Film Theory and the Problem of Chronology

Jason Sperb has posted a couple of his syllabi, including one for a film theory class. His class has some terrific choices, which are already inspiring me as I fine tune my syllabi for my film theory classes this semester. He's also using the same anthology I'm using, Corrigan, White, and Mazaj's Critical Visions in Film Theory (Bedford St. Martin's).

I'll post my syllabi soon, but I wanted first to highlight a conceptual issue I've been wrestling with in teaching the film theory class: how much should I arrange a syllabus in chronological order? I don't mean chronology in the strictest sense, in which all writing form 1978 has to come before that from 1985. Rather, I mean organizing the syllabus according to the intellectual history of the field, with identifiable theoretical schools following one after the other. To be honest, this is my first inclination. There are a few reasons, but the biggest is that film theory itself tends to refer to prior schools and works. Even though I really like the Critical Visions anthology and find it a welcome improvement over prior anthologies, I do find it a weakness that the books skips certain conceptual steps and expects students/readers to figure out what semiotics, signification, or the "subject" mean without reading anything that explains these concepts.

Then again, I can imagine the editors would counter that an anthology has to start somewhere, and now that contemporary film theory alone has had a run of roughly 40 years, it's sometimes worth skipping to more current debates rather than have to recreate Cahiers' political thriller debate, Screen's realism debate, or Cinema Journal's melodrama debate.

For me, an additional issue is that I'm teaching mostly production students who are interested in theory but not invested in schematizing overview that one would need for an orals exam or even a journal article. For this reason, this semester I'm trying a more conceptual organization to my syllabus and addressing key problems that film theory tries to answer. I'm not dispensing with chronology altogether - I'm still teaching Bazin before semiotics before cultural studies. But I'm loosening up the focus on intellectual history. Maybe I'll learn that I need to go further.

CFP: Contemporary Screen Narratives

Call for papers:

Contemporary Screen Narratives:

Storytelling’s Digital and Industrial Contexts

Conference to be held on 17 May 2012
Hosted by the Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham

Keynote speakers: Henry Jenkins and Jason Mittell

This one-day conference looks to trace connections between the narratives of contemporary screen media and their contexts of production, distribution and consumption. We refer here to narrative as the presentation and organisation of story via the semiotic phenomena of image, sound and written/spoken word. We anticipate that speakers will explore ways in which stories and their on-screen telling are informed by contemporary industrial and technological conditions. We invite contributions from postgraduate and early-career researchers working across screen-based narrative media, such as film, television, comics, literature, video games and other areas of new media. We are interested to receive all paper proposals pertinent to the conference topic, though we particularly welcome those that engage with the following themes and questions:

Industrial determinants. In what ways are stories and their telling contingent on the production cultures, distribution methods, revenue models and governmental policies that configure a given creative industry?

Digital Technologies. How has the construction and/or reception of narratives been influenced by digital production equipment, distribution tech, online platforms and consumer hardware devices?

Seriality and Transmedia: In what ways do serial narrative forms, whether disseminated within a given medium or across multiple media, reflect industrial and technological contexts?

Audio and Visual Styles: How are the sounds and visions of contemporary screen narratives informed by conditions of production and reception technologies?

Paratextual Surround: In what ways do promotional materials, practitioner discourses, fan cultures and critical/journalistic responses discursively frame screen narratives?

Send abstracts of 250 words to Anthony Smith (aaxas4@nottingham.ac.uk) and Aaron Calbreath-Frasieur (aaxac2@nottingham.ac.uk). Papers should not exceed twenty minutes in length. The deadline for proposal submission is Monday 13 February 2012.

For updates, see the conference blog.

The Trouble With Women

It's been tougher for me to track down the Paramount films from 1947, but it is seeming like they tend to specialize in genre films that would not be out of place five or ten years earlier: light comedies, action-adventure films, and "exotic" romances.

The Trouble With Women (Sidney Lanfield) would seem to confirm the notion of the Paramount as a stuck-in-the-30s studio, ignoring the broader changes of postwar aesthetics and ideology in Hollywood films. Whereas other comedies seem to update the screwball formula, The Trouble With Women reprises Bringing Up Baby, with Ray Milland in the bookish Cary Grant role:

The twist, though, is that Milland's character, Prof. Sedley, is a psychoanalyst famous for his counter-intuitive and misogynist theories of female sexuality. To my mind, this points to one of the recurring conventions of the late 40s light comedy: a social satire that cuts both ways. In this case, the film sends up both psychoanalysis and the Babbitt-like reactions of the townspeople to Sedley's ideas.

