The Passion(s) of Sam Rohdie (1939-2015)

UPDATED on November 19, 2015 with link to Sam Rohdie's Passions(s): A Coda [four new tributes]

'In Vertigo, James Stewart's look is as important as the figure [...] whom he regards and who he transforms by his desires [...] It is important that the sight seen has in it something out of place, out of true and the normal, which engages the look of the character and lures him or her into an imaginary.'

Sam Rohdie, Montage (Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 63-64 (Also see here)

The sad news has arrived of the sudden death, on April 3 in Florida, of film scholar Sam Rohdie, a hugely important, if at times also a divisive figure in our discipline.

In the last years, Rohdie held the position of Professor of Cinema Studies in the Department of Film at the University of Central Florida. He had previously held the Chair in Film Studies at The Queens University of Belfast and before that was Professor of Film Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. He also held academic posts in universities in England, Ghana, Italy and the United States and was an original member of the Cinema Studies Program at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He published widely on film in academic journals and books (see below). Rohdie was the editor of Screen in the United Kingdom from 1971 to 1974.

FSFF's author never met Rohdie, but was an avid reader of his work. He not only made a huge contribution to film studies as a discipline, he was also an important author and supporter of online and open access film scholarship, particularly at the pioneering Australian open access journal Screening the Past (including co-editing two dossiers for the journal with Des O-'Rawe - on ‘Cinema/Photography: Beyond Representation [Screening the Past, Issue 29]' and 'Cinema/Theatre: Beyond Adaptation [Screening the Past, Issue 21]'; see the journal's own Facebook page for its tributes to Rohdie). The latter is one of the reasons why his contribution is especially dear to FSFF.

Below, you can find invited tributes to Rohdie's work, beginning with Adrian Martin's memories of Rohdie - more will follow on a rolling basis in the next days. 

Below the tributes is FSFF's characteristic gathering of links to online scholarly works - ones by or about Rohdie, as well as a list of his major books.

If you have any resources you would like to be added, please email FSFF. Thanks.

[ADDED November 19, 2015: See also the four new tributes -- by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, David Johnston, Stefania Parigi and Des O'Rawe -- at a later entry at FSFF]

Sam Rohdie 

By Adrian Martin

It was 1978. I was a student in the Media course at Melbourne State College (a training institution for secondary school teachers) in Australia, and that semester we had (thanks to his friend Tom Ryan) an illustrious guest lecturer: Sam Rohdie. At that time, Sam was completing his PhD, a minute analysis – written somewhat in the manner of Barthes or Derrida – of a segment from Rossellini’s Rome, Open City. We worked through this same segment in class, week after week, with a 16mm print and projector (those were the days!).

Sam’s goal was to show, intensively, that what history had taken for ‘realism’ (or even neo-realism) was entirely fabricated, shot for shot, cut for cut. That what happened apparently ‘incidentally’ in the scene was connected, by numerous narrative and semantic chains, to every other moment in the film. There was the thrill – de rigueur at the time – of the micro-analytic exposure of common sense and transparency, an almost paranoiac ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ as it came to be called. But there was also a sensual joy in this analysis, and that quickly came to mean more for Sam, in all the work that followed this doctoral culmination of what we might think of as his ‘Screen years’ – i.e., his time as editor, contributor, instigator and agitator at that (now august) cinema studies journal.

Almost at the second the ink was dry on that thesis, Sam got into the habit of downplaying the Screen legacy in his life – and he was still doing so when Deane Williams interviewed him in 2010 for a history of film theory in Australia. He had developed a marked aversion to the ‘dry taxonomies’ of Metz, as he told me, and indeed with the entire dream of structuralist-semiotic film analysis. He was through with the pretension to scientific rigour and certainty. He was heading somewhere else, and now in a more post-structuralist spirit, but without all the lengthy citations and footnotes of the then-recent academic past: into paradox, into pleasure, and above all into writing as a creative as well as critical art.

In 1978, Sam had given me the draft of his PhD to read – and he curtly dismissed me from his presence on the day I handed it back without any particularly searing critical comment to offer on it. That’s how he was: like Godard, Sam was always in search of an interlocutor, and so rarely found one who he deemed worthy. It was his personal style, and it infused his singularly disconcerting teaching method. Sam was aggressive and provocative in the classroom; he was impatient with having to be ‘the teacher’. This seems to have remained his teaching mode, more or less, to the end of his life (he was about to retire from the game in May). In 1978, at least, he was in the habit of identifying the ‘gifted’ students – this was to be my role, alas – and, when he got bored, giving the signal for that chosen delegate to keep the class going by yapping on without missing the beat, as he looked off and thought of more pleasant things, such as what he would cook that evening (Sam was a true foodie). 

Rossellini: Sam came to love him, not to expose him – as his essay on India eventually showed. I came to see, by the mid 1990s, when he launched his personal book-writing crusade with the brilliant Antonioni – and after articles he had written in various Australian magazines like Cinema Papers and Filmviews – that Sam now grasped every film he liked (in deep-dish Derrida style) as a conceptual paradox: a statement or position always undoing itself, implying its opposite term. This idea tracks through all of his writing on the great auteurs of Italian cinema. Fellini, for instance, may make films that, on the surface decry a world of artifice and superficiality – but, in their very being, they celebrate this artifice, and invite us to (as he once wrote) “join the party”. Rocco and His Brothers may seem to be groping toward a stern moral statement about the “conflicting claims of passion and duty, art and reason”, but Visconti is forever fascinated by the decadence that he dramatises. Sam was no longer out to expose or correct these wayward, paradoxical expressions. On the contrary, he took them for constitutive paradoxes, generating the most agonised, soulful and beautiful of films. 

