Sunday, 20 December 2015

Big December Round Up! Favourite Film and Media Studies Gifts of 2015 Galore!

A new online video essay on BRIEF ENCOUNTER (David Lean, 1945), which forms an integral part of Catherine Grant’s contribution to The Videographic Essay: Criticism in Sound and Image, edited by Christian Keathley and Jason Mittell, forthcoming from CABOOSE BOOKS in 2016: https://www.caboosebooks.net/the-videographic-essay
Focusing on a number of videographic explorations of matters of film editing, including her study of the dissolves in David Lean’s 1945 Brief Encounter, Grant explores what such practical and audiovisual modes of research and presentation—ones which themselves evidently turn on editing—can add to the study of a feature that (with a number of key exceptions) has not received much sustained attention to date in written film scholarship. [Dissolves of Passion]

Well, 'tis the season to be jolly, and Film Studies For Free is indeed quite jolly as the holidays approach. It hasn't been an especially busy year, entry-wise, at this here blog. But it has certainly been a lucky, busy and bountiful one for its author's film-studies-related activities away from it (including at FSFF's Twitter and Facebook versions).

What customarily follows, to celebrate and give thanks for that fortune, are some links (including some choice ones not shared very much on any platform before) to openly accessible items of scholarly and critical interest.

FSFF hopes (as ever) to be back here with an update very, very soon. But in the meantime, it would like to wish its faithful, patient and much appreciated readers very happy holidays if they are having them, and to send its warmest seasonal greetings to all!




