Word: cinemae
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...time when some of cinema's most respected actors--Robert De Niro, Al Pacino--have developed an unfortunate taste for self-parody, Neeson has made his mark in Hollywood as a paragon of restrained intensity. In Ethan Frome, the 1993 movie version of Edith Wharton's novel, Neeson manages to convey a lifetime of thwarted longing in one gaze. In a Schindler scene that has Neeson's debonair businessman surveying the destruction of the Cracow ghetto, we see in the actor's perplexed expression something quite remarkable: a man's humanity slowly surfacing...
...continue to bear my respect, and feeling myself qualified as a cinephile for familial reasons (my father, a self-educated individual had such an abiding love for silent film that my childhood was spent in front of 16-millimeter films) it seemed propitious to launch a course on French cinema. It began with an enrollment of 120, soon split into two sections ("realism" and "new wave"), and then ramified into seminar-topics ("auteur" theory, structural cinema, cinema of cruelty...). The course became something of a machine, what Gilles Deleuze would have called a "spiritual automaton" that engulfed its students...
...which I sought to explain how and why research was in two different areas. Concepts, like time, won over: the indistinction of things legible and visible in both film and early modern writing. The book as a creation of what Walter Ong called the "local motion" of printed characters. Cinema as an operation that analyzes culture differentially because it establishes multiple "tracks" and thus complicates deixis in ways familiar to medieval authors. Cartographic writing and the relation of space on early maps to literary and political artifacts...
Here I find a freedom given to anyone willing to develop in myriad directions, especially along horizontal, collectivizing itineraries, that embrace both literature of the early medieval and early modern ages and cinema. Here I have taught Rabelais with a few good Pantagruelists, am on the verge of teaching film with a larger student body, and things cartographic and Baroque with a scattered few. If the students of film become what Susan Sontag and Jean-Luc Godard call passionate cinephiles, they will be no less stalwart, no less engaged, and no less given over to the endless pleasure and thrill...
Thomas C. Conley is professor of romance languages and literatures and is currently teaching Foreign Cultures 21: "Cinema et culture francais, de 1923 a nos jours...