This dual satire plays out some, too, in the depiction of journalism, though I'm not sure the film departs much from the screwball conventions in this. The Teresa Wright and Brian Donlevy characters are journalists trying to write an expose of Sedley; in the process, they expose mostly their own lack of humanity, but they are still correct in their views.

Donlevy's McBride tries to undergo a social class transformation in the film:
What's striking to me is how the film is poised right at the historical moment of a class transformation of the journalism profession. There are a number of films of the late 40s that seem to be coming to grips with a dying petit bourgeois class.

CFP: Console-ing Passions 2012

Call for Papers

Console-ing Passions

International Conference on

Television, Video, Audio, New Media, and Feminism

July 19-22, 2012

Suffolk University

Boston, MA

Founded by a group of feminist media scholars and artists in 1989, Console-ing Passions held its first official conference at the University of Iowa in 1992. Since that time, the conference has created collegial spaces for scholarly and other creative work on culture, identity, gender, and sexuality in television, digital and aural media, and gaming. In this anniversary year, the conference will focus on remembering its roots and forging its future.

Mindful that changes in media platforms and consumption practices have altered the field of feminist media studies, this year’s conference will reflect back on Console-ing Passions’ own history as well as highlight how contemporary research reflects these multiple alterations. Continuing the feminist legacies of the conference, the 2012 program will emphasize intergenerational conversations. To this end, equal emphasis will be placed on the histories, presents, and futures of feminist inquiry.

Organizers of the 2012 conference are seeking proposals for individual papers, preconstituted panels, or workshops on these broad themes investigated within the context of race, class, gender, and sexuality:

· histories and theories of television
· women in media industries
· media and globalization
· user-generated content and new media economies
· social networking
· television genres
· media and gay/lesbian/transgender politics
· gaming and virtual worlds
· media activism
· experimental media histories and criticism
· media spaces and local media
· social movements and global uprisings
· theories of apparatus and interface
· audiences/players/viewers/listeners
· mobile media
· theories of post-television

Deadline for receipt of proposals is January 10, 2012.

Guidelines for Proposal Submission:

Individual Papers: Individuals submitting paper proposals will be asked to provide an abstract of 350 words, a short bio, and contact information.

Pre-Constituted Panel Proposals: In keeping with this year’s theme, we ask that panels attempt to showcase a range of experience in the field; graduate students and junior members are encouraged to pair with senior scholars. Panel coordinators should submit a 200-word rationale for the panel as whole. For each contributor, please submit a 200-word abstract, a short bio, and contact information. Panels should have three to four papers.

Workshop Proposals: We seek workshop ideas that focus not only on scholarly issues in the discipline, but also on matters of professionalization. Topics might include: gender and sexuality in the workplace; teaching feminist media studies; tenure and family; publishing your first article or monograph; moving to full professor or administration; mentoring challenges and opportunities, etc. Coordinators should submit a 350-word rationale for the workshop (including some discussion of why the topic lends itself to a workshop format), a short bio, and contact information. For each workshop participant, please submit a title, short bio, and contact information. Workshops are intended to encourage discussion; contributors should plan on a series of brief, informal presentations.

Screening Proposals: We invite proposals for video, audio, or new media screenings. Proposals should consist of a 500-word abstract (including the length and format of the work), a short bio of the producer/director, and contact information.

Please submit all proposals, via the conference website at http://bit.ly/CPBoston2012

Direct all questions about the conference and the submission process to:
CPBoston2012@gmail.com

Follow us on twitter @CPBoston2012

Conference Organizers:
Miranda Banks, Assistant Professor, Visual and Media Arts Department, Emerson College
Nina Huntemann, Associate Professor, Communication & Journalism Department, Suffolk University
Deborah Jaramillo, Assistant Professor, Film and Television Department, Boston University
Suzanne Leonard, Assistant Professor, English Department, Simmons College
Jane Shattuc, Professor, Visual and Media Arts Department, Emerson College

How To Write About Film History, part I

I am teaching a film history survey. It's only my second time teaching this survey and the first time it's been historically limited (1945-present). One issue I've faced is that this is the first film history course many of the students have taken. As a survey, it's not really a methods class, nor does a larger primary research project seem fitting for this sophomore-level class, but I still want the students to write papers that make historical arguments as part of a research-based project.

