Discipline and Publish: The Birth of Cinematology

In 1957 and again in 1958, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) brought together a number of university teachers to discuss the "teaching [of ] film as an art form" and its place within the university.¹ At the second meeting, the decision was taken to form a professional association, to be called the Society of Cinematologists (SoC). In "acquiring academic standards" through this association, the "isolated" university film teacher could, founding president Robert Gessner argued, "end his second-class citizenship in university faculties." ² In this way, professional association would gather together faculty members across diverse departments, united now in their focus on film, and thus hopefully bring these faculty the professional advantages of "citizenship" (visibility, tenure, promotion). Citizenship might in turn be parlayed, through the persuasion of university administrators, into the formation of programs and departments for the study of the cinema along the lines of established academic disciplines in the university. Gessner's naming of the society was mindful of this project, for it sought specifically to bring the "right scholarly and scientific tone," and thus a "move in the direction of dignity" for the study of cinema that would uplift the cultural status of the production of knowledge about cinema and foster its acceptance in the university.³

Language marks off the borders of disciplines, which are in some respects epistemic speech communities. "Cinematology" drew explicitly on the "filmology" movement in France that had proposed to set in place a comprehensive methodological approach to what the filmologists termed the "science" of cinema.⁴ Gessner had visited Paris in the postwar period (the first of many Americans in Paris drawn by the study of film and newfangled, fancy theories); the alliance with filmology bypassed or overrode the belletrist criticism and cinephilia widespread in the Paris of Cahiers du cinéma and the Cinémathèque in favor of a more rigorous, "scholarly," and "disciplined" formation of knowledge and expertise. "The cinematologist is a scholar rather than a journalist," the Christian Science Monitor observed approvingly in 1960, "a theoretician, rather than merely an articulate spectator."⁵

Gessner and the cinematologists were fighting, his 1968 obituary in Cinema Journal noted, for the "recognition of cinema study as an autonomous discipline."⁶ A professor in the English Department at New York University, Gessner had taught a course on screenwriting in the Extension Department as early as 1935, and he had developed a lecture series on "History and Appreciation of the Cinema," using the films from MoMA's influential circulating library, that had by the late 1930s mutated into a for-credit course in the English department ("The Cinema as Literary Art").⁷ Gessner attempted to establish a four-year program at NYU in the postwar period.⁸ Later, when canvassed for a report on the study of cinema in universities in the mid-1960s by the American Council on Education, Gessner argued that all film classes must contribute "to the rhythmic visualization of emotions and ideas." Otherwise they would not be "germane" to the discipline.⁹ Gessner was proposing that the new "discipline in cinema" would be grounded in close formal analysis of the "unique characteristics" of what he called, in an essay in the first issue of the Journal of the Society of Cinematologists, "the exclusive language of cinema."¹⁰ In doing so, Gessner was influenced not only by the filmologists but also by the "new critical" methodology central to English departments from the postwar period that focused attention on "intrinsic" literary properties to the exclusion of "extrinsic" historical "context." The formalism of "new criticism" helped the professional consolidation of English, transcending historical philology and linguistics, giving it a definable object of study (the "literariness" of the text) and methodology.¹¹ It would in turn inform the idea that film could constitute the grounds of an autonomous discipline that would be properly housed in a university department and supported by a professional association. The dynamics of the questions about ontology and film as language and art would continue to resonate within that discipline.

Gessner and the cinematologists participated in, and concretized, a shift in...