In Focus: What Is Cinema? What Is Cinema Journal ?

With the advent of our organization's recent name change, from the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS) to the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), and with a new editor and editorial board at the helm of Cinema Journal, it makes sense for us to readdress some of our foundational disciplinary meta-questions and to ask what it is that we study, teach, and write about.

Does our organization's name change signify a seismic shift in the nature of our academic discourse, or does it merely represent a long-delayed declaration about what we have been doing at conferences, in classrooms, and in the pages of Cinema Journal for many years? What specific artifacts constitute media within SCMS? What methodological principles and objects of research make up our purview? What sort of scholarship is suitable for Cinema Journal? These are appropriate questions to ask at any time in the life and history of a learned society or a scholarly publication, but they are especially apposite in today's climate of "convergence" media, globalization, and technological innovation.¹ Dislocations in both the public sphere and the academic arena have led to many transformations in the ways we now think about cinema and media.

In 1962, Thomas Kuhn insisted that "paradigm shifts" occur in a discipline only when a novel methodology emerges, when a new generation or new idea begins to use the new taxonomy in a fresh and fruitful way.² Kuhn went on to argue that during the interregnum between such epistemes, the older generation of scholars was often confused (or unconvinced) by the new paradigm or unwilling to accept its innovative premises. As he put it, "Proponents of different theories are . . . native speakers of different languages."³ In some ways, Kuhn anticipated poststructuralism and deconstructionism in his insistence that science "advances" in its most revolutionary periods regardless of the "truth" or "falsity" of its claims.

Similarly, it is instructive to look back over the decades since the foundation of the SCS in 1959 and to study the history of evolving scholarly trends.⁴ Various academic acolytes have employed and defended their particular paradigms as the "latest and greatest"from auteurism, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, through semiotics, multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, cultural studies, the New Historicism, poststructuralism, deconstructionism, and cognitivism. In turn, most of these methodologies have eventually, mutatis mutandis, been either incorporated or sublated into some new synthesis or discarded outright as passé and irrelevant.

On the one hand, in an era that emphasizes "branding" in so many areas of corporate and academic life, these periodic dislocations might be construed as signaling a veritable "identity crisis" for the discipline. On the other hand, an enlightened self-study that expands the scope of our collective bailiwick should be viewed as a positive advance for the organization, especially given the growing real-world significance and influence of television, cable, music videos, interactive entertainment, digital delivery systems, and other contemporary moving-image technologies.⁵

Thus, by observing the field of cinema and media studies from a sub specie aeternitatis historical position, we can begin to see how the discipline has evolved (and not always on a teleological course), splintered, and balkanized into factions—at the same time that it has accepted diverse objects, methodologies, and constituencies into its domain. This current (yet perpetual) "crisis" may not be such a bad thing. While change, diversity, and debate in a given discipline should be encouraged and celebrated, there is also no need to "throw the parent out with the bath water."⁶ This may be, in fact, why the organization's new name retains the term cinema: to acknowledge the historical legacy and primacy of film research to all our endeavors, whether the texts we study are on celluloid or acetate, a TV monitor or a computer screen. Thus, an inclusive and pluralistic "big-tent" approach might well be the solution to the current conundrum—an approach that is responsive to all...