The Movie Project is Dead: Long Live the Movie Project

When I was an undergraduate at the now decfunct Indiana University I took film classes with James Naremore, Harry Geduld, and Peter Bondanella. Film was not my major at the time but semiology was the in thing in film and I was interested in semiology and all other theoretical -ologys and -isms that were happening in film and literary studies at the time.

University film courses were not my first introduction to the study of movies. I had had an interest in film before this. I had read Robin Wood’s monograph on Alfred Hitchcock. It blew me away. I was gobsmacked that film criticism could be so good. I was amazedy at how attentive Wood was and I was amazed at how perceptive he was. Because of my interest in Wood I was eventually drawn to Ian Cameron’s Movie journal, a journal Wood wrote extensively for and I subscribed to it sometime in the mid to late 1970s, the period in which the journal was revived.

Ever since that time it lodged in the back of my mind that I should  write a dissertation on Movie. Movie, you see, though it was important in the Anglo-American world of Britain, Canada, the United States, and Australia, does not get the attention it deserves given its role in bringing an attention to film details and a type or form of auteurism to the English speaking world. By the way, when I did actually do my dissertation, however, it dealt with another topic, Mormon Studies. 

Despite getting the dissertation blues off my back I still had an urge to do that scholarly dissertation on Movie. So, sometime in the 2010s, 2011 or 2012 I think, I got was able to get a supervisor (Doctor Smyth) who was willing to supervise me on the Movie project at the University of Warwick. I applied to do a doctorate in the History Faculty at Warwick and was accepted into the doctoral programme. Warwick would have been a great place for me to do the Movie project given the fact that Victor Perkins, who was one of the early contributors to Movie and guiders of the journal was a member of the faculty in Film Studies at Warwick. 

What I could not get out of my mind at the time was the fact that I I really did not want to do yet another doctorate in history even if it meant that I could do the Movie project. When I did not get monies from Warwick, which I absolutely needed to do doctoral study at Warwick—I am poor—I decided, after much discussion with the chair of the History Faculty, not to matriculate at Warwick.  It was probably a wise decision since, in my discussions with Doctor Smyth she implied that I was overqualified for study at Warwick. She suggested I apply to the American Studies doctoral programme at Manchester since I preferred to do a doctorate in a more interdisciplinary programme.

Still I could not get the Movie project out of my mind. I went back to my documentary materials and outline for the project on my computer and tweaked it a bit. I then contacted two scholars at Cambridge (Doctors Bitney and Boddy), a place I already know fairly well, who agreed to take me on and agreed to take the project on.

Before I applied to Cambridge—I would have requested admission into Selwyn College for those who are interested—I did some checking around because I needed a goodly amount of primary source materials to do the project as envisioned. The dissertation as planned was to have had three chapters, a preface or introduction, and a conclusion. Chapter one would have focused on the origins of Movie. Chapter two would have been on the culture of Movie focusing on those who wrote for it and the connections they might have to other film study journals and cultures. This chapter would also briefly discuss the importance Movie placed on design. Chapter three would have been on the economics of Movie, a topic that has been generally ignored by contemporary film studies scholars.

Because I needed to use primary source materials, particularly for chapter three, I contacted the new Movie at the University of Warwick, I contacted the folks at the University of Reading who had ties to Movie, and I contacted Jill Hollis at Cameron and Hollis Jill Hollis was the wife of Ian Cameron, the founder and publisher of Movie ever since its first issue came out in 1962. I also I looked to see if there was anything on Movie is in the archives of the British Film Institute. In all this digital running around I found some what might be called oral histories with Cameron and others connected to Movie at a University of Reading website. i found one document relating to Cameron at the BFI, an interview. And I found out from Jill Hollis that she had no primary source material beyond the issues of the journal itself.

Because of the paucity of primary source materials and because I don’t think a dissertation relying on oral histories can really work in the way I wanted it to, I dropped the Movie project once and for all. As a consequence I must admit that I feel some regret and am somewhat sad to have had to drop the project. So, I guess it is back to retirement time for this wanna be lifelong student.

