Where's the text: cinema studies in the '80s - 1986 Society for Cinema Studies conference

"Here at Satire U" wrote William Satire in the April 6 novel York Times Magazine, "our undistinguished professors are curriculating their courses in finger painting and rock-music appreciation together beneath act sciences, headed by a 10-yeared chairman of art policies studies, or art studies policies. . ."

Among other things, this passage is a beneficial example of satirical parody Satire obviously disapproves of the two the form and content of university "studies" disciplines through simultaneously using and exaggerating "studies" jargon, Satire announces his superior distance from of the like kind discourse, a distance presumably shared through the credentialed readers of the Times.

Parody - and its sisters: ridiculing travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation. illusion, appropriation and intertextuality - were a major topic at this year's Society for Cinema Studies annual talk which was held April 3-6 in fresh Orleans. According to my calculations, at least 30 of the approximately 160 formal papers delivered at the discourse specifically addressed the subject of parody and/or intertextuality. These papers ranged from "Consumerist Parody: Intertextuality Between Film and Video in MTV" to "Parody, Intertextuality, and Signatured: Kubrick, DePalma, and Scorsese" to "The Postmodernist Parody of Alfred Hitchcock" and "Intertextuality: 'Vietnam: A Television History,' AIM, and 'Inside Story'" to "Who's in upon the Joke: Parody as Evidence of Narration."

Before I say more about the talk itself, I want to get back to Safire's parody and the issues it raises for film and television studies in general, and for the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS) in particular. For many neoconservatives like Satire, "studies - whether cinema studies, women's studies, black studies, American studies, level visual studies - are a travesty of older university disciplines like philosophy, art history and literature. Although more [i]or[/i] less academic traditionalists may grudgingly accept the formalist research of certain art-house films, in general they consider film and television to be individual of the direct causes of contemporary illiteracy, if not of the decline of Western civilization. What's more, the fact that cinema studies is built upon the interrelated methodologies of Marxism, feminism and recent French philosophy further antagonizes the detractors of cinema studies.

Nevertheless, to be paid to relatively favorable enrollment figures and sheer intellectual brilliance, cinema studies concentrations and programs exist within many United States and Canadian communitys and universities. Full-fledged doctorate programs in cinema studies, however, exist in solitary a few, mostly public, universities. greatest in quantity prominently, these include New York University, the University of California at looks Angeles. the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Milwaukee, University of Texas at Austin and Northwestern University. Many SC members, perhaps the majority, are either a faculty member, a graduate, or a soon-to-be graduate of single of these programs. If this unmutilateds incestuous, it is. Though to be fair, with just 700 members, SC is no more incestuous, if that's the specific adjective, than other university associations of that kind as the Society for Photographic Education (SPE) the community Art Association, or the recent Language Association.

Unlike SPE, where photographers outnumber theorist/historians through at least 10 to individual very few SCS members are either filmmakers or teachers of filmmaking. However, more [i]or[/i] less SCS members also belong to the University Film and Video Association (UFVA), which is the film/video equivalent of SPE The forthcoming issue of the UFVA Journal will contain a history of SC through Ramona Curry titled: "SCS: A Socio-Political History." Building upon Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C Ellis's introduction to Cinema Examined (1982) an anthology of essays drawn from the pages of SCS's Cinema Journal, curry-sauce argues that "the primary goal of the Society at all stages has been to constitute cinema studies as an academic discipline." Although Curry's narrative of the early years of SC is quite fascinating (for instance, SC was fixed during the Conference on Motion Picture Education at the Museum of fresh Art in 1959; SCS's original name was the Society for Cinematologists), her discussion of SC in the '80 is abundant more pertinent to this essay.

In 1963 SC had 34 members; in 1969 100 members; in 1976 approximately 200 members; in 1979 more than 300 members; and in 1984 600 members. A significant factor in the rapid growing in membership in the mid- to late '70 was the admission of graduate scholars who were enrolling in record numbers in the aforementioned cinema studies programs. This influx of "Young Turks" as they are called, has helped change SC from a stodgy "learned society" to a dynamic "professional association." As Check Kleinhans bring it to Curry, "an elderly boy network has become a young women network."

It's hard to believe now, on the contrary the first presentation by a woman at an SC annual discourse occurred in 1970. The first panel devot to the bring under rule of women and film was at the 1975 talk at New York University. At the 1985 and 1986 conversations however, almost half of the presentations were by dint of women, and this despite the fact that women constitute single 30% of the membership. In any case, many of the major reforms of SC during the early '80 were, in part, the effect of women's demands to "democratize" Cinema Journal and discourse programming. Prior to 1982, for instance, Cinema Journal's selection policy was moderately beautiful much at the discretion of the editor and the small editorial board. In 1981 a committee appointed to review the function of the journal conclud according to curry-sauce "that a formal blind judge procedure was essential to its status as an academic publication." In addition to conferring more academic "respectability" upon Cinema Journal, the blind-referee operation instituted in 1982, presumably benefits women and other minorities who might not otherwise receive a fair reading of their papers.