I don’t pretend to have really known Sam, or to know now what ever made him tick. I have the impression that he was someone who constantly reinvented himself and his life, in terms of the places he lived (and taught), the languages he learnt, the books he read and the films he saw (and re-saw). In Australia in the 1970s and ‘80s, he hurled himself into the public works of film culture: he appeared on radio (very memorably), chaired feisty public discussions at the National Film Theatre, and contributed to curriculum committees for screen education at tertiary and secondary levels. The most remarkable sign of this intense desire to ‘assimilate’ was in his finding and championing of Australian avant-garde work – work that has rarely been approached with such theoretical zest ever since. 

But I think that, in later times and places – in Hong Kong or Belfast or Florida, by which time I had totally lost touch with him – he no longer longed to fuse himself with local scenes in the same way. Rather, he preferred to look backward (and yet forward) into history, histories of film and culture; and it was writing that sustained his interest and his passion, as we see in his final essay collections, Montage and Intersections, and no doubt the posthumous Film Modernism appearing later this year. I spotted him at the Godard conference at the Tate in 2001 – a rather lonely, sullen figure, he seemed to me, and unaccountably silent at each session’s question time, where once he would have been so vociferous – and again in 2006 on the streets of Paris, once more on a rendez-vous with Godard, this time the astonishing Pompidou exhibition Voyage(s) en utopie. And it is Godard and his Histoire(s) du cinéma that, judging from the essays he would regularly send the editors of Screening the Past in his last years, form the spine of Film Modernism. 

I am back in that classroom of 1978. Sam gives me ‘the sign’ to speak – I am utterly terrified, but kind-of used to this sadomasochistic ritual by now – and he looks away from the sea of students, indifferent to either their delight or their dismay. I remember one day, when he did this, just about everyone present could forgive his perennial tactic, because he was concentrated by something that formed a quite lovely spectacle: his very young daughter had fallen asleep in his lap at the front of the classroom, and he caressed her very gently and tenderly, soothing her dreams. This is the image of Sam Rohdie I choose to remember today.

© Adrian Martin, 14 April 2015

Sam Rohdie: Three Times 

By Deane Williams 

(1)

In 1989, after many years away from the University, I enrolled in an Honours year at the then legendary La Trobe University Cinema Studies department, home to Bill Routt, Rick Thompson, Barbara Creed, Lorraine Mortimer, and, of course, Sam Rohdie. I wanted to write a dissertation on Chris Marker’s Sunless and was assigned Sam as a supervisor. Sam told me he didn’t, at that time, like the film much, wasn’t a very good supervisor, suggested I might be interested in Italian neo-realism and that I couldn’t write. He also suggested that I read Proust and Jean Rouch on the “cine-trance” in the essay in Mick Eaton’s collection Anthropology, Reality, Cinema. It turned out to be not much of a dissertation. No matter. 

What Sam did was introduce me to was what I think of as intellectual film studies, what Sam, in an interview I did with him in 2009, called “serious film studies”, a term he used over and over in that interview, as distinct from a theoretical approach to film studies; an approach taken by everyone at La Trobe in this period. He continued:

I think the more correct word is seriousness and that engaging with a film or a group of films was risky and exciting and you needed to do it seriously and whatever would help you in that seriousness you should employ and so it was very… anything, anything would do but there certainly wasn’t a ‘film theory’ that I had any particular loyalty towards. You used ideas when they seemed appropriate and you went to things when they seemed appropriate and if certain structures of ideas helped you to see things, you employed them but they were kind of instruments.

In this way Sam was a kind of deep intellectual, with a formidable knowledge across, film and art history, literature, critical theory et al., matched by an equally fearsome confidence in both his own criticism of any presumed knowledge as well as his own manner in pursuing his own ideas. Sam was forthright, difficult and a hell of a writer. 

(2) 

In my PhD dissertation completed in 2000, I tried to mimic Sam’s writing on Italian neo-realism in my own discussion of Rossellini’s Stromboli in relation to R Maslyn Williams Mike and Stefani. A few years later I read and reviewed Sam’s essayistic Promised Lands: Cinema. Geography, Modernism for Framework. It is my favourite book of Sam’s, even though his Antonioni floored me at the time. I wrote then that,

Promised Lands is a book that is formally like the cinema that Rohdie revels in. Like Rohdie’s beloved neo-realism the book is invested with the present but only as it relates to what Rohdie and Bazin understood to be “the unforeseen”. In adopting this approach Rohdie divests himself of intention, of arguing a point, of calling on reliable witnesses to nail the reading of any situation, photograph or film. The book is open ended, free flowing marked by gaps, fissures and repetitions masking an intricacy at its heart.

I wrote that Promised Lands was a kind of ideal film studies book, eccentric to the pressures many of us submit to in academic life, a book that worked away at Albert Kahn’s The Archives of the Planet, in an imaginative, indirect and marvellous work of writing about cinema. 

(3) 

In 2009 I travelled to Orlando Florida to spend the day with Sam, eating at a Vietnamese restaurant, interviewing, talking about Sam’s latest interests and writing endeavours: Chris Marker, Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and Johan van der Keuken.  Sam was incredibly generous with his time and his remembrances, able to understand his enormous contribution to film studies in a measured and engaging way. Sam had obviously thought a lot about his various roles, in Ghana, in London at Screen, New York, Australia, Hong Kong, Belfast, Florida with each move understood in amongst the significant cultural shifts occurring around him. I think the interview captured the intellectual spirit of a truly eccentric character. Rest in Peace Sam Deane Williams 

“Journeying” Rev of Promised Lands: Cinema. Geography, Modernism – Sam Rohdie”,Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media. 45: 2 (Fall 2004): 118-120.
 “Some Things You Never Learn” – Sam Rohdie Interviewed by Deane Williams. in Noel King and Deane Williams. Australian Film Theory and Criticism. Vol. II: Interviews. Bristol and Chicago, Intellect, 2014. 157-168.  