Online at: http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/sequence3/archive/sequence-3-1/
  • Daniel Reynolds (Emory University) presents: Execute Minute 47: on Star Wars Wars
  • Joseph Moss (Georgia State University) presents: Wait, Where is the New Star Wars Trailer Premiering?
  • Garret Castleberry (Oklahoma City University) presents: Prophetic Revisionist Paratextual Ontologies: Preparing the Way for The Force Awakens
  • William Proctor (Bournemouth University) presents: Star Wars Detectives
  • New NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2015_‘Vintage’. The below contents are all accessible here: http://www.necsus-ejms.org/portfolio/autumn-2015_vintage/
    Editorial Necsus; Articles: Temps mort: Speaking about Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) by Eric de Kuyper and Annie van den Oever; Agamben’s cinema: Psychology versus an ethical form of life by Janet Harbord; Richard Serra: Sculpture, television, and the status quo by Francesco Spampinato; Dredging, drilling, and mapping television’s swamps: An interview with John Caldwell on the 20th anniversary of Televisuality by Markus Stauff; Special section: Vintage, guest edited by Kim Knowles; Locating vintage by Kim Knowles; A theoretical approach to vintage: From oenology to media by Katharina Niemeyer; Technostalgia of the present: From technologies of memory to a memory of technologies by Tim van der Heijden; The way we watched: Vintage television programmes, memories, and memorabilia by Helen Piper; Retro, faux-vintage, and anachronism: When cinema looks back by Stefano Baschiera and Elena Caoduro; No time like the past?: On the new role of vintage and retro in the magazines Scandinavian Retro and Retro Gamer by Kristian Handberg; Death, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del Rey by Arild Fetveit; Audiovisual essays: edited by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin; Learning from popular genres – with help from the audiovisual essay by C. Álvarez López and A. Martin; Construction of a Heist by Henrike Lindenberger; Comedy Vitti Style by Pasquale Iannone; Book reviews: edited by Lavinia Brydon and Alena Strohmaier (NECS Publication Committee); The Lumière Galaxy by Francesco Pitassio; Beautiful Data / The Democratic Surround by Malte Hagener; Cinema of the Swimming Pool / Cinema as Weather by Adam O’Brien; Festival reviews: edited by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist (Film Festival Research Network); Selling film in the summer of 2015: Midnight Sun, Il Cinema Ritrovato, and Karlovy Vary by Maria San Filippo; Made in Peru: Lima Film Festival comes of age by Sarah Barrow; Strong positioning on the international festival circuit: An interview with Diana Iljine of Filmfest München by Tanja C. Krainhöfer; Exhibition reviews: edited by Miriam De Rosa and Malin Wahlberg (NECS Publication Committee); Hollis Frampton’s ‘other work’ by Michael Zryd; Theaters: Cinematic vintage magnified by Miriam De Rosa; Arab Pop: Whose Gaze is it Anyway? by James Harvey-Davitt; Artists’ Film Biennial, ICA 2014 by Sophia Satchell-Baeza.
  • New SENSES OF CINEMA!! Issue 77, 2015 - including tributes to and studies of Chantal Akerman: La Passion de L’Intime/An Intimate Passion, the Legacy of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Australian film history, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Quentin Tarantino  and more...
  • New Media Industries Journal, 2.2 2015. Online at: http://www.mediaindustriesjournal.org/index.php/mij/issue/view/5
  • Articles: PR and Politics at Hollywood’s Biggest Night: The Academy Awards and Unionization (1929-1939) by Monica Roxanne Sandler; The Impact of Working Conditions and Personality Traits on the Job Satisfaction of Media Professionals by M. Bjørn von Rimscha; The Sony Hack: Data and Decision in the Contemporary Studio by J.D. Connor;   
    Hacking Radio History’s Data: Station Call Signs, Digitized Magazines, and Scaled Entity Search by Kit Hughes, Eric Hoyt, Derek Long, Kevin Ponto, Tony Tran;  Cultural Diversity as Brand Management in Cable Television by Melanie Kohnen; TV Got Better: Netflix’s Original Programming Strategies and the On-Demand Television Transition by Chuck Tryon
  • The Open Library of Humanities, a major new open access journal platform, launched in 2015 and immediately published excellent film and media studies content: 
Preface: M. Downing ROBERTS
1. Oshima in Retrospect(ives): The Question of Corporeality in Daitōa Sensō (1968) by Shota OGAWA
2. Ideology and Subjection in Ōshima Nagisa’s Kōshikei (1968) by Max WARD
3. Oshima is Dead: Proxy Wars, Security, and Cinematic Love by Phil KAFFEN
4. Ōshima Nagisa on Responsibility and Premonition: Shiiku (1961) and Amakusa Shirō Tokisada (1962) by M. Downing ROBERTS
5. The Voice of the Dead: The Image of the State and Postwar Democracy in Oshima Nagisa’s The Ceremony (1971) by Ryoko MISONO
  1. Anti-Christ: Tragedy, Farce or Game? PDF Jan Simons
  2. Laughter and the Death of the Comic: Charlie Chaplin's The Circus and Limelight in Light of the Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas PDF Moshe Shai Rachmuth
  3. Films Blancs: Luminosity in the Films of Michael Mann PDF Davide Panagia
  4. Cinematic Incorporation: Literature in My Life Without Me PDF Sarah Dillon
  5. Trying Truths: Dreyer, Bresson and the Meaning Effect PDF Brandon White
  6. Ambivalent Screens: Quentin Tarantino and the Power of Vision PDF Frida Beckman
  7. The Permeable Self: A Theory of Cinematic Quotation PDF Chelsea Crawford
  • New Offscreen 19.7, 2015 Online at: http://offscreen.com/issues/view/volume-19-issue-7 (link via Girish Shambu)
  • Articles: The Maltese Falcon and the Case of the Mystery Square and other things lurking in the background by Donato Totaro; Nanarophelia and the danger of praising the mediocre by Simon Laperrière; London Made Me: Personal History, Film History and My Home Town by Paul W. Salmon; The Subject Was Rose Joseph Cornell and Rose Hobart by Elaine Lennon; Beautiful Light, Vibrant Things, Speaking Minds: Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder by Daniel Garrett


  1. Jason Mittell’s account of the project
  2. A post by participant Melanie Kohnen for Antenna, which also includes links to some of the work produced at the workshop
  3. Guest Presenter in Residence Catherine Grant's video essay Dissolves of Passion on Brief Encounter, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this winter.
  4. And participant John Gibbs' Three videographic exercises on Notorious (Alfred Hitchcock, 1946). including the video below:

  •  Below, Corey Creekmur's great video essay on 'intensified continuity' How to Read a File (How to Read a Film) [The 39 Steps]. Watch Corey's other videos here: https://vimeo.com/user41519424


  • Film Theory Ch 3 The Face and the Mirror The below video essay, drawn from chapter 3 ('Cinema as Mirror: The Face and Close-Up'') of Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener's Film Theory: an Introduction Through the Senses (Routledge, 2nd edition, 2015), investigates elements of film theory that highlight the close-up and the face in the films of Ingmar Bergman. Premissed as the book is on the assumption that great films 'think' their own conditions of possibility, the video essay gives a meta-cinematic dimension to a filmmaker's apparently personal themes and private obsessions. For related video essays and texts, visit the book's companion website: http://www.routledgetextbooks.com/textbooks/9781138824300/
  • A video essay on Lindsay's Anderson's film If, by Ella Finch, Dilyana Atanasova, Alex Brace, Yang Jiang

