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
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
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