To this end, I've developed some guidelines in how to write a film history paper. I thought I'd share them in case anything is useful for other teachers out there, but also I'm open to feedback or tips.

Also, are there guides somewhere that I'm overlooking?

This first part is on coming up with a thesis. The second part, on research, will be in a separate post.

How to Write a Film History Paper: The Thesis

The basics of a thesis

A thesis should make a claim that is not obvious and that one could disagree with. You should be able to put (I intend to prove that) in front of the statement and have it be meaningful. For instance, the following is not much of an original thesis:

(I intend to prove that) The French New Wave was a movement of filmmakers who were inspired by Hollywood.

since few would disagree, but

(I intend to prove that) The French New Wave adopted a trademark black-and-white style because of cost and the influence of photojournalism.

gives a claim that asks the reader to understand the subject differently. (We think of New Wave films in relation to Hollywood, but perhaps Life magazine is just as important.) The thesis could be argued against: for instance, maybe New Wave cinematographers adopted their style mainly because of the need to show on B&W television or as a reaction against Tradition of Quality style. In any case, it's up to the author to present evidence to prove her/his case.

How to come up with a thesis

I have a lot of practice with coming up with thesis statements. It is easier to write a focused, specific thesis if you have read a number of other arguments in the field. Ideally, you should be reading materials for this class (and others) with an eye for figuring out their arguments, not simply absorbing information.

In the meantime, there are a few questions you can ask about your topic to help you come up a thesis:

- Is there some pattern of filmmaking that others haven't written on?
- What historical causes can you pinpoint behind some aspect of a film or group of films?
- Why could this film have only been made when it was made? (If you think the answer is obvious, it's not.)
- How can we think about the film/films as economic products in addition to art or entertainment?

Scope of a thesis

The scope of the paper will determine the length it takes to provide enough evidence. If the thesis is broad, a shorter paper will be too general. For a 5-6 page paper, narrow down your argument. You won't be able to talk about a whole movement or period in general. Find, instead, some aspect. You can focus on particular case studies (directors, films, etc) - this approach works better if you can do a little extra research into production, exhibition, or reception of the film.

Or, you can focus on a formal or ideological aspect - like New Wave cinematography (above), screenplay form in 40s Japanese cinema, or racial casting in 80s Hollywood. It's up to you and your creativity - and what's previously been written on the subject.

22nd Screen Conference CFP

The 22nd International Screen Studies Conference is organised by Screen journal and will be programmed by Screen editor Karen Lury.

We invite papers on any topic in screen studies, i.e. cinema, television and digital media. Submissions for pre-formed three-person panels will be considered but not prioritised.

‘Other Cinemas’ will be the subject of the plenaries and will form a strand running throughout the conference.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
Charles Acland (Concordia University), editor of Useful Cinema (2011)
Elizabeth Lebas (Middlesex University), author of Forgotten Futures: British Municipal Cinema 1920-1980 (2011)

Looking into the past and the future of cinema has inspired increasing academic interest in films and film-making practices that are generally considered to be outside the ‘mainstream’ of commercial cinema. Screen wishes to encourage presentations that engage with these ‘Other Cinemas’. This might involve:

• ‘Amateur’ films;
• Educational cinema;
• Industrial films;
• Films produced for and distributed via different web platforms;
• Experimental or avant-garde work;
• ‘Sponsored’ films (municipal cinema, health films).

The deadline for proposals is Friday, 13th January 2012.

Please visit the conference site for full submission details.

Movie Title Sequences

At the Notebook, Adrian Curry has a good entry on the title sequences by Jacques Kapralik. Another instance in which the modernism has blinded critics to the art and craft of classicism: "Sure we’ve all swooned over Saul Bass title sequences, and Annyas, of course, has a superb section devoted to them too, but have you ever really considered Warner Brothers end titles before? To see all these cards together is to discover a breadth of type design and handlettering, impeccably and inventively used over and over again." To me this is another instance of the way our understanding of classical Hollywood (and studio-era filmmaking in general) shifts a bit when we approach these films as an archive of films made more accessible through cable TV, home video, bootlegs, and downloads.

Decherney on Public Domain

Peter Decherney has an op-ed in the New York Times on copyright law and public domain. I know this dovetails Peter's larger project on copyright in Hollywood, so it's no surprise to see a good op-ed piece, but it's still nice to see an accessible version of it circulating out in the broader public sphere. Film studies is not a field known for its public policy applications (one of Toby Miller's frequent complaints), but Peter's op-ed shows how what we do (at least the historians among us) illuminates policy issues in a clear, productive way.

Pulling Back the Curtain on Book Writing

I look forward to reading Michael Newman and Elana Levine's new book on TV and cultural legitimization.

In the meantime, Michael has a good post reflecting on the book writing process. This is becoming one of my favorite blog post genres, in fact. Pulling back the curtain not only lets non-scholars know a bit more about what we do (as in Tim Burke's series of posts), but it allows scholars to see each others' work habits and get inspired by each other.

The Mid-Size Conference

I have attended two conferences this summer that I would classify as mid-sized conferences: Screen had about 100 scholars presenting, Visible Evidence between 2-3 times that many. Both were terrific events and academically nourishing - good papers and panels where conversations actually emerged from the debates the papers engaged with. And the schedule was not too crowded. From what I gather, other regular conferences have similar benefits: Flow, Visible Evidence, Media in Transition, and Console-ing Passions.

As much as I do actually enjoy and look forward to SCMS Conference, it suffers in comparison with the smaller conferences on many grounds. I don't know the solution or even if anything needs to change. I would probably be happier with a variety of conference sizes, types, and themes, if there were a couple more mid-sized conferences for film studies in the US.

Visible Evidence 18

Tomorrow I will be going to New York to attend the 18th Visible Evidence conference, devoted to the study of nonfiction film and media. I have promised to contribute the conference blog. I may also post here.

I look forward to seeing colleagues and (potentially) some readers there.

Vernacular and Formal Expression

This Virginia Heffernan post on overhauling eduction to meet the demands of the future has gotten a bit of attention. Tim Burke chimes in his support for the idea.

So educators can argue that their immediate job is to ensure an even distribution of experience with new media practices and a richer exploration of interpretative and expressive work in those media.

Of course, to do so, educators themselves would have to have widely distributed skills and be practiced in those richer possibilities. This is not my sense of the current norms in higher education in the humanities and social sciences, nor do I necessarily see incoming faculty as being markedly closer to that goal, only that there are tendencies in that direction.

I always value Burke's reflections on liberal arts eduction. Even if I tend to be more slanted toward traditional disciplinary education, I admire his sense of purpose and ability to articulate it.

I'm left scratching my head here, though. I can't help but feeling that the academy is being set up as the fuddy-duddy straw man. What exactly is being proposed, either by Heffernan, Cathy Davidson (whom Heffernan is drawing on), or Burke?

From Heffernan: "When we criticize students for making digital videos instead of reading Gravity’s Rainbow, or squabbling on Politico.com instead of watching The Candidate, we are blinding ourselves to the world as it is."

It happens I have taught in the context of an intro class both The Candidate and internet political culture. I don't see these as mutually exclusive. Both benefit from ideas about mass media and from ideas about civics. Each has its historical context, so by nature The Candidate is less obviously relevant to contemporary culture than, well contemporary culture. That said, at least some of my students have found The Candidate an eerily prescient commentary on President Obama's star image. It's not as if TV culture or the political party apparatus has gone away.

Then, there's this claim: "Ms. Davidson herself was appalled not long ago when her students at Duke, who produced witty and incisive blogs for their peers, turned in disgraceful, unpublishable term papers.... Ms. Davidson questioned the whole form of the research paper. [She] concluded, 'Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers.'”

I have used blog writing in the classroom, sometimes to great effect, sometimes not. Whatever the merits of students' blog writing (which does tend to have a more assured voice than the average term paper), is the proposal to spend more instructional time on vernacular expression and less on formal expression? The reason that blog writing is less tortured is that it comes closer to daily speech. Formal expression is valuable precisely because it is abstracted away from verbal speech - abstracted in the mechanics of written language, abstracted in its logical structure, abstracted in its ultimate ideas, and abstracted in the readership it imagines. This makes it difficult to teach, and the missteps painful to read sometimes, but expository prose is valuable precisely on all of these counts. The ability to deal in these abstractions is closely related to the formal expressive abilities that form the basis of professional life and specialized knowledge. I can't predict the jobs of the future, but they may be important then, too.