  • PhD thesis by Anna Hurina (2015) Representations of Urban Spaces and Their Transformations in Soviet Cinema of the 1920s and 1960s, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/11340/

      List of Cinematologists episodes Season 1 & 2
      Episode 1: Repo Man (with Director Lucien Busse)  http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/3/23/episode-1-repo-man Dario and Neil introduce, screen and discuss Alex Cox’s 1984 cult classic Repo Man in the context of independent v mainstream filmmaking. Neil's visit to the Berlinale is reviewed plus we have an interview he conducted while in Berlin with filmmaker Lucian Busse.
       Episode 2: Bande À part (with Actors Gillian Harker, Robert Dukes, Aisling M De’Ath & Adam Lannon)  http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/3/23/episode-2-bande-part Neil and Dario discuss perhaps Godard's most accessible film and contextualise the filmmaker’s legacy covering topics of filmic influence, homage and pastiche. We also talk to four London based actors - Gillian Harker, Robert Dukes, Aislinn M De'Ath & Adam Lannon - about their process of working with directors and their own influences as actors. Episode 3: Whip it (with Prof. Linda Ruth Williams & Dr. Shelley Cobb) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/3/23/episode-3-whip-it Introduction and audience discussion of Drew Barrymore’s Whip It (2009) with guest speaker Dr Laura Canning. The episode also analyses issues of gender with regards to the film industry and academia and Dario interviews Prof. Linda Ruth Williams and Dr Shelley Cobb about their AHRC funded research project investigating the status and role of women filmmakers.
       
      Episode 4: Yojimbo (with Director Mark Herman) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/4/9/episode-4-yojimbo Neil and Dario discuss the cinematic influence of Kurosawa particularly on American New Wave filmmakers and explore the gaps in their own cinematic canons arguing whether there can be any real, definitive criteria for judging a 'great' film. Dario interviews British film Director Mark Herman about his career including the films Brassed off (1996), Little Voice (1998) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008).
      Episode 5: Bronson (with Dr. Johnny Walker) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/5/2/episode-5-bronson Neil questions Dario about his article on Nicolas Winding Refn’s powerful Bronson (2008) - entitled Punishing Bodies: British Prison Film and the Spectacle of Masculinity - which analyses the prison as an aesthetic space and suggests the (de)constructions of masculinity made possible by the prison genre. Neil also interviews Dr Johnny Walker about his work on the contemporary British Horror film. Episode 6: Goodbye Dragon Inn (Dr Sarah Atkinson) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/5/13/episode-6-goodbye-dragon-inn Neil and Dario discuss Tsai Ming-Liang’s 2003 ode to the cinema auditorium Goodbye Dragon Inn and discuss the concept of the cinema experience and how this has been affected by the arrival of the digital age. This theme also frames Dario's interview with Dr. Sarah Atkinson on her recently published book Beyond the Screen: Emerging Cinema and Engaging Audiences
       
      Episode 7: Sci-fi Special (part 1) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/6/4/episode-7-sci-fi-special-part-1 In the first of a sci-fi podcast double bill Neil and Dario discuss their introductions to four films screened at the Poly, Falmouth as part of the BFI season Days of Fear Wonder. The Fly (1986), Demon Seed (1977), The Thing (1982) and Rollerball (1975) are all explored in the context of what science fiction offers as a key cinema genre. Neil and Dario touch upon the tropes of hard v soft sci-fi, artificial intelligence, the fear of technology, metaphors of alien invasion and control of reproduction, along with many other of the fundamental elements of the genre.
       
