The Big Picture: On the Expansiveness of Cinema and Media Studies

In the past couple of decades, scholars in cinema and media studies have importantly, if incompletely, expanded the range of media, objects, methods, and culturally situated perspectives—including international ones—that we study. Institutionally, this has been epitomized by the addition of "and Media" to the organization's name (from SCS to SCMS) in 2002 and by the more recent proliferation of Scholarly Interest Groups to thirty-four SIGs by 2017 (a growth that has raised concerns that there are now "too many" SIGs).

But as the discipline and organization grow, have we simply become atomized into a plurality of smaller conversations? Do we still share unifying projects, sets of questions, and concerns? Would we even want to? How do we foster supportive intellectual communities that are essential for legitimating long-marginalized areas of study while not simply splintering into separate subfields that do not actually engage in dialogue or cohere? Does our work make an impact beyond our discipline? These questions developed for me out of conversations in recent years among a variety of colleagues.

Generational questions emerge as well. As the discipline "matures," how do we understand its evolution? Do we still need to teach apparatus theory, for instance—and, if so, is it as intellectual history or as active theory? The recent expansion of new graduate programs has literally redrawn the map of schools of thought. The tenure-track academic job market, however, has not kept pace. So what should be (and in many ways is) invigorating for our discipline must also raise questions of professional ethics: for what kind of future are we training students? Meanwhile, a generation of leading scholars has been in the process of retiring. Whereas there used to be a fairly recognizable star system of authors and canon in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s—including Metz, Mulvey, Elsaesser, Dyer, Altman, Bordwell, Williams, Doane, Hansen, and Gunning—can one say that we have shared references today? Would it even be desirable for us to have such common scholarly texts? Or was it old-school cinema studies that was arguably myopic?

What could we learn from reading and talking more broadly? What is the most innovative and essential work being done now in cinema and media studies? What kind of work needs to be developed? Are we occupying isolationist bubbles in our microconversations? Beyond our discipline, the near-daily disorienting, seemingly implausible global political upheavals of 2016–2017 have made it all the more urgent to strategize how to sustain a long view, find purpose in our work, and not give in to pessimism. But how do we do that?¹

These are all sincere questions on my part. I don't know the answers. Too often, I feel that the scholarship in our discipline is overly textually descriptive or citationally theoretical without having a clear sense of innovation, stakes, politics, intervention, perspective, or engagement beyond our friendly bubbles. Indeed, I'm not sure one could say that there are debates animating our field at present. We may be (over)due for a crisis of relevance, and perhaps it's even time to take the pervasive attacks on the humanities as a cue to ask ourselves what we are doing and what we hope to do.

Surely these questions reflect my own perpetual existential crises (and anxieties about the significance of my own work) as much as disciplinary ones. Each of my degrees has been in film studies or cinema studies, although I have always identified with the cultural studies end of the spectrum. I consider myself amphibious in my research and teaching—moving between cinema and media, history and theory, formalism and cultural context. I alternately embrace and fear my own dilettantism for having written on video, documentary, underground cinema, pornography, and queer media of various formats as the impulse struck me; for several years, I've been researching a project on the history of gay male bars in the United States that bears no obvious connection to cinema and media at all. So my own position has been one of being both fully...