© Deane Williams, 15 April 2015

In Memoriam: Sam Rohdie 

By Lesley Stern 

The film is beautiful. The Chinese authorities wanted a film which glorified the Revolution, a film full of certainties. Antonioni gave them instead a film of immense affection, care, and attention, but one as a result at odds with the official, the sure, the conventional, and the false. In doing so, the film suggested a politics of art based on openness, on looking, on wondering, on respect for the specific, the particular, the individual. It was a journey in search of what was hidden and interior in China, not its political public face, but its human one.[i]

Sam, here, is writing about Antonioni’s 1972 film, Chung Kuo Cina. But it seems to me this could also be read as an account of his own journey through cinema, and about the relationship between writing about films and films themselves. Sam’s later books and writing hover between a careful attention to the films he discusses, as entities existing independent of the individual gaze, and as worlds that bring into being the consciousness of the writer, that elicit and shape a mode of writing and reflection that is acutely personal. 

Sam and I worked together, along with others, in the Cinema Studies Program at la Trobe University in Melbourne for about six years, from 1977-1982. During that time we maintained a strong collegial relationship and a kind-of-friendship. A couple of years later he cut me out of his life as he was wont to do. And we had no further contact. 

I learnt more, teaching with Sam, than from any other single person. He might have been cavalier with students (Adrian describes his mode very well and also captures the way in which Sam, despite his unorthodox pedagogic mode, had a tremendous impact on those students who endured) but he never condescended and always (usually correctly) assumed that people were capable of grasping much more complex ideas than commonsense dictated. As a colleague, though, the thrill was in the preparation, in the discussion about the curriculum and courses, in the space opened up in these discussions and debates to really interrogate why the cinema mattered (interrogate? oh where did this word come from? It just torpedoed right out of the 1970s, exploding into this so much more subdued bit of writing). We had a lot of fun devising and imagining courses, like an introductory unit that would begin with All that Heaven Allows and end with River of No Return. 

Sam was a formidable presence. He could be charming, seductive, engaged -- or cruel, malicious, capricious, indifferent. And sometimes it varied from one moment to the next. I learnt early on that if you could get a toe hold in an argument with Sam the important thing was to hang on, even if you had to swing from the chandeliers or more often from decidedly less glittering perches. We argued a lot during those years. Some of those arguments were predictable but you could also be blind-sided. One day, seemingly out of the blue, he lit into me with particular fury about Jeanne Dielmann. He chose his moment well: a party, when there was a hush in the room. He denounced the film (and me) as retrograde, as exhibiting all the worst tendencies of neo-realism, as a huge black mark against feminist film and any claims made on its behalf for experimentation. Indeed, in general he considered my feminism as proof of an impoverished imaginative grasp of cinema. Robbe Grillet is another figure about whom we disagreed. For Sam all relations in film could be plotted, figures positioned and transposed, the game enjoyed. 

This is the story I now tell; his story would no doubt be different. He would be the first to say that we all tell stories, and indeed he reveled in performativity. He picked up and dropped people just like he did ideas. He would include people in his will and excise them, often publicly. If you were able to grasp the performative aspect of his vitriol you might survive, and even on occasion enjoy the drama, but a lot of people didn’t survive. 

Let me qualify or reconsider what I have just said. Sam did not treat people and ideas in quite the same way. I think he had a lot more respect, on the whole, for ideas; he was a tenacious and passionate intellectual, he never floated ideas whimsically, always his arguments were based in extensive and deep reading, viewing, thinking through. In the interview he did with Deane Williams he reconsiders his position of the Screen days, and talks about how he has no canon, no fixed allegiances, how he likes to probe and find out what curiosity yields, what ideas are useful, or new—generated by a text. I think this is true in his criticism, but I would also say that he has remained remarkably true to certain film makers and writers: to Italian cinema of the postwar period, to Godard, to Proust and Barthes. 

Take A Lover’s Discourse. Sam and I were in agreement in loving that Barthes. Though at the time its influence did not actually register in much film writing. But it does register in later Rohdie, reading a book like Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism is also to reread the Barthes of A Lover’s Discourse. 

Ideas/people: are they so distinguishable, or so interchangeable? Surely not, but it is not always so easy to tell how, in what circuitous and often unexpected ways they are connected. 

After living for some years in Melbourne Sam bought a place on the outskirts of the city where he (I think) remodeled the existing house and terraced the hillside to landscape a vegetable garden. He was a marvelous cook, his touch was light and deft. I remember a particular lunch he conjured: raw crunchy fresh vegetables and a rich yellow mayonnaise, and then a stir fry with snow peas from the garden. But most of all I remember how he showed with great pride his pantry. It was cool and spacious, shelves lined with jars of fruit and jam and chutneys he had bottled. 

I often recall that day, a poignant pleasure, not long before we became no-longer friends. Often when I am feeling sorry for myself, when I start cataloguing all the things that are missing from my life, top of the list is usually a pantry. I always think, then, with considerable envy, of Sam’s pantry. But as I walk in and start browsing the shelves ideas start bubbling. The Rohdie pantry is also a library, an archive, a film museum, a curiosity cabinet. 

Looking forward to meeting Sam again in his forthcoming Film Modernism.

[i] http://www.littlerabbit.com/antonioni/masamrohdie.html

© Lesley Stern, 18 April 2015

Cut 

By William Routt 

Perhaps I should begin by pointing out that what you read here was not written by Bill Routt. It is being written by William D. Routt, an identity with which Bill should be intimately acquainted but who is by no means me. 

