Out of the Past

When I started studying film in the 1970s, I did not project myself into an era in which SCMS would turn 50. Neither did I anticipate that when it did, I would be even older than that. But here we both are.

In some sense, I view myself as an academic "test-tube baby," because I was one of the first generation of newly minted film studies PhDs ("Yes, really," I assured disbelievers, "I did get a doctoral degree in that "). In fact, I recall the precise moment when attaining such a distinction became possible. After getting BA and MAT degrees in English, I was teaching high school in New York City—motivated by post-1960s idealism about improving urban education (and limited by constrained career aspirations for women at that time). I was already interested in film and illegally borrowing movies from the Donnell Public Library to show to my students—boys enrolled in a public vocational high school. One day in the teacher's lounge (amidst the usual disheartening conversations about hours remaining in the day, or days remaining until retirement), I picked up the New York Times and read that New York University was launching one of the first (if not the first) doctoral programs in cinema studies as a distinct discipline. I had already decided that I wanted to go on for my PhD and teach at the college level, so I read the article with great interest.

Like most educated young people living in Manhattan at the time, I had become an avid filmgoer—watching revivals at the Thalia, Bleecker Street, Symphony, or New Yorker theaters, attending the New York Film Festival, and going to screenings at MoMA. Of course, when I went to college, there was no film studies major and few, if any, classes in the area. While teaching, however, I had taken a few graduate film courses at Columbia University with Andrew Sarris, among others. In considering doctoral studies, I had also been investigating programs in English, but had, curiously, felt some reluctance about enrolling in them (despite my background in and love of literature).

In contemplating film studies, what attracted me, in addition to the subject itself (with its untraveled paths and scholarly new horizons), was its "maverick" status. I use this word with great trepidation as it has recently been tainted by contact with Republican candidates in the 2008 presidential election—but I mean it with utmost sincerity. There was something decidedly "tweedy," "elite," and "establishment" about the field of English in my mind—a traditional thrust that, frankly, alienated me (in part, because I was a first-generation college graduate and because the sixties had taught me to question canonical education). Quite simply, I felt (without any supporting evidence) that I would be more "at home" in film studies—because of my love of the medium, because of my desire to be an academic pioneer, and because I sensed that I would like the more unconventional people who chose it as their life's work. Neither the subject nor my colleagues have disappointed me.

As a basically cowardly person, I like to think that I took some "risk" in pursuing a degree in film studies at the time. My conservative parents opposed my quitting a secure teaching job for a pursuit of the vagaries of an unfamiliar academic life (bad enough in a conventional field but unthinkable in a new and questionable one). I had always been chastened by their warnings but, for some reason, I ignored this one. From the present perspective, studying film back then was, in some ways, a lunatic pursuit. For the most part, we saw films only once: in a classroom, at a museum, at a festival, in a theater. Of course, the latter situation allowed for rescreening if the film continued to be exhibited. At NYU, Bill Everson (a dedicated professor) often allowed students to borrow his 16mm prints, and I can recall dragging heavy cases on the subway back to my apartment. As I think of it now, Bill was an extremely unusual collector in his generosity with his prints, and his...