      Episode 8: Sci-fi Special Part 2 (Pacific Rim) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/6/26/episode-8-sci-fi-special-part-2-pacific-rim In what promises to be a no-holes-barred, apocalyptic battle of the ages Neil and Dario face off in a cerebral clash of wills over a film that represents the most overt disagreement: Pacific Rim (2013). Don't miss episode 2 of the sci-fi double bill.
       Episode 9a: Point Blank (Port Eliot Special) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/8/21/episode-9a Dario is on Holiday so Neil is joined by filmmaker and academic Mark Jenkin to present and discuss John Boorman's 1967 classic Point Blank starring Lee Marvin. Point Blank was released in a zeitgeist year for crime cinema that also included Arthur Penn's Bonnie & Clyde, Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai and Seijun Suzuki's Branded To Kill and it stands equal to those illustrious peers. This episode also features an interview with writer Tom Shone about his latest book Woody Allen: A Retrospective.
       Episode 9b: Interviews from Port Eliot http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/9/9/episode-9b-port-eliot-special This episode collects the diverse interviews collected by Neil across the weekend of the festival. The conversations cover film costume with Oscar winner Sandy Powell, music documentaries with television actress Caroline Catz, poetry with Simon Armitage, extinct birds with Ceri Levy and clouds with Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the Cloud Apprecation Society. Yes. Clouds. Neil also spent time with one of his heroes, Ralph Steadman, and Neil and Dario discuss the place of cinema at modern multi-arts festivals.
      Port Eliot Festival websiteNextinction by Ralph Steadman and Ceri LevyWalking Away by Simon Armitage
      Episode 10: 12 Angry Men http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/9/26/episode-10-12-angry-men Season 2 of the podcast kicks off with a bumper freshers edition featuring a screening of Sydney Lumet's 1957 social drama 12 Angry Men. A heavyweight cast of character actors led by Henry Fonda argue over the evidence of what appears to be straightforward guilty verdict. Neil and guest presenter Kingsley Marshall introduce what is a canonical film studies text. Dario and Neil also discuss their experiences of studying film and hopefully offer some helpful guidelines to those who are coming into university to study what is a changing discipline.
       Episode 11: Tony Manero (with Prof. Will Brooker) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/10/4/episode-10-tony-manero Our intense desire for, and identification, with film characters and stars comes under the spotlight in this weeks' podcast. Neil is joined by filmmaker James Dean to introduce Pablo Larraín's unique and brutal Tony Manero (2008) about Chilean criminal who is obsessed with John Travolta's character from Saturday Night Fever. It is simultaneously bleak, shocking and unsettling with allusions to the darkest parts of human identity. Also on the podcast Dario interviews Professor Will Brooker from Kingston University about the year he is spending embodying the iconic David Bowie.
       Episode 12: Planes, Trains and Automobiles (with Jeanie Finlay) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/10/25/episode-12-planes-trains-and-automobiles Neil is joined on stage at Falmouth by Kingsley Marshall to introduce John Hughes' comedy Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987). The influence and persona of John Candy and Steve Martin is discussed along with the career of John Hughes as one the quintessential American 80s directors. The podcast also features an interview with Jeanie Finlay on her surprising and offbeat musical documentary Orion: The Man Who Would Be King (2015).
       Episode 13: Dead of Night (with Jez Connolly) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/10/29/episode-13-dead-of-night The Cinematologists go on the road again, this time to the University of Bristol, to screen the Ealing produced British anthology horror Dead of Night (1945). Dario and Neil discuss the film with Jez Conolly who has co-authored a book on the film with David Owain Bates as part of Auteur’s ‘Devil’s Advocates’ series. Also discussed on the podcast is the new book by friend of The Cinematologists, Dr. Johnny Walker. Contemporary British Horror Cinema is out now from Edinburgh University Press.  
      Episode 14: Seconds (with journalist Andy Bass) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/11/1/18p6jz74rsjn3od3azafzzkznn0fvo In our first podcast from the University of Brighton's Hastings campus we screen the strangely superb sci-fi thriller Seconds (1966). John Frankenheimer's key themes revolve around paranoia and conspiracy with titles to his credit including The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964). This film takes a faustian theme and links it to social contexts of mistrust in government, consumerism and the increasing loss of identity in the modern age. The episode also features an interview with writer and historian Andy Bass who has recently written an article on the shooting of the film in his home town of Scarsdale:
      http://scarsdalenews.com/Scarsdale_Inquirer/8-21-15_NEWS__Rock_Hudson.html
       Episode 15: The Hitch-Hiker (with writer Jack Thorne) http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/12/2/episode-15-the-hitch-hiker-with-writer-jack-thorne Neil is joined onstage at Falmouth by Kingsley Marshall to discuss Ida Lupino's 1953 film noir The Hitch-Hiker. Neil also interviews writer Jack Thorne about, amongst other things, his up-coming theatre adaptation of Harry Potter.Link to the Film Programme episode discussed on the podcast
      Link to the Senses of Cinema Ida Lupino piece mentioned by Kingsley on the podcast  Episode 16: In The Mood For Love http://www.cinematologists.com/podcastarchive/2015/12/2/episode-16-in-the-mood-for-love
       In one of the highlights of the year The Cinematologists screen Wong Kar-Wai's stylish masterpiece as part of the BFI 'love' season in association with The Poly, Falmouth. A veritable modern masterpiece In the Mood for Love stars Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung in iconic roles as lovers seeking refuge from disappointment, loneliness and the harsh realities of their surroundings. Dario and Neil also discuss their cinematic highlights of the year. The Guardian article by Peter Walker referred to in the podcast can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2011/dec/19/in-the-mood-for-love