And what I am writing or have written emphasises a specific and crucial element of my (and your) relation to Sam Rohdie: Sam as a distorted reflection. In 1989 I, the one who writes this, dedicated an essay about cinema and architecture to “Sam – miroir insolite,” a pretty up itself way of telling him (if he ever read it or understood the secret message) that I was writing about this topic because he had been teaching and thinking and occasionally talking about Antonioni and architecture, and that I was also conscious of having taken other cues from what he had done. Of course, as it turned out, my dedication was much more than that. 

I had taken a lot of pleasure in the disturbance Sam caused when he initially arrived in the same batch of media faculty as I and another, at La Trobe's School of Education. There had been a raucous, pointed exchange with other members of the School on matters of history in which Sam was the Big Dog and I was the Small Dog. Even when he scared me, I thought it probably did me some good – because he could not shut up, because he had to say what he thought (or, rather, felt), because he was a bully, because he liked to embarrass and destroy. And because I also thought that there was no particular, no specific malice in what he did and said. There was a malice towards all, not malice towards one. He wanted no part of anyone (he wanted us all, all of us). Don't you wish you were like that? I did. 

So Sam was my bizarre mirror, an inversion of vision as printing is an inversion of what has been written, in which I identified myself distorted, no good, and truly. Saw the Big Dog without ever being the big dog. My reflection, projection, identification. The triumph of the finite me in the Absolutely Other. I hope he was that for at least some of you as well because, I think, it may have been something of what he intended, if he ever intended, if we ever really intend. 

Almost to the measure that his later, post-La Trobe, work was not within a mainstream that he, as editor of Screen in the early seventies, did so much to establish, that work is a benchmark of the best that a passionate, loving, and ambitious curiosity about  the cinema can produce. What interests me most about Sam's writing after Promised Lands, however, is its form. Fellini Lexicon, Montage, Intersections, and the forthcoming Film Modernism are all what I will call quilts, made of pieces that “stand alone”, related by colour and shape set in a certain relation to one another, a relation that might be another relation in another context, a relation that perhaps only seems to suggest a bounded whole – each a small model of community that does nowork. In this sense, what he wrote in that period takes us back to the  dissertation on just 43 shots of Rossellini's that he wrote, and I read, during his first years at La Trobe University. 

Fourteen years ago (almost to the day that I heard about Sam's death), he sent me an email asking what I knew about Primers. The wonderful, perfectly elementary Fellini Lexicon was about to come out and he was working on a short book about Godard along similar lines. Diane, who makes the actual quilts and to whom my writing is always (sometimes also) dedicated, collects childrens' books and she and I began to talk about such books. I picked through what she said and I said and wrote back to Sam. Some time after that he told me that he might quote/use what I had sent him in his Godard book. 

Two intriguing things happened since then. 

The first is that "the Godard book" no longer exists. Instead there is Film Modernism, which apparently is/will be something of a Primer on the topic of its title and on Godard and on Godard's Histoires, which Sam loved and lured me to love in a certain "round and round we go, down and down we go, into that old black magic" fashion. I do not know what may be in that book beyond love and black magic. 

The second intriguing thing is that in sorting through my computerised files a couple of year ago, I came across a couple of pages about Primers which I thought must have been written by Sam - for what would I have to say on such a topic? Since they had been placed, clearly by mistake, among the files of my own writing, I conscientiously deleted them in order to avoid inadvertent plagiarism. Now I remember that I was keeping them because they belonged with my notes about The Fairy Spectator, a very interesting book about mirrors and morals - thus, like Lois Weber's Hypocrites and other texts, about the cinema (only The Fairy Spectator was written in 1784). But now those pages are lost utterly because I was not able to distinguish myself from Sam. Or so it may be. There was no mirror left, no inversion. In writing, to my mind and for a couple of paragraphs, we were one. 

* 

I am thinking just now, intermittently, of Sergei Eisenstein's glass house in which no one notices anymore that the walls are glass, that someone can see and be seen through them. Instead all behave as though they are invisible to others. And this is the cinema: we watch, we judge. In the end our judgement is delivered; the glass house is smashed, and with it everything else is destroyed. One reason I am thinking about this is that I was first drawn to Eisenstein's glass house project while I was writing the essay I dedicated to Sam. 

"I wrote a story about living in the city, you know, after the end of the world thing. Just glass, everywhere glass" (an Author). 

For every image is  a sememe, that is, an assertion, a speech act. Every image demands interpretation, that is, judgement. Every image in this way reflects its viewer; every image is a figure. Every figure cuts itself off from other figures, every figure foresees its own destruction and everyone knows the exploding dice are loaded. 

Or at least this is what happens when one sees the thing in the mirror - a figure, a singularity, always already a monster. But this is also what happens when one stops looking, stops being distracted by the refractions of the light, the unending proliferation of sense. All that glass is, of course, already in the city before world's end, but invisible. All those reflections refracting reflections. We have but to look (again). 

There are more than a Viewer, or Viewers, and a Figure, or Figures, here. There is an Author. There are Authors. Histories, Memories, Texts, Secrets, Erasures, Lies, the Unnameable, the Unintended. And Futures, of course.  There is a community there and here, an unworking or nowork community, lured by curiosity, and awakened by a touch.  

The Big Dog - is it ambition? And the Little Dog - curiosity? What does ambition want - is it love?  Surely curiosity wants only understanding? They lie there together in the hall, waiting for me (and others) to take them for a walk. 

