Why study cinema? Serial visions of the culture industry and the future of film studies
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12672010 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Valentina Vitali (0000-0003-0275-1310, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 282-288 |
| Publication date | 2005-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1464-9373 • E-ISSN: 1469-8447 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/14649370500065995 |
| OpenAlex | W1998847031 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
In Britain, film studies came on the agenda in the 1970s, when it served as a terrain for the formulation of a critical understanding of how cinema functioned within the broader context of industrial capitalism and the nexus between that and the reshaping of people's habits and lives. However, during that decade, a different agenda was also at work, which, from the early 1980s, began to receive support from neo‐liberal ‘free‐market’ ideologues. Over a period of 30 years, the overall direction of the inquiry into cinema, now firmly sealed into institutional networks, has become such that the critical language of ‘film theory’ has been hollowed out and the industrial agenda of British national television and cinema wrapped around it. Today, with the opening of film studies departments across Asia, the question is not whether outside Britain the language of film studies will became available for instrumentalization by the forces of an expanding Euro‐American capital, but how it will do so. This paper argues that the recovery of film from the bureaucratization of its study and its rediscovery as one of the modalities of modernization require both a framework of analysis that is fully conscious of its own historicity and critical role, and a new topography of cinema. Keywords: Film studiesmodernizationeducationfilm theoryfilm historyscreenneoliberalism Notes A version of this paper was presented at the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Conference in Bangalore in February 2004. This and the following information on Screen is taken from Willemen (Citation2002). Paper presented at the The Conference on Culture, the Arts, Media and Cultural Politics held in Sidney in July 1985. An earlier version of this paper appeared in Intervention 20. Sources: Balnaves et al. (Citation2001), and Hoover's Online at www.hoover.com
Art history · Auteur theory · Bureaucracy · Capitalism · Context (archaeology · Film industry · Film studies · Hollywood · Ideology · Media studies · Modernization theory · Movie theater · Political science · Sociology · Vision · Cinema and Media Studies · Cultural Industries and Urban Development · History · Law · Political and Economic history of UK and US
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |