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Cinema Journal 43.3 (2004) 88-91



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Diversity or Dilution?

Thoughts on Film Studies and the SCMS


The topic of this second In Focus section in Cinema Journal is, most appropriately, the reconsideration of some "foundational disciplinary meta-questions," as Frank P. Tomasulo puts it in his introduction. I want to thank both Frank and Cinema Journal editor Jon Lewis for inviting me to participate in this discussion, for while some may consider the exercise passé or pedantic, it is in fact propitious, as the recent attack by Los Angeles Times columnist David Weddle on the Film Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, specifically and the discipline generally so clearly attests.1

The immediate catalyst for this self-reflection has been the name change of the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS) to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). This is, I think, a change of great import, for it has significant implications for the organization and its future direction. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but this modification in the organization's name does raise some thorny issues.

The name change was probably inevitable, given how we encounter movies today. There is no need to rehearse the technological history of cinema here, but suffice it to acknowledge that television, home video, digital technology, and computers have drastically altered how we experience films, how we think about them, and how films are made. Now we can watch the movies we want to when we want [End Page 88] to. The history of film—or, more accurately, what remains of the history of film—is now not only available to us but literally at our fingertips.

Cinema has both lost and gained something from these changes. More people are exposed to films through other media than in movie theaters, but at the same time cinema is diminished, as it becomes only one option in a menu of visual entertainments. When we no longer need to go to the cinema because the cinema comes to us, then cinema loses whatever "aura" it may once have had. I do not mean this in a strictly Benjaminian sense, since film prints are of course copies, but in more of a phenomenological sense.

Movies have become a more integrated part of the environment, like the old films continuously playing on the ubiquitous TV monitors in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985). It is no surprise, therefore, that people chat more often these days during theatrical screenings, because when we can watch films with optimal viewing conditions on our home theater systems, viewing them in movie theaters seems merely like seeing them in a larger living room. When the Bazinian myth of total cinema is achieved, it will be the death of cinema, not its fulfillment.

In short, film has been absorbed by other media and formats, and the name change of SCS to SCMS is simply a recognition of what has happened to cinema ever since movies began to appear on television. In the academic context, how many professors of film studies still use film as film (to borrow Victor Perkins's phrase) in the classroom? How many members of SCMS, I wonder, could actually thread a projector and show a film to a class? Astonishingly, there are film scholars who never go to the cinema!

Yet, while the organization's name change may have been inevitable, it is not the case that the nature of its impact is predetermined. SCMS is at a crossroads, and its many possibilities are reflected in the ambiguity of the new name. This change is as much a matter of substance as semantics. Aside from the jokes about the new acronym (SCAMS?), there is the more serious issue of what the new name signals. Cinema now is separated from other media. Does this suggest that cinema is not a form of media, one among others, but somehow related to them ("cinema and media studies"), or that cinema is privileged above all other media ("cinema and media studies...

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