(But I would say that, about understanding and love, wouldn't I?).  As though one had to make a dichotomy here, as though this writing has been an act of separation instead of conjuncture. I am not writing about Sam. I cannot write about Sam, for there are no words of mine to replace his words which I make my own whenever I read them. I can write only about me, about the part of me that I sense as Sam. This is what I would write about you also. You know that. 

And you would make of me. 

*

© William D. Routt, 19 April 2015

Works by Sam Rohdie online

• 'Antonioni', Michelangelo Antonioni Archive
• 'National Fiction', Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1987
• 'Geography, Photography, the Cinema', Screening the Past, 1998
• 'The Art of Interruption: Realism, Photography and the Everyday', Screening the Past, 2000
• 'Citations', Screening the Past, 2004
• 'Jacques Rivette: Va savoir', Screening the Past, 2007
• 'Ribbons of Time', Screening the Past, 2007
• 'Intersections', Screening the Past, 2008
• 'Three Essays [Varda; Godard/Gorin; Tati]', Screening the Past, 2009
• 'Four Essays: Painlevé; Jennings; Vigo; Ford,' Screening the Past, 2009
• 'Hitchcock's Fabrics', Screening the Past, 2010 
• 'A Note on F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Cooking', Screening the Past, 2010
• 'Profils Paysans,' Screening the Past, 29, 2010
• JUST ADDED 'Salò: A Cinema of Poetry', Criterion Collection Essays, 2011
• JUST ADDED 'Amarcord: Federico of the Spirits', Criterion Collection Essays, 2011
• 'I racconti di Canterbury (Pier Paolo Pasolini)/The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer)', Screening the Past, 2012
• 'Il gatto selvatico', Screening the Past, 2013
• 'Jean-Paul Sartre, Hollywood, Citizen Kane and the Nouvelle Vague', Screening the Past, 2013
• 'Studies', Screening the Past, 12, 2014
• 'Film and Landscape', Screening the Past, 12, 2014
• 'Metz and film semiotics: opening the field', from Jump Cut, no. 7, 1975, pp. 22-24

Online works about Sam Rohdie's work:

• 'Some Things You Never Learn: Sam Rohdie Interviewed by Deane Williams', Screening the Past, 26, 2010 
• 'I’m going to be met by a phalanx of safari-suited men.’ Lesley Stern interviewed by Deane Williams', Screening the Past, 28, 2010
• Tom Conley, 'Review of Sam Rohdie, Montage', Screening the Past, Vol. 23, 2008
• Benjamin Halligan, 'The Felliniesque Besieged: Fellini Lexicon by Sam Rohdie', Senses of Cinema, January 2003
• Dan North, 'Fragment #8: Sam Rohdie on Eadweard Muybridge’s Illusions', Spectacular Attractions, August 15, 2009
• Donato Totaro, 'Sam Rohdie on Montage,' Offscreen, 11.12, December 2007

Sam Rohdie's Books

• Film Modernism, New York : Manchester University Press, October 2015 (see below for blurb)
•  Intersections: Writings on Cinema,  New York : Manchester University Press, 2012
• Montage, Manchester ; New York : Manchester University Press ; New York : Distributed in the USA by Palgrave, 2006
• Fellini Lexicon, London : BFI Publishing, 2002
• Promised Lands: Cinema, Geography, Modernism; London : British Film Institute, 2001
• The Passion of Pier Paolo Pasolini, London : British Film Institute / Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1996
• Rocco and His Brothers, London : BFI Publishing, 1993
• Antonioni, London : BFI Publishing, 1990

Film Modernism publisher's summary

This book is at once a detailed study of a range of individual filmmakers and an exploration of the modernism in which they are situated. It consists of fifty categories arranged in alphabetical order, among which are Allegory, Bricolage, Classicism, Contradiction, Desire, Destructuring and Writing. Each category, though autonomous, interacts, intersects and juxtaposes with the others, entering into a dialogue with them and in so doing creates connections, illuminations, associations and rhymes which may not have arisen in a more conventional framework. The apparent arbitrary order and openness of the book, based as it is on the alphabet, is indebted to Jean-Luc Godard's interrogation of history and of film history in all his work, especially in his Histoire(s) du cinema and its associative reach.
     The author refers to particular films and directors that raise questions related to modernism, and, inevitably, thereby to classicism, and often offers more in the way of questions and speculations than answers and conclusions. Jean-Luc Godard's work is at the centre of the book, though it spreads out, evokes and echoes other filmmakers and their work, including the films of Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, João César Monteiro, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Orson Welles. This innovative and eloquently written text book will be an essential resource for all film students.

Chronicle of an Auteur: More Antonioni Goodness!

Frame grab from Cronaca di un amore / Story of a Love Affair (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1950)

Film Studies For Free presents the second of its celebrations of the centenary of the birth of Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni. Below are embedded the video recordings of a number of unmissable talks at Antonioni and the Arts, an event held at Royal Holloway, University of London, in October to mark the anniversary. 

Thanks to Royal Holloway's School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures for hosting the talks, as well as taking the trouble to record them and make them freely available online.

This latest entry coincides with Cronaca di un autor: Convegno dedicato a Michelangelo Antonioni nel centenario della nascita, a marvellous conference, with an amazing array of speakers, taking place between December 11-13, 2012, merely the latest in a series of brilliant, celebratory events in Ferrara, Antonioni's birthplace.

Who knows? Maybe there'll be some more videos to embed here at FSFF! Hope so! In any case, You can see the first FSFF Antonioni anniversary celebration here: Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth.

Part 1.a, Arts Building - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Dr. Laura Rascaroli's lecture and discussion. In conversation with Dr. Giuliana Pieri.