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      Thursday, 19 November 2015

      Sam Rohdie's Passion(s): A Coda


      Publicity for the Queen's University Belfast Study Day event held in memory of Sam Rohdie

      Film Studies For Free is delighted to publish four additional tributes to the late film scholar Sam Rohdie (1939-2015). These join the ones published by this blog on April 14, 2015. Link here. Many thanks to Des O'Rawe and his Queen's University Belfast colleagues for their work in gathering them. Coming up next at FSFF we have a big round up to coincide with the upcoming festive season See you then!

      On Friday, 9 October 2015, Film Studies at Queen's held a study-day to mark the recent passing of former colleague, Sam Rohdie. The event focused on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, and included presentations by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Rod Stoneman. It also included a screening of Une femme est une femme, and some extracts from Godard's more recent work. The study-day was well-attended, with an audience that included many of Sam's former students and colleagues from Queen's, as well as some of the friends he and Margaret had made while living in Belfast.
      As a coda to this event, we are publishing Geoffrey Nowell-Smith's reflection on Sam's life and work, as well two pieces about Sam by former colleagues at Queen's, David Johnston and Des O'Rawe, and a tribute written by another close friend and collaborator, Stefania Parigi (Università degli Studi Roma Tre).

      1. My Friend Sam Rohdie by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith

      Sam Rohdie is – or was – the only person I know of who taught film studies in four continents – Europe, Asia, North America, and Australia. (He also did some teaching in Africa when he was a graduate student doing his anthropology fieldwork, but not film studies.) I was a friend of his, more or less continuously but with certain gaps due to his being on a different continent so much of the time, for forty-five years. And over that lengthy period we never had a row that couldn’t be patched up. People who knew him will recognise how unusual that is.

      He was combative, abrasive, and bore grudges. Sometimes his temperament stood him in good stead, particularly in the early 1970s when he left Sheffield, where I first knew him, to become General Secretary of a small London-based organisation attached to the British Film Institute called the Society for Education in Film And Television (SEFT). At the time of his appointment both SEFT and its sponsor the Education Department of the BFI were in crisis. Sam played an important role in saving SEFT and turning it into a vanguard organisation not only for film studies but in wider intellectual life in the UK. He succeeded partly because he earned the respect of Sir Denis Forman, a former Director of the BFI and at the time Managing Director of Granada Television, who had been brought back to the BFI as Chairman to sort out the crisis. Denis was tough, imaginative, generous, instinctively progressive, and not easily put off by young whippersnappers who stood up to him, even aggressively. He had shown these qualities at Granada and was to do so again on his return to the BFI. Sam was to be a beneficiary.

      But having turned SEFT and its magazine Screen into the voice of a new cultural avant-garde, Sam’s singlemindedness, his aggressivity and his inability – unlike Denis – to listen to criticism, meant that he fell foul of his former allies and was acrimoniously sacked from his post as General Secretary of SEFT and Editor of Screen.

      Jobless in the UK, he went back to New York, where he came from originally. He taught there for a while, then went to La Trobe University in Melbourne, where the Aussies rather took to him, abrasiveness and all. He acquired – and lost – a new wife. More importantly, he became properly himself intellectually. No longer enslaved to the Screen dogma he had done a lot to foster, he developed new tastes, a new sensitivity to the richness of film language, and a new writing style with which to communicate his discoveries. The upshot was his book on Antonioni, which remains the best – certainly the subtlest – account of what is so special about that director’s films.

