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

Afterimage, May-June, 1998 by Michael Starenko

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

Among other things, this passage is a good example of satirical parody Satire obviously disapproves of both the form and content of university "studies" disciplines By simultaneously using and exaggerating "studies" jargon, Satire announces his superior distance from such discourse, a distance presumably shared by the credentialed readers of the Times.

Parody - and its sisters: burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation. illusion, appropriation and intertextuality - were a major topic at this year's Society for Cinema Studies annual conference, which was held April 3-6 in New Orleans. According to my calculations, at least 30 of the approximately 160 formal papers delivered at the conference 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 on the Joke: Parody as Evidence of Narration."

Before I say more about the conference itself, I want to return 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, even visual studies - are a travesty of older university disciplines like philosophy, art history and literature. Although some academic traditionalists may grudgingly accept the formalist study of certain art-house films, in general they consider film and television to be one 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 on the interrelated methodologies of Marxism, feminism and modern French philosophy further antagonizes the detractors of cinema studies.

Nevertheless, due to relatively favorable enrollment figures and sheer intellectual brilliance, cinema studies concentrations and programs exist within many United States and Canadian colleges and universities. Full-fledged doctorate programs in cinema studies, however, exist in only a few, mostly public, universities. Most prominently, these include New York University, the University of California at Los Angeles. the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Milwaukee, University of Texas at Austin and Northwestern University. Many SCS members, perhaps the majority, are either a faculty member, a graduate, or a soon-to-be graduate of one of these programs. If this sounds incestuous, it is. Though to be fair, with just 700 members, SCS is no more incestuous, if that's the proper adjective, than other university associations such as the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), the College Art Association, or the Modern Language Association.

Unlike SPE, where photographers outnumber theorist/historians by at least 10 to one, very few SCS members are either filmmakers or teachers of filmmaking. However, some 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 SCS by Ramona Curry titled: "SCS: A Socio-Political History." Building on 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 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 SCS is quite fascinating (for instance, SCS was founded during the Conference on Motion Picture Education at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959; SCS's original name was the Society for Cinematologists), her discussion of SCS in the '80s is much more pertinent to this essay.

In 1963, SCS 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 growth in membership in the mid- to late '70s was the admission of graduate students, who were enrolling in record numbers in the aforementioned cinema studies programs. This influx of "Young Turks," as they are called, has helped change SCS from a stodgy "learned society" to a dynamic "professional association." As Check Kleinhans put it to Curry, "an old boy network has become a young women network."

It's hard to believe now, but the first presentation by a woman at an SCS annual conference occurred in 1970. The first panel devoted to the subject of women and film was at the 1975 conference at New York University. At the 1985 and 1986 conferences, however, almost half of the presentations were by women, and this despite the fact that women constitute only 30% of the membership. In any case, many of the major reforms of SCS during the early '80s were, in part, the consequence of women's demands to "democratize" Cinema Journal and conference programming. Prior to 1982, for instance, Cinema Journal's selection policy was pretty much at the discretion of the editor and the small editorial board. In 1981, a committee appointed to review the function of the journal concluded, according to Curry, "that a formal blind referee procedure was essential to its status as an academic publication." In addition to conferring more academic "respectability" on Cinema Journal, the blind-referee procedure, instituted in 1982, presumably benefits women and other minorities who might not otherwise receive a fair reading of their papers.