A study day devoted to the late Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) took place on Friday, 26 October, in Egham, co-sponsored by HARC, SMLLC, Media Arts, and the Institut Français du Royaume-Uni.

The centenary of the birth of this master of European modernist cinema was a chance to bring together a number of scholars and curators who have a particular interest in the interdisciplinary aspects of Antonioni’s oeuvre. Dr Laura Rascaroli (U. of Cork) and Dr John David Rhodes (U. of Sussex), who edited the 2011 volume, Antonioni: Centenary Essays, offered a novel perspective on the work of the Italian film-maker by focusing on the influence of art and architecture respectively. The two talks were preceded by a screening of two rare Antonioni documentaries: Gente del Po (1943-7) and Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo (2004). Documentaries are a very important but often less studied aspect of Antonioni’s production. They also ideally frame his career since Antonioni began as a documentary film maker and ended his cinematic career with his tribute to the master of the Italian Renaissance, Michelangelo Buonarroti, in a short film of extreme beauty which helped the audience to reflect upon art and tradition. The general discussion that followed covered a number of fascinating topics relating to Antonioni’s practice, including his consistently ‘open’, physical engagement with the human figure, as compared, for example, with that of Jean-Luc Godard.

Part 1.b, Arts Building - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Dr. John David Rhodes's lecture, discussion and round table with Dr. Laura Rascaroli, Dr. Giuliana Pieri and Prof. James Williams.

Part 2.a, Windsor Lecture - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

Prof. Dominique Païni's presentation of the retrospective 'Antonioni And The Arts. The Gaze of Michelangelo' and lecture. Introduction by Prof. Williams James.

The second part of the study day was a lecture by film scholar and curator, Professor Dominique Païni (École du Louvre, Paris), who presented with slides his plans for the forthcoming centenary exhibition on Antonioni in his home-town of Ferrara. Prof. Païni revealed that the physical challenge of the exhibition space, the Renaissance Palazzo dei Diamanti, created the opportunity to present Antonioni’s work as a series of contrasts arising from the idea that cinema is, after all, narrative sculpture in movement, and that shapes are born out of the most basic contrast, that of light and dark. Both the lecture and ensuing discussion brought into focus a series of important characteristics of the work of Antonioni: the identification of women and the nation, ideal masculinity and Italian art and tradition, the critique of humanism and the classical heritage, and the ambiguous relationship between Antonioni and Italy’s post-war tradition of social and political engagement (impegno) which characterised the work of many of his contemporaries working in film and literature.

Part 2.b, Windsor Lecture - Antonioni and the Arts @ Royal Holloway, University of London from SMLLC, Royal Holloway, London on Vimeo.

A few reflections with Professor Dominique Païni. Translation in English by Alix Agret.

Sculpting the Real: Michelangelo Antonioni Studies in the Centenary Year of his Birth

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 1 of 2)

This event on March 30, 2012, was part of: Homage to Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) held at the Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, to mark the centenary year of the Italian director’s birth organized jointly by the Department of Italian Studies and the Department of Cinema Studies, NYU.

Above: PANEL 1: Richard Allen (NYU), ‘Hitchcock, Antonioni, and the Wandering Woman’ and Karen Pinkus (Cornell), ‘Automation, Autonomia, Anomie’; PANEL 2: John David Rhodes (Sussex), ‘Antonioni and Geopolitical Abstraction’ and Karl Schoonover (Warwick), ‘Antonioni's Toxicology’

International Conference: ANTONIONI 1912-2012 (Part 2 of 2)

Above: PANEL 3 Screening of N.U. (11’, 1948) and discussion with David Forgacs and Ara Merjian (NYU) Matilde Nardelli (UCL) 'Antonioni and the Cultures of Photography’ PANEL 4 Michael Siegel (Brown), ‘From Identificazione to Investigazione: Looking at Looking in Late Antonioni’ Francesco Casetti (Yale), ‘The Remains of the Modern’ PANEL 5 Eugenia Paulicelli (CUNY), David Forgacs (NYU), John David Rhodes (Sussex)

Approaching the figure and work of Michelangelo Antonioni a century after his birth, one is confronted with a number of persistent critical tropes about his oeuvre, with a substantial, if in great part dated, body of critical work and, perhaps, also with the sense that all has already been said and written on the director of the malady of feelings, of filmic slowness and temps mort, of the crisis of the postwar bourgeoisie, of epistemological uncertainties, of modernist difficulty and even boredom, of aestheticism and the hypertrophy of style, of narrative opacity. And yet, Antonioni today powerfully escapes the reach of old categorisations that have attempted to congeal his figure once and for all into an inert monument of modern cinema. His continued influence on world film-makers and the new pressing questions that his films raise today for contemporary audiences call for a renewed critical effort. [Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)]

Despite Antonioni’s deep concerns about scientific logic and any objective representation of reality, in purely formal terms his work is always defined by a clear tension between what I would call on the one hand a documentary impulse, and on the other a drive towards fiction pushed at times to the level of melodrama.

[... H]owever hollowed-out and experimental Antonioni’s works become, they always constitute fictions since they present characters in artificial situations. As Antonioni himself put it, his primary interest lies in the moment when the context or environment suddenly takes on “relief.” Which is to say, his hybrid narratives marked by temporal disjunction, disorientation, black holes, ellipses, and a lack of resolution serve to provide just enough justification for human figuration, however “unnaturally” heightened and stylized, to take hold. This recourse to melodrama, broadly defined, offered Antonioni a means of shortcircuiting and sculpting the Real in slowed-down, distended form in order to capture it as a series of tableaux vivants. [...]