Postscript:

Given that there was no primary source materials that i could use to write the history of Movie and its economic and cultural aspects I revised my doctoral project by putting my Movie project in the context of other post-World War II British film criticism and film scholarship movements, particular that of Screen and the theoretical components that fed into it (you can also see the outline for this below in the appendix B). Additionally, doing it this way allowed me to do more on Robin Wood and I wanted to do more with Wood, who had ties to Movie and who was influential in the history of film criticism and film studies in Canada, Australia, and the UK. Anyway, I sent the revised project to one of my potential sponsors/tutors/sponsors at Cambridge. He refplied that he was busy and could not give it his full attention at this time. He suggested that I either do it myself (an important point that had consequences for my candidacy for admission) or simply apply. Both were understandable and reasonable responses to my post though I would have liked a brief comment on its acceptability to him as a doctoral project I could do at Cantab (which seems to have been Americanised since the 1980s).

The problem here was the same problem I had with the project at Warwick. I could not do the project myself since I did not have the financial means to do so. The Catch 22 here was the same Catch 22 as it was earlier at Warwick. In order to go to Cambridge, assuming I was admitted, I had to get monies from the university or college to do it. And if past is prologue I won’t get an monies from Cantab; “foreign” students, after all, are meant to bring in income to the entrepreneurial university not suck it out. Anyway, I have applied and been accepted for postgraduate work at four “foreign”universities—the University of Toronto, Queen’s University in Canada, La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and the University of Warwick. I got monies from none and I expect this to be the rule for Cambridge as well.

At this point I think I am going to give up on the revised project as well. Given my age and the fact that I already have a doctorate I suspect I won’t get into Cambridge and even if I did, I suspect that I would not get monies to do the project for the same reasons. Nor, I suspect, could I teach somewhere because I am not British. And, as I said, I would need support to do the project. Such, I guess, is life for those of us with limited financial means and who consider themselves life long learners. Apparently, corporate universities have little use for us elderly life long learners who could benefit from intellectual life at, for example, Cantab and Cambridge. Oh well.

Appendices:  

Appendix One: 

The Original Movie Project 

Movie: The Biography of a Film Journal

To my probably far too Americanised Mum, my English rose

Introduction: 

In the beginning when narrative film was created there was a debate as to whether narrative film was an art, a form of entertainment, or both.

Film as Art

Film as Entertainment

Film Criticism and highbrow, middlebrow lowbrow

Film scholarship and highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow

Auteurism and the art film

Auteurism and the entertainment film

Cahiers and Hollywood as art

Movie and British Auteurism

Chapter One:

Ian Cameron and the Rise of Movie (1962-2000):

Precedents and Links: Cambridge (Leavis, Literary Criticism, Humanism, Wood), Oxford (Oxford Opinion), Cahiers, Postif (1952-), Films and Filming (1954-1990)

Movie (1962-2000): Ian Cameron, V.F. Perkins, Robin Wood, Jim Hillier, Charles Barr, Peter Bogdanovich, Raymond Durgnat, Joel Finler, Elizabeth Sussex, Michael Walker…

Sources:

Archives: where are the Movie and Cameron archives?

UK: Cameron, Movie, Reading, Warwick

Cameron obituary in the Guardian

Interviews: UK: Charles Barr, Susan Smith, Deborah Thomas, Edward Gallafent, Peter Wollen, Laura Mulvey…

Chapter Two: 

The Culture of Early Movie

Cameron, Perkins, Shivas, Wood, Barr, Alloway, Sussex, Bogdanovich, Durgnat, Walker, Ciment (ties to Positif?), Engel, Chabot, Daudelin, …

Movie paperbacks on Bergman, Chabrol, Antonioni, Vigo, Bresson, Rossellini, Truffaut, Satyajit Ray, Lindsay Anderson, Dwan, Penn, Fuller, Second Wave, Heavies, Dames

Sources:  

Wood obituary in the Guardian

Wood obituary in the NYTimes online, 

Sight and Sound obituary of V.F. Perkins online

Cameron and Hollis webpage

Chapter Three:

The Economics of Early Movie

How successful was the journal?
 How successful were the books?

The economic problems of early Movie

This area is massively understudied in Film Studies

Archives: Movie archives if accessible

Cameron

Conclusion: 

Movie’s Impact:

Wood: Hitchcock’s Films, Howard Hawks

Film Books: Barnes/Tantivy/Zwemmer (Cowie, Auteurs, Genre, Stars), Twayne (Auteurs, Genre), BFI and Film Book Publishing The Ultimate in Auteurism (Faber and Faber’s Directors on Directors series)

Wood at Queen’s, Warwick, York

Perkins at Warwick (co-founder of Film Dept.)