      His break with “Screen” theory did not align him with any of the other tendencies in vogue in the world of film studies in the 1970s and 80s. He recognised the existence of a “classical” film language but his focus turned away from generalities to the ways in which this language was subverted and disrupted in the work of particular artists – besides Antonioni, his examples included Renoir, Pasolini, Godard, Nicholas Ray. This focus on the disruptive was in part a continuation of the other side of Screen legacy, its championing of a cinema that “bared the device” and broke with the comforting illusions of classical Hollywood and its avatars. But Sam’s interest was not in “baring the device” as such – another generality paralleling that of the idea of classical cinema itself. Rather he looked at the many and various ways, both overt and covert, in which certain film-makers destabilise the world they portray and the relationship the spectator has to it. This was to differentiate him not only from “Screen” theory but from “mise en scène” criticism which, while interested in the particular, remained locked in to the norms of the classical aesthetic.

      From Melbourne Sam went to Hong Kong, where he acquired a new wife (his third), this time for keeps. He spent time in Paris and Rome, developing his interest in Godard, Pasolini and Bertolucci. He mostly stayed away from London, and his return to the UK was to Belfast. Forcibly retired at the age of 65 (which was the rule at the time: exceptions could be made but Queen’s for whatever reason did not wish to make an exception in his case) he then finished his scholarly career back in the United States.

      He died last April, leaving his last book in proof.

      The presiding genius behind this last book, Film Modernism, is Godard. The over-riding thesis of the book, developing ideas expressed in his earlier work, is that in 1960 Godard, together with Antonioni, Pasolini, Bertolucci and a few others, revolutionised the cinema and for the first time in history aligned it with the modernism that had taken the artistic world by storm fifty years earlier but to which the cinema up to then had been resistant. But while the early Godard of Breathless (1960) and Une femme est une femme 1961) had taken the first steps towards creating a truly modern cinema, it was the later Godard, particularly that of the monumental Histoire(s) de cinéma (1988-1998), which most fascinated Sam and, in a sense, defeated him. He made several attempts to write a book just on Godard, focusing on Histoire(s) but could never bring it together. Much of what he wanted to write about Godard is folded into the pages of Film Modernism, and is his legacy.

      He is survived by his first wife, Jean McCrindle, and their daughter Claire, and by his second and third wives, Annie Langusch and Margaret Lam.


      2. Remembering Sam by David Johnston

      Sam Rohdie was the first Professor of Film at Queen’s University. I was Head of School at the time, and was on his appointment panel. The first signal he gave of his enduring willingness to come at you from left field was in his interview. Other candidates answered stock questions in stock ways, but to one query as to why he had moved from Australia to Hong Kong, Sam smiled and drawled with disarming honesty ‘Love’. That one-word (but in his voice two-syllable) answer got him the job, in my book anyway. It marked him out as a maverick, and in an institution – and indeed a whole sector - increasingly prone to the deadening sameness of a compliancy culture, to be human and different and unexpected was a breath of fresh air. He was a maverick but, at the same time, he was a great film critic and an intellectual of stature; to be a maverick and still be regarded by your students and peers as one of the best in the field anywhere, requires extraordinary finesse. He was a contrarian, of course, but an endlessly intelligent and creative one. Like many Americans he rose early, and would regularly send at least six impossible emails before breakfast. I would open them with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation, but they would always make eloquent representation for the ideal programme in Film Studies that Sam had in his mind. Never once did he use the word ‘vision’. But he had a glorious sense of what Film at Queen’s might become. And I came to share that sense. That’s how I remember Sam: a colleague who challenged because he cared, not least about language itself. A colleague who became a friend.


      3. Travels with Sam by Stefania Parigi

      Sam for me was always the man from another planet: Africa, Australia, Hong Kong ...

      An unstoppable traveller. All his books read to me like travel diaries, performances of an individual wandering through nature, cinema, the imagination.

      As time went on his thoughts led him increasingly to reject any form of organicity or system and took form more as fragments of an adventure, where knowledge was sparked off by pleasure. Montages, cross-cuttings, as suggested in the titles of the books which brought together his pieces of writing, jotted down at any time of day or night, between a swim and a wander through images of the cinema and of the world. Of a world that becomes cinema and a cinema that never ceases to be a fantasy of the world.

      His pages shine as if covered in droplets, like his swimmer’s body.

      This is my first memory of him: athletic arm movements in a little swimming pool, in a small hotel on the Adriatic coast, courtesy of the International Festival of New Cinema at Pesaro. It would have been in 1987 or perhaps 1988.

      We got to know each other thanks to a captivating laugh. Out of control, childish, quite out of scale with his giant’s body. He was very handsome, women flocked to him.

      Maybe Sam and I talked more about love than about cinema. But it was all the same. Don’t get me wrong. We told each other stories of our loves as if we were eternal adolescents who could not tell life from representations of it.

      Sam seemed to move all the time inside a kind of fairy tale, in which ancient and modern images were mixed together, and where horizons merged with each other in a wandering flow.

      He combined certain refinements of thought with a taste for the continuous discovery of the most basic forms of pleasures, which he found in every nook and cranny of life. He was a solitary and he was a communitarian. His cooking was a performance very like the performance of his writing, each caught up in the same display of impulsive vitality.

      There is no doubt that he had nothing to do with the academy, at least as we understand it in Italy. He cultivated independence with a boyish pride and could be as cutting in his negative judgements as he was warm and constructive in his appreciation. He was very generous with me and offered to translate some of my writings on the Italian cinema for an English publisher.

      Together we had the privilege of enjoying a free run across the field of aesthetics, with no protocols to respect or formulae to box us in. I mean aesthetic here also in its original sense of perception; aesthetics as pleasure and pain, as a form of knowing, an extricable twining together of thinking and the senses, in brief a field of flesh and blood, of dreams, of projections outward towards the other and plunges deep into the interior of the self. But also as an inexhaustible field in which to play.

      Moreover, writing for Sam was above all a way of capturing the oscillations, the light and shade of the internal and external world, as if one were for ever in an gigantic rotating merry-go-round.

      And his laugh. So subversive, so exhilarating, shaking and embracing you at the same time, it made me feel that he was indestructible, like one of those fantasies that move in and out of the screen, challenging us with their uncertainty. And now I have nothing left to say but this: Sam so far away, Sam so close.


      4. Sam/Belfast by Des O'Rawe

      My first encounter with Sam was at a BFI study day at the Queen's Film Theatre (QFT). He had arrived only recently to Belfast, and was still finding his feet. His talk had an edgy eloquence, culminating in a ferocious denunciation of BFI Education and its policies. Belfast can often seem at one remove from the metropolis, and I suspect much of what Sam said that afternoon meant little to the assembled gathering (especially, given that most of us probably knew little about his history with the BFI.)

      At that time, I was teaching an undergraduate module on Irish film and visual culture with Colin Graham and Eamonn Hughes. Shortly after Sam's appointment, we met with him and I remember a good-humoured meeting, at which The Big Sleep (and 'Rusty' Regan) was discussed at length. I happened to mention to Sam that I was also teaching film courses in the local further education college, and I was surprised at his genuine interest in extra-mural and outreach film education, and so - half mischievously - I invited him to call in on one of these classes. A week or so later, true to his word, he paid a visit. In the classroom, he was courteous but didn't pay much heed to me, preferring to sit enigmatically at the back, sporting a pair of dinky designer sunglasses. We were about to screen F.W. Murnau's Tabu that morning, and Sam was delighted on hearing this news. (This choice of film was fortuitous: I had ordered up Nosferatu; Tabu arrived instead, and I decided just to go with the flow.) After the film, Sam talked to us about cinematography, anthropology, vampires, exoticism, the sea, the moon, Tabu as a documentary, Tabu as a painting, Tabu as a dream, Tabu as Nosferatu, Tabu as everything the cinema should be, and still can be. He listened carefully to whatever the students had to say. He was inquisitive but encouraging, witty but also self-deprecating - and completely unrecognisable from the volcanic eccentric who had erupted at the QFT a month or so previously. Once I got to know Sam, I realised that this kind of teaching situation was his métier - relaxed, unfettered, unscripted, free - sitting among students talking about a film, encouraging them to explore new ideas and possibilities, and also wanting to learn with them.

      Of course, a part of Sam relished the challenge of wooing an audience, and he could be very good at that. (A couple of years ago, I bumped into a former reluctant student of ours who told me the only thing he remembered about his entire first year at university was 'that Sam Rohdie lecture on Rules of the Game'). However, I think Sam's best and most influential teaching at Queen's was done with smaller seminar groups, in situations where he could persuade students to think for themselves, to embrace difficulty, to lose their bearing before discovering a space where the cinema alone could work its magic.

      With the benefit of hindsight, and all things considered, it was only a matter of time before Sam and Margaret moved on from Belfast but he certainly made a lasting impression, influencing the lives of many of us, in all sorts of ways. A critic with a distinctive vision, a teacher with a method, and a professor with something to profess, Sam will be much missed - not least by his more intelligent critics.
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