Alert to the tensions in the spatiotemporal relations between people, objects, and events, the director must, according to Antonioni, engage with a “special reality” and be “committed morally in some way.” What this means in practice is dedramatizing the narrative event in order to focus attention on the physical context that both makes it possible but also eludes it. Antonioni propels his protagonists into new or alien environments, and we follow them almost ethnographically as they develop new perceptual powers in order to negotiate their changed conditions'. [James S. Williams, 'The Rhythms of Life: An Appreciation of Michelangelo Antonioni, Extreme Aesthete of the Real', Film Quarterly (Fall Issue 2008, Vol. 62, No. 1, pp. 46-57), pp. 50-52 - my emphasis]

Today, Film Studies For Free gleefully celebrates the publication online of just under seven hours of videoed content from an excellent, recent conference in New York City that its author had really wished she'd been able to attend. Now -- virtually -- she (and you) can! 

The conference took a timely new look at the work of FSFF's favourite Italian filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni one hundred years on from the year of his birth. It followed on from the recent publication of an excellent, similarly inspired, BFI/Palgrave collection of work on Antonioni edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes. 

Rhodes, a highly esteemed (and much loved!) colleague of FSFF's humble scribe, appears in the video frame still at the top of this post, and throughout both embedded videos. He was one of the organisers of, and main contributors to, the NYU conference. A very generous sample excerpt from his and Rascaroli's book may be found here.

To accompany the truly excellent videos, FSFF has assembled a rather fabulous list of links to other online and openly accessible studies of Antonioni's work. If you know of any significant resources missing below, please leave a link in the comments. Grazie!

If you happen to be in the vicinity of Antonioni's birthplace of Ferrara between September 30, 2012 and January 6, 2013, you'll be able to catch an excellent exhibition about his work, which opens following a public celebration of the filmmaker on the day of his birth itself (September 29). You can find more information here. Thanks to Antonioni scholar Ted Perry for his tip off about this event. Do look out for his new book on him which should be out next year.

• Paolo Bartoloni, 'Blanchot and Ambiguity, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 12.4 (2010)
• Michael Bloom, 'Fragile Images and Concrete Things: Indirect Subjectivity and the Externalization of The Soul in Michelangelo Antonioni's Tetralogy', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• David Brancaleone, 'Part 2 of 'The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction'', Experimental Conversations, Issue 8, 2011
• James Brown, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', Senses of Cinema, 20, 2002
• James Brown, 'Il Grido: Modernising the Po', Senses of Cinema, 26, 2003
• Peter Brunette, 'Introduction [excerpt]', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Peter Brunette, 'Blow-up', The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
• Ken Burke and Héctor Mario Cavallari, 'Julio Cortázar and Michelangelo Antonioni: Words, Images, and the Limits of Verbal and Visual Representation', Dissidences. Hispanic Journal of Theory and Criticism, 05/20/10
• Bert Cardullo, 'Introduction', in Cardullo (ed.), After Neorealism: Italian Filmmakers and Their Films; Essays and Interviews (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2009)
• James Cisneros, 'How to Watch the Story of Film Adaptation. Cortázar, Antonioni, Blow-Up', Intermédialités : histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques / Intermediality: History and Theory of the Arts, Literature and Technologies, n° 2, 2003
• Jonathan Dawson, The Passenger', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Laurie N. Ede, '[Review of Murray Pomerance's] Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011]', Screening the Past, 33, 2011
• R. Bruce Elder, 'Antonioni's Tragic Vision: Style, Fonn and Idea in the Films of Michelangelo Antonioni, with Especial Emphasis on His Masterpiece, Il deserto rosso', Canadian Journal of Film Studies, 1.2, 1991
• Hamish Ford, 'Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Deleuze’s Time-Image', Senses of Cinema, Issue 28, Sept-Oct 2003
• Matthew Gandy, 'Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert', originally in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (2) (2003)
• Peter Goldman, 'Blowup, Film Theory, and the Logic of Realism', Anthropoetics 14, no. 1 (Summer 2008)
• Absjørn Grønstad, 'Anatomy of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up', Film Journal, 9, 2004
• Mike Grost on Antonioni
• Christine Henderson, 'The Trials of Individuation in Late Modernity: Exploring Subject Formation in Antonioni's Red Desert' PDF, Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 2011
• Penelope Houston, 'Michelangelo Antonioni', originally in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980
• Ian Johnston, 'We’re Not Happy and We Never Will Be: On Cronaca di un amore', Bright Lights Film Journal, 53, 2006
• Robert Philip Kolker The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (passim.), originally published 1982
• Little Rabbit's Antonioni Archive (thanks to Mike Grost for the link)
• Gaetana Marrone, 'A Cinematic Grand Tour of Sicily: Irony, Memory and Metamorphic Desire from Goethe to Tornatore', California Italian Studies, 1(1), 2010
• 'David Martin-Jones, '[Review of Brunette's book on Antonioni', Film-Philosophy, Volume 3 Number 50, December 1999
• David Alan Mellor, '‘Fragments of an Unknowable Whole’: Michelangelo Antonioni’s Incorporation of Contemporary Visualities in London, 1966', Journal of Visual Culture in Britain, 8 (2): 2007, pp. 45-61
• Zach Melzer, 'Michelangelo Antonioni and the “Reality” of the Modern', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Gary Morris, 'Chabrol, Losey, Antonioni: Three Classic Eurofilms: Les Bonnes Femmes, Eva, Il Grido', Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 31, 2010
• Gavriel Moses, 'As We [They] See [Hear] Them [Us]: Cain/Antonioni//Antonioni/Coppola', Voices in Italian Americana, 1991
• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007
• Murray Pomerance, 'Significant Cinema: The Scene of the Crime', Senses of Cinema, 61, 2011
• Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes, 'INTERSTITIAL, PRETENTIOUS, ALIENATED, DEAD: Antonioni at 100', in Rascaroli and Rhodes (eds), Antonioni: Centenary Essays (BFI/Palgrave, 2011)
• Julie Ravary, 'La Femme “Antonionienne”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Elena del Río, “Antonioni’s Blowup: Freeing the Imaginary from Metaphysical Ground”, Film-Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 32, June, 2005
• Christopher Sharrett, 'L’eclisse', Senses of Cinema, 62, 2012
• Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara, 'Reporting on The Passenger', Undercurrent, 3, 2006
• Gregory Solman, 'L'Avventura', Senses of Cinema, 31, 2004
• Irini Stamatopoulos, 'Realism and Reality in Antonioni’s Profession: Reporter as dramatizing the Nietzschean notion of the “power of the false”', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Frank P. Tomasulo, 'The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura', Jump Cut, 49, 2007
• Donato Totaro, ' Zabriskie Point (1970, Antonioni): A Scene by Scene Analysis of a Troubled Masterpiece', Offscreen Journal, 14.4, 2010
• Donato Totaro, 'Alida Valli: May 31, 1921-April 22, 2006', Offscreen Journal, 10.5, 2006
• Donato Totaro, 'May 1968 and After: Cinema in France and Beyond', Offscreen Journal, 1998
• Jack Turner, 'Antonioni's The Passenger as Lacanian Text', Other Voices 1.3 (January 1999)
• Peter Verstraten, 'A Cinema of Modernist Poetic Prose: On Antonioni and Malick', Image [and] Narrative, 13.2, 2012
• Fiona A.Villella, 'Here Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing In Antonioni's Zabriskie Point', Senses of Cinema, 4, 2000
• Elisabeth Weis, 'Tati, Hitchcock, Antonioni: Three Approaches to Sonic Creativity', Offscreen Journal, Vol. 11, 2007
• Matthew M. Wylie, 'Avoiding the Masculine "Gaze": Frustrated Homosexual Desire and the Eroticized Role of the Camera In Hitchcock's Rear Window and Antonioni's Blow Up', Cinetext, February 2003