Douglas Pye at Reading

Movie, Down Under: Colin Crisp, specialist in French Cinema, Griffith University, Brisbane, Tom Ryan

Movie in the Twenty-First Century or the new Movie goes digital

Movie at Warwick, Reading

Movie’s New Generation (Pye, Gibbs, Smith, Klevan, Thomas, Gallafent, Close-Up, Warwick, Sunderland, Grant and Canada

Movie Advisory Board: Massey, Monash, UBC

Cine-Action

The Inevitability of Auteurism?

Auteurists always (Rosenbaum, Kerr, Naremore, Wood)

Archival Material:

The BFI Archives holds one folder on Ian Cameron.

Movie (the journal) Archive (at Warwick) 

Interviews with Cameron, Perkins, Barr, Lovell. Reading

Appendix B: 

The Revised Project

Introduction

The French Connection I: Cahiers du Cinema (1951-) and film culture

The too great of focus on Cahiers by previous scholars. What about the British film magazines and journals and their influence?

Cahiers and auteurism in the UK and US

Chapter One

Oxford, Oxford Opinion and Ian Cameron

Cambridge and Robin Wood

London and Movie (1962-2000). Movie eventually moved to Moffat, Dumfriesshire, Scotland in 1989. Movie and design.

Cameron v. Kael in Film Quarterly

London and the BFI, Sight and Sound (1952-), and Penelope Houston

Lindsay Anderson, Oxford, Sequence (1947-1952), and film criticism. Anderson on John Ford

London: newspaper and magazine film criticism

From criticism to auteurism

Chapter Two

Peter Harcourt and Robin Wood in Canada at Queen’s University and York University

Wood and US film culture

Wood at the University of Warwick

Wood and Harcourt at York

Peter Cowie, Cambridge, the International Film Guide, and Tantivy/Zwemmer/Barnes film books

Movie Paperbacks

BFI Cinema One and Cinema Two books

Auteurism

Chapter Three

Screen (1969-). Precursors: The Film Teacher (1952-1958) and Screen Education (1959-1969). 

The French Connection II: Lacan, marxism, structuralism (also Cult Anth and Soc Anth), semiology

Birmingham CCCS

From auteurism to representation

Screen and US, Canadian, and Australian film culture

Wood and the “new” film theory.

Wollen

Conclusion

The impact of British film culture, particularly Movie and Screen, on Canada, Australia, and the US.

The rise of professionalised film studies on college campuses in the UK, Canada, Australia, and the US

 

The Books of My Life: Empire and Superempire

 

Imperialism. For many thinking people the word imperialism and the ideologies or meanings, actions, and behaviours associated with it has, historically speaking, been conceptualised in normative terms. It has been seen by some, in other words, as a good and by others as a bad. For many Romans, for example, Rome’s conquest of others brought with it the political, economic, and cultural benefits of Roman civilisation while for anti-imperialists  imperialism was grounded in ethnocentrism, exploitation, violence, and brutality. For the anti-imperialist Mark Twain American imperialism was a betrayal of fundamental American values.

Over the years there has been a host of attempts to define imperialism. Economic exploitations, particularly since the rise of Marxism and thanks to Lenin’s influential book on imperialism as the last stage of capitalism, have long been central to intellectual and academic definitions of imperialism. There is a problem with this economic and geographic conception of imperialism, however. The focus on imperialism as a geographic and economic phenomenon, the exploitation of the conquered by the conqueror for economic benefits, is too limited. It is only one of the forms imperialism has taken root in the human community since the rise of human civilisations in the Near East,  the Indus Valley, China, and in what is today Central and South America.

Imperialism is more than conquest and economic exploitation. It is also cultural, political, and demographic. Imperialism does have, of course, a geographic dimension. It has been and is the conquest of one territory by some entity, usually a city-state, a state, or a nation-state. I give you America’s conquest of and occupation of the American West, wherever that American West or the American frontier happened to be during the course of American history. Imperialism has also taken another form. There has been and is a form of imperialism in which the economy of one entity dominates the economy of another entity. I give you Trump’s use of the tariff as a heavy handed means for American economic domination in the world today and Trump's attempt to grab Venezuela's oil for American oil corporations. There has been and is political imperialism in which the political culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s attempt to spread American style “democracy” around the world particularly since World War II. There is cultural imperialism in which the culture of one entity dominates that of another. I give you America’s conception of itself as god or nature’s chosen land whose messianic and mission it is to spread the gospel of America across the globe. Needless to say, this American gospel has economic and political cultural dimensions, namely, the belief that Americanism, including the supposedly distinctive form of the American economy and the supposedly singular form of American democracy, is the best thing since that proverbial slice of sliced bread. And there is demographic imperialism in which the population of one entity is hegemonic over another. See the British in India or the Afrikaners in South Africa.

