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'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)
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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.
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.