"A fusion of life and dream": In memory of John Orr

Image from Dogville (Lars von Trier, 2003). This  film topped John Orr's list of favourite films in 2003 (here are his 2004, 2006, 2007 and 2009 lists)

What is trauma if not, as in the original Greek, a kind of wound? In cinema, though, it is something more: a wound that seldom heals, a deep wounding of body and soul from which, often, the subject does not recover. Hence, the critical formula for the outcome of the trauma picture: at the least, significant damage; at the most, violent death.

If film horror often sources the supernatural, film trauma focuses on the fears of the natural world. What is out there as waking nightmare in a dangerous world is often a mirror of what is hidden in here, in the human heart. The monsters that horror films project onto the screen are often the monsters of our dream worlds. The wounding events of the trauma film are by contrast a fusion of life and dream.

In film, there is no absolute borderline between these opposites – human trauma and supernatural horror  but the question of emphasis, one way or the other, is crucial: the threat of aliens, mutants, werewolves, monsters, robots, slasher killers, vampires et alia, or the threat of evil that is here and now, that is contingent and recurrent in the life-world, yet also seems onscreen to inhabit the world of dream. Horror is, thus, the popular genre of superhuman evil, trauma its human and dreamlike subset. [John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009]

Film Studies For Free was very sad to hear, via Dina Iordanova's website, of the death of influential film theorist and scholar John Orr.

Appointed as a lecturer in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh in 1967, Orr began teaching film and cultural studies in that department in 1984. A few years later, he founded, with John Ellis, the joint honours film course for Sociology and English Literature. From 1998 onwards, he taught on the MSc in Film Studies, based in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.

Best known for his pioneering work on the sociology of film and art, Orr was author of Cinema and Modernity, Contemporary Cinema, The Art and Politics of Film and Hitchcock and 20th Century Cinema. He also co-edited important works on Andzrej Wajda and Roman Polanski and had written recent essays on Ingmar Bergman, Terrence Malick, and Dogme 95. His most recent book was Romantics and Modernists in British Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2010). He had recently retired from his post as Professor Emeritus in Social and Political Studies at Edinburgh, but was still very active in his research and publishing on cinema.

Orr was both prolific and very generous with his work. In recent years, he published a number of significant essays online, many of which set out in depth his brilliant thinking on trauma, fright, and paranoia in the cinema. Below, in tribute to and with gratitude for his work, both on and offline, FSFF has gathered links to those essays.

• John Orr, 'The Trauma Film and British Romantic Cinema 1940-1960', Senses of Cinema, Issue 51, 2009 

• John Orr, 'A Cinema of Parallel Worlds Lynch and Kieślowśki + Inland Empire', Film International, Volume: 7 | Issue: 1 February 2009

• John Orr, 'Pinter and the paranoid style in English theatre', cyc, Volume 12 n°1, 2008

• John Orr, 'Hitchcock and Hume Revisited: Fear, Confusion and Stage Fright', Film-Philosophy, 11.1, June 2007

• John Orr, 'Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman's The Silence vs. Antonioni's The Passenger', Film International, 3.5, 27, 2007

• John Orr, 'Otto Preminger and the End of Classical Cinema', Senses of Cinema, Issue 40, 2006

• John Orr, 'Claire Denis by Martine Beugnet', Senses of Cinema, No. 37, 2005

• John Orr, 'Right Direction, Wrong Turning: On Zizek's The Fright of Real Tears', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 7 No. 30, September 2003

• John Orr, 'Hidden Agenda: Pierre Bourdieu and Terry Eagleton', Edinburgh Working Papers in Sociology, No. 14 (1999)