back in time and toward the interests of culture industry stakeholders over the general public?
Doesn’t the prospect of […]
As if to follow up on the quandry of how to define independent cinema, Edward Jay Epstein comes to the rescue and offers an industrial definition I hadn’t thought about:
Independent films are a totally different enterprise than studio films. They are typically made before they have U.S. distribution and with independent financing. Therefore, the […]
Chuck Tryon raises an interesting question: what is independent cinema? His point in short is that if we define it as a style we risk including films which are major studio films and loses the effectiveness of the term:
stylistic flourishes–handheld camera, intimate character studies, references to international art cinema, or films featuring indie auteurs (Jim […]
In case you’ve been wondering about my silence, I’ve been toiling away at combining material from a couple of my dissertation chapters into an essay, hopefully for publication, on the transformation of the prestige film from the 1930s to the postwar years. Essentially, the former rely on middlebrow production, with their conspicuous search for highbrow […]
Via Crooked Timber, I see that Tim Burke has a downer of a discussion on whether one should go to grad school.
Graduate school is not about learning. If you learn things, it’s only because you’ve already internalized the habit of learning, only because you make the effort on your own and in concert with […]
I’ve been thinking more and more about films and film scholarship on this blog lately. Part of it is simply being freed up from the dissertation, which was such a solitary, narrowing endeavor that it’s a liberation to begin to watch films from other periods, genres, and national cinemas, and to read scholarship outside my […]
John Holbo and the gang at the Valve are running a book event on theory’s empire, an edited volume attacking critical theory and its dominance in literary studies (and aligned fields in the humanities).
My initial thought is "Don’t they realize that film studies has already had an attack on Theory"? David Bordwell and Noel […]
I won’t bore with details of the dissertation proper, but as a reflection on the project, I thought I would offer some film-watching suggestions. When I say that I write on the social problem film, people often ask me what exactly a social problem film is. Well, the definition’s a bit impressionistic (you know one […]
Bear with the slow posting here, as I frantically revise and format the diss. over the next couple of weeks.
I do want to recommend, especially for any cinephiles or film studies folks out there, a new blog, co-authored by my friend Diana, called The Causeway Film and Video Forum. It’s devoted to film and […]
Apologies for the sparse posting this week. I’ve been frantically revising my first chapter, as I enter the home stretch of the dissertation. But since Chapter 1 is on industrial history in the classical period, a side thought arose: how much of our sense of Hollywood is skewed by the relative unavailability of B films? […]
Chuck Tryon has a tentative syllabus for his Intro to Film class up on his blog. It’s been a few years since I’ve taught, but it made me wonder how I’d structure an Intro class, and drafting a syllabus is not an entirely hypothetical requirement now that I’m putting an eye to the job market. […]
One of the most frustrating classes I took my freshman year in college was a Philosophy in Film course. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t really prepared not having had any philosophy training - I’m still not really very knowledgeable in the subject. But part of it was that as a new college […]
The more I read David Edelstein’s film reviews in Slate, the more I love his smart but snarky tone. His current review of David Gale is top form. I particularly love one quip - “the prospect of more liberal politics wedded to more fascist film techniques” - that so neatly summarizes for me the insights […]