A Note from Dudley Andrew

Though he cannot join us for Thursday's kickoff session of the 2010-11 Chicago Film Seminar, Dudley Andrew has kindly offered some words about his book What Cinema Is in advance of our panel discussion. Here, he underscores and in some ways expands the sense of the book's core assertions as they were crystallized in the prompt that the CFS officers circulated in advance to our scheduled speakers.

"I shouldn't try to inflect Thursday's discussion since I had an entire book to say what I wanted to say, but I do worry that the provocative passage excerpted from the book on the blog's 'invitation' for Thursday may unduly limit discussion. The 'feature film' is not meant to absorb all the attention of the book and shouldn't absorb the attention of the discussion. True, I do call it the bull's eye in the concentric rings of a target, but I also say that we should be concerned with the entire target. Nor is the bull's eye necessarily a normative assessment of value (50 points if you hit it, only 30 points if you hit the documentaries that circle it in the next ring, 20 points for animation etc).

"I wanted to keep in view the 'centrality' that the feature played in film studies when the field gained its great strength in the 1960s and especially the 1970s. So this is a description of both the cinema when it thought itself unrivaled, as well as cinema studies when it felt sure of its coming power. I do think we should recognize this moment of postulated ascendancy, and it is associated with strong feature films, modern ones, not 'classical' as the blog's invitation has it. But my book itself needs to deal with other forms and it addresses such works as WWII docs (The Battle of Midway, Battle of San Pietro, Why we Fight), the two great Resnais docs of 1955-56, plus Les Maîtres fous). These short films are directly in the 'line' I am intent to trace and they help to produce it. As for experimental work of this modernist period, from Maya Deren to Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage, it forms another line, one that was and remains personally important to me, but that was parallel to, not part of, the line that emerges clearest in my last chapter. Bazin himself of course wrote on all sorts of non-features as well as on animation and TV shows. He was a media-fiend; but the main line of his ideas came through features and documentaries (films of exploration, of painting, etc). So don't let my initial plea for a concentrated corpus completely take over Thursday's discussion. It has a place in discussion but not a constitutive place.

"Finally, let me wish you a good discussion where the target may be my book, or at least its title (and without benefit of concentric circles), but where the real goal is the expression of new ideas and understandings. May these come in abundance."

Thanks, then, to Dudley Andrew for taking the time to say more about the motivating impetus of the book and the range of its investments—and for taking the very welcome initiative to make this blog a site for additional conversation, before, about, and after our formal Thursday sessions. Again, feel free to register your own first impressions about What Cinema Is or the questions you'll be bringing with you on Thursday night in the comments.

Reminders: Today is the deadline to RSVP if you'd like to stay around for dinner after Thursday's discussion. See the previous entry for more info about the format of the evening and about practical logistics of location, parking, etc.

What Cinema Is: The 2010-11 Theme

The coordinators of the Chicago Film Seminar have taken the unusual step this year of organizing its yearly slate of speakers around a unified theme, taking Dudley Andrew's recent book What Cinema Is! as either a direct or an indirect point of departure. Here is a copy of the prompt distributed to the invited presenters:

"In What Cinema Is! Bazin's Quest and Its Charge (Blackwell, 2010), Dudley Andrew posits classical cinema—fictional feature films made between 1938-1968—as the norm, not as a way of defending the canon for its own sake, but for the sake of defending 'an instinct of looking and listening' that developed out of long, critical engagement with that form of cinema. For Andrew, 'the legacy surrounding the feature film has caused the most heated and robust debates in film theory,' and if we are to cherish anything in a time of disciplinary upheaval, we should treasure the energy and focus behind those debates. Indeed, 'such debates...have made cinema studies among the liveliest sites in the humanities for the past half-century. The prospect of the decline of those debates is more worrisome than the putative mutation of their topic.'

"For Andrew, then, it all starts and returns to the feature film and 'the intensity and the focus that films invite and sometimes demand.' As long as we define cinema in multiple ways, according to Andrew, we risk losing the focus that created and defined our field. We invite you to present your latest work as an explicit or implicit response to this idea."

Please join us this year for a series of talks that, in their own ways, will take up some of Andrew's concerns, implicitly or explicitly suggesting some direct replies to his claims.

Links: Buy What Cinema Is! from Wiley-Blackwell or from Amazon

In the Comments: Any thoughts already on Andrew's book, or the CFS theme? Any questions you hope we might consider over the course of the year in relation to 'What Cinema Is,' either during our evening sessions or here on the blog?