If this is a status and resource battle between literary and media studies, fine, I guess. Beyond that, I'm not sure what the overhaul being suggested means specifically.

The Foxes of Harrow

Foxes of Harrow (2oth-Fox, John Stahl) is a historical drama set in antebellum New Orleans. At initial blush it seems to fit the genre formula: dynastic melodrama set on a Southern plantation; an Irish immigrant (Rex Harrison) who comes to America and moves from gambler to businessman in attempt to overcome his illegitimate status; his wife who is too guarded sexually to be able to deal with her husband; and tragic events that threaten to bring down the slave-owning patriarch.

A couple of things are unusual about Foxes of Harrow, though. First, it lacks the visual style we associate with the antebellum or historical melodrama. The black-and-white cinematography looks downright low-key and realist in comparison.

It's probably more accurate to call Joseph LaShelle's cinematography romantic minimalism than realist. Romantic, because its set ups provide washes of etherial light; minimalist because like Shamroy's work (also at Fox) it tends to be sparse with the number of lighting sources.

Fitting with the Fox style, the result exploits a deeper and darker spectrum of grayscale than other studios' cinematography.

The second unusual aspect of the film is that the novelist for the source book, Frank Yerby, was African-American. As a best-selling writer of popular romance-historical novels, his work does not fit comfortably in the canon of African-American writing. Foxes, after all, has slave-owning white characters as protagonists. In the film version, there is a depiction of the dark side of the slave trade, as in an auction early in the film, during which the wandering camera emphasizes both the inhumanity of the spectacle and the complicity of the spectator of Old South movies who does not watch the forced labor propping up the lifestyle of the slaveowners.

As in many late 40s films, there's a self-conscious critique of film representation and a sense of making films unlike the "Hollywood film."

Edited Volumes

Some thoughts from another discipline on the relative lack of weight given to edited volumes in academic research standards. I think much of what Fabio Rojas applies to the humanities as well, though there are also some culture differences around publishing between sociology and film studies.

But beyond the matters of professionalization, I would pose the question of what role edited volumes and essays in such volumes play. Rojas poses "dumping ground," heterodoxy, and lit review as three basic functions, but I think there are plenty more.

- Applied scholarship. Film studies (and to some extent, I think, television studies) has the peculiarity that one former branch of the discipline - film criticism - is now subsumed into the branches of film theory and film history, which have more prestige and purport to tackle more complex questions. Interpretation and textual analysis are still part of the methodological toolbelt, but for journal articles, the expectation is often for bigger stakes than mere textual reading. Yet there are many, many films that merit close study and edited volumes give rooms for articles weighted more toward the film criticism side.

- Pedagogy. Edited volumes are rarely pedagogical in a way that textbooks are, but they can be organized and edited with an eye toward use in the classroom. Where monographs are too long and specialized and where journal articles are too oriented toward the vanguard of the field, the edited volume allows for a more accessible writing tone and fuller coverage of a topic. Rutgers' Star Decades and Screen Decades series are good examples.

- Agenda setting. Certain volumes capture and even christen scholarly agendas by pulling together work in a heretofore forgotten area or under a new rubric. The recent studies in world cinema are good examples.

- Compilation. I take it the compilation volume is going out of fashion because of the expense of negotiating and paying rights, but there's a real value for the reader to have influential and/or smart essays on a subject together in one book. Examples: Caughie's Theories of Authorship or Elsaesser's Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative.

- Collective work. Humanities scholars are notorious lone wolves. The edited volume, however, can bring together scholars in a larger study, dividing up tasks or parts of the coverage. von der Knapp's volume on Night and Fog's reception is a good example.

- Synopsis. This refers more to individual contributions than to entire volumes, but frequently scholars use volumes as a place for work that condenses and excerpts a larger argument developed more elsewhere. Similarly, they may use the volume to riff off their more established argument in the context of a new subject or theoretical emphasis.

Are there other functions I am overlooking?

Film History syllabus

I will be teaching a film history survey this Fall - the second part, form 1945 onward. I have a draft online - at this point I'm probably more concerned about weeding out possibilities in the interest of time constraints, but I'd happily hear comments and suggestions for what has worked for you before in such a class.