Obituary: Robert Sklar (1936-2011)

Robert Sklar, 74, died on 2 July 2011 from injuries sustained from a bicycle fall in Barcelona, Spain. He had retired in 2009 as professor of cinema studies at NYU, where he had taught since 1977. His most famous book was Movie-Made America (1975; revised 1994) but he was also a prolific author of scholarly essays, reviews and newspaper articles, and had been an editorial board member of Film History since its inception in 1987. His key contributions include work on early cinema, cultural history, Hollywood's Production Code, various filmmakers, cinema's political valence, and the role of theory within historiography - butmust also include his mentoring several generations of notable scholars.

Known fondly to students, colleagues (and students-turned-colleagues like me) as Bob, he graduated from Princeton in 1958 and worked as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times, cultivating the accessible style that gave his writing such reach beyond academia. He completed his PhD at Harvard in the history of American civilization in 1965, joined the history faculty of the University of Michigan, and published his first book, F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Last Laocoön, in 1967. The following year he was among many writers protesting the Vietnam War by signing a pledge to refuse making tax payments, prefiguring his later interests in the political sphere, his belief in the power of collective engagement as reflected in culture, and his support for alternative modes of expression. Early exemplars of cultural studies such as Raymond Williams influenced him greatly, and Bob also eagerly considered the paradigms of French thinkers from Michel Foucault to the Annales School.

Encouraged by students and his passion for cinema, Bob took a professional risk writing Movie-Made America and moving to NYU in his forties. Using his own historiographic insights, one can place Bob not among the first generation of film scholars (those not academics by training), but rather among those with PhDs who came along in a second wave

Fig. 1.

Robert Sklar (left) with Julie Garfield, Lee Grant, Nelson Page and Victor Navasky at a 2008 panel on blacklisting sponsored by the Fort Lee Film Commission. [Photo by Donna Brennan.]

and enriched cinema studies with scholarly prestige and insights from their original disciplines. The book itself, one of the most widely read in our discipline, justifiably made Bob's name and set the stage for later scholarly debates. He posited American film as developing from people at the "bottom" and not just social powers at the "top," emphasized early cinema, suggested the "Age of Turbulence" vs. "Age of Order" paradigms for the pre- and post-PCA years, and provocatively backtracked his chronological survey in its last chapter to explore the possibility of social change embodied by the avant-garde. Before cultural studies fully impacted media history, Bob practiced it. Prime-Time America (1980) examined television long before many other scholars, and City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield (1992) elegantly considered these stars' personae as well as their performances of masculinity, the arc of their careers and their roles as political subjects, willing or not, within society.

Bob quickly established a venerable seniority in the field, serving as the thirteenth president of the Society for Cinema [now Cinema and Media] Studies (1979-81) and encouraging greater graduate student participation. Later he joined the National Film Preservation Board, helped program the New York Film Festival, and wrote his most lavish book, Film: An International History of the Medium (1993). Bob also held visiting positions in New Zealand and Japan, and received Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. He long championed Cineaste magazine, served as a book series editor for Temple University Press, and co-edited a number of anthologies. These include a fine volume (with Vito Zagarrio) on Frank Capra; a forthcoming one (with Saverio Giovacchini) on the global legacy of neorealism; and an essential collection (with Charles Musser), Resisting Images (1991) - all of which emphasize the confluence of archival research, textual analysis, theoretical grounding and historiographic self-awareness at the cornerstone of Bob's work.

Bob Sklar, however, wore his august status lightly. He was...