Written in the long shadow of 9/11 and the Bush regime’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq Bernard Porter’s Empire and Superempire: Britain, America and the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), compares and contrasts British imperialism, particularly the liberal British imperialism of the Victorian era with the American imperialism of the post-World War II era. Porter gets that there are various forms of imperialism which sometimes if not often overlap making these various forms of imperialism Weberian ideal types. For Porter, both Victorian British imperialism and American post-WWII imperialism had geographic, if less so in the case of the United States, economic, if less so in the case of the British (once the Indies corporations became defunct), political, and cultural dimensions. It was in the cultural dimension area where the differences between the two were, so Porter claims, particularly evident.

For Porter both Victorian Britain and post-World War II America were imperial empires. Porter argues that there were a number of similarities and differences between these British and American empires. Both were cheerleaders of free trade though the British empire was less a cheerleader of free trade than the American. The English public school educated elite who staffed the colonies were not devotees of the gospel of free market capitalism, an ideology that proved to be a kind of a countervailing force to those who saw empire as a way to spread the gospel and the reality of “free” market capitalism, argues Porter. The British empire was also, claims Porter, more paternalistic than the American. 

Both empires, according to Porter, spread around the world on a crest of expanding commerce and of foreign investment. Both saw themselves as civilising and liberating forces bringing “enlightenment" and "democracy" to the areas they colonised. While the British elite, who did believe that the British way of life and its values were universal and absolute, tempered this civilising and liberalising force with a pinch of cultural relativism the US elite saw itself in a way Britain never did, namely, as chosen people of a chosen land who were messianic evangelists for a way of life that was universal and beyond space and time. 

Both empires, claims Porter, had pedigrees that stretched to the past. British imperialism was born in the crucible of the Napoleonic Wars while the US empire originated in westward expansion or manifest destiny. Both empires had an interest in oil, some might argue, particularly in the case of the US, that they were addicted to oil. Hence both had an interest in the Middle East and Iraq. Both empires fought wars in Afghanistan, a place that has come to be known, as the graveyard of empires thanks to the British failure in Afghanistan. The US, of course, had its own failure in Afghanistan suggesting again that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Whether the American failure in Afghanistan, one which echoes its failure in Vietnam, will prove a factor in the fall of the American empire is an open question at the moment. Both empires felt the sting of guerrilla warfare. Both empires were overstretched militarily. Where the two empires differed in particular, according to Porter, was in their size. Britain was an empire. The US was and is, claims Porter, a superempire.

I found Porter’s Empire and Superempire an excellent read. I greatly enjoyed Porter’s rather coy and wry comments on the American empire many Americans refuse to recognise, about the US fighting wars against “enemies” it knows it can defeat easily only to find itself fighting guerrilla wars again and again, guerrilla wars it cannot win in the long run, about the US conviction that its invasions will be welcomed just as they were in Paris during World War II when they aren't, and about the US hoping to cut and run as fast as it can after it invades other countries leaving them, in the process, in economic and political ruin. 

That said I think that Porter overemphasises the differences between the British empire and the American superempire. These differences seem less important when one looks at the two in demographic and technological terms. America is bigger than Britain demographically which means that the US is bigger than the UK in its economic, political, cultural, and imperial dimensions. If Britain was as demographically big as the US would they be more similar? I think so. Technology is also a factor in the seeming differences between the two empires. New weapons like the atomic bomb have been developed since the US transplanted England as the dominant empire on the planet and the US has been willing to use these new technologies. So, the US is really simply a demographically (the key factor), geographically, economically, politically, and culturally and more technologically bigger empire than England. This, however, does not make them fundamentally different. 

By the way, the Commonwealth is a different kind of empire with its loyalty to the Crown and British political liberalism. It is also something that I think should be emphasised in this era of Trumpian economic and cultural imperialisms. The world is sadly in need of a countervailing imperial forces since the fall of the Soviet Empire if simply to keep American imperialism in check. The Commonwealth or the EU, with the addition of the UK and Canada, might be able to check and balance the American empire at least in certain parts of the world. That would mean that both the UK and Canada would have to get over their notion that there is a special relationship between the "Anglo-Saxon" three.