Whither Film Studies (in a Post–Film Studies World)?

In order to respond to the question "Where do we go from here?" it may be useful to remember how we got where we are. While what follows is more personal than universal, I suspect that many readers of Cinema Journal will recognize aspects of their own trajectory in mine.

As a French literature graduate student at Yale in the late sixties, I shared in the decade's interdisciplinary impulse, strongly influenced by the healthy disrespect for established disciplines demonstrated by such currents as structuralism, semiotics, and narratology. My studies with Todorov, Genette, and others equally suspicious of traditional disciplines encouraged me to compare texts as disparate as Russian folk-tales, French fantastic novels, indigenous social practices, and . . . films. The knowledge that I brought to film texts came not from a discipline called "film studies" but from my training in semiotics, my familiarity with twentieth-century theater and art movements, and my reading in a broad narrative tradition that included epics, romances, short stories, and novels. I had film surrounded, even though I had not yet really penetrated into the film fortress. I was rich in cultural knowledge and analytical techniques that helped me to understand the cinema, but I had precious little access to the films themselves. Only rarely did I enjoy the luxury of consulting a 35mm print at the Museum of Modern Art or the Library of Congress. My early film knowledge thus depended almost entirely on one-time public projections by museums or festivals—including a glorious year in Paris, when my wife and I virtually camped at the Cinémathèque Française—along with the odd "classic" film shown on television. In the early seventies, the chance discovery of Blackhawk Films started me on the road to building my own collection. My long-suffering Bryn Mawr students got used to the whir of my Super-8 projector sitting on a table in the back of the classroom.

When I came to Iowa in the mid-seventies I finally became part of a community that understood dedication to the study of film as its founding feature. Interestingly, however, the fact that the University of Iowa offered an MA and PhD in a discipline called "film studies" didn't mean that Iowa recruited graduate students with solid training in film analysis, history, and theory. Given the virtual absence of undergraduate film studies programs at the time, we regularly accepted students who knew more about film production, English literature, or art history than about the history of cinema. Happily, my Super-8 copies were rapidly replaced by rented 16mm prints. But in order to build a substantial film repertoire, students still required the shared resources of course screenings, the Bijou's regularly scheduled offerings, specially programmed retrospectives, and increasingly frequent televised film series. Like their instructors, our students became adept at taking copious notes while watching films, because we all knew that only in exceptional circumstances would we be privileged to see that particular film again. Only with the appearance of U-Matic 3/4-inch videotape recorders later in the seventies were we regularly able to preserve films for later viewing, and even then only with all the drawbacks of machines that were heavy and expensive and recorded only an hour per cassette. Even the simplest research need—such as checking the details of a print before publishing an analytical article—required a trip to the Library of Congress, MoMA, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, or a West Coast archive.

During the sixties and seventies, the film studies bibliography was limited indeed. I remember writing an article on the historiography of American cinema, shortly after my arrival at Iowa, for which I read virtually everything then available on American cinema—an unthinkable task now. The eighties changed all that. Hand in hand, the development of videotape recording technology and a substantial market for books about cinema transfigured our discipline. During the eighties and nineties the availability of films on video not only expanded our corpus, substantially increasing the range of films covered, but also led to a new...