Film Voices: Interviews from Post Script

PREFACE

In 1978, about a dozen colleges and university instructors interested in film and fiction participated in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at The Johns Hopkins University. The seminar was directed by Leo Braudy (now of the University of Southern California) and focused on how character is presented in fiction and film. As is the case with many of these NEH seminars, participants often bond because of similar interests and general compatibility. Near the end of the seminar , six or seven of the participants wanted to continue the dialogue established during our six weeks together. We agreed to start a newsletter to discuss ideas begun in the seminar and to open the newsletter to others who might be interested in participating in our discussions. (This, of course, was prior to e-mail and chat rooms.) We agreed that if we could sustain the newsletter for a year or two, we would then try to change the format from newsletter to journal. After about eighteen months and several issues of the newsletter, some of us decided to begin a journal. Those collaborating on this project consisted of Robert Ginsberg (Penn State, Delaware County), Wade Jennings (Ball State University), Judy Riggin (Northern Virginia Community College), the late T. J. (Ted) Ross (Fairleigh Dickinson University), Gerald Duchovnay (Jacksonville University, Florida), and Leo Braudy, who offered his good offices to assist us with establishing an editorial board. After several meetings, the group asked me if I would serve as the general editor. Without knowing what was involved, I agreed. The others said they would do what they could to raise funds and solicit editorial staff and submissions. Since there were several other film journals at the time (and many more since), we thought an interdisciplinary journal, with articles that were accessible to scholars and the general reader, would be the approach we should take. The journal’s name, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, hammered out in a hotel suite at a film conference in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1980, sought to capture our intent. With nominal support from Jacksonville University and some P R E F A C E 쵧 xiii contributions by most of the members of the original editorial board, we secured enough funds and submissions to publish our first issue in November 1981. Uncertain of the journal’s reception and future funding, the editorial staff recommended that in addition to the articles, we should try to include substantive interviews and some book reviews. We knew that Film Quarterly had an issue devoted to book reviews, so we did not want to duplicate what they were doing. Literature/Film Quarterly focused on filmed adaptations, and numerous journals had interviews, but for the most part they were brief remarks connected to the director, actor, or cinematographer’s latest film. Our goal was to try to go beyond the moment. By 1983 J. P. Telotte, one of the contributors to several of our early issues, joined the editorial board and suggested we consider adding an annual bibliography of film studies. This bibliography would list and annotate articles on film that appeared in English language publications that would be relatively accessible to most of our readers. The editorial staff agreed that this would be a useful resource for those who wanted a ready reference and who did not have access to the more substantive (and expensive) Film/Literature Index (State University of New York Press, Albany) or the International Index to Film Periodicals (Fédération Internationale des Archives du Film, Belgium). After the first few years of testing the waters, Post Script established its format , which, except for a major design change when it moved from Jacksonville University to Texas A&M University-Commerce in 1990, has remained fairly consistent. Since 1981 we have published three issues a year. Those issues have included an annual bibliography, an occasional brief note on articles previously published, substantive essays on film acting, film as visual art and cinematic style, film history, aesthetics, film and technology, genre studies, and interdisciplinary studies, as well as book reviews and interviews. We have also devoted full issues to special topics—French cinema, Spanish cinema, film and philosophy, Shakespeare and film, Chinese cinema, Japanese cinema, Hong Kong cinema, autobiography and film, Gen-X film, Canadian cinema, Paul Verhoeven, the films of Kurosawa Akira, and literacy and film. While we have not received (or published) as many interdisciplinary essays as we initially hoped for, our readers have frequently commented on the usefulness...