Event

Timothy Corrigan

First-Person Film Theory/Supplemental Film Theory

Partly in response to the proliferation of so many film and media platforms today, from streaming sites and film festivals to the related expansion of critical commentaries on blogs and in digital formats, such as Letterbox and Rotten Tomatoes, the theoretical and critical frameworks for viewing films have become, in mostly positive ways I think, more varied, less predictable, and sometimes more innovative than ever before. Some of the implications of these relatively recent cultural and technological parameters for film criticism and film theory include the destabilization of both the traditional movie canons and the conventional touchstones of film theory. Yet, however beneficial these destabilizations have been, there is also a significant anxiety lurking within and around these recent cultural and technological shifts, which I cavalierly reduce to a series of questions: Which films deserve our critical attention today? And why? Do notions of realism and the centrality of feminist interventions, as examples, continue carry the same weight as before? Or, in larger terms, which films in film history or in contemporary culture deserve our attention and in which ways and which theoretical positions sustain the value of those films? Lastly and very much related, I am interested in a growing divide but imaginary distance between film theory and film criticism today—between film/media theory and so-called pragmatic film criticism, and how that relationship and breach can be productively crossed through first-person film theory or in a more resonant variation on it, what I will call supplemental film theory. To address some of these questions, I offer a brief sketch of a couple of prominent historical models connecting film theory and film criticism, then discuss Nathalie Léger’s remarkable 2015 book Suite for Barbara Loden, an extended essay on Loden’s 1970 film Wanda. Finally, I argue the especially critical but too often overlooked role of writing in the contemporary film theory and media criticism as part of this recent theoretical direction. Threading these different topics and texts is. I believe, the central question of critical authority and how it has been assumed and expressed through film criticism. The authority of film theory and criticism has sustained itself, over many years, through its authority to convince or provoke, to “authorize,” and it is the renewed and revised  possibility of this authorization today that returns the film theory and criticism, for me, to writing.

Timothy Corrigan is Emeritus Professor of Cinema & Media Studies, English and History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. His work in Cinema Studies has focused on modern American and contemporary international cinema and documentary, adaptation studies, and documentary film and media. Books include New German Film: The Displaced Image (Indiana UP), The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (Routledge), Writing about Film (9th ed., Longman/Pearson), A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after Vietnam (Routledge/Rutgers UP), Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader (2nd ed., Routledge), The Film Experience (5th ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, co-authored with Patricia White), Critical Visions: Readings in Classic and Contemporary Film Theory (Bedford/St. Martin’s, co-authored with Patricia White and Meta Mazaj), American Cinema of the 2000s (Rutgers UP), Essays on the Essay film (Columbia UP, co-authored with Nora Alter), and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (Oxford UP), winner of the 2012 Katherine Singer Kovács Award for the outstanding book in film and media studies. He has published essays in Film Quarterly, Discourse, and Cinema Journal, among other collections, and is also an editor of the journal Adaptation and a former editorial board member of Cinema Journal. He is a member of graduate groups and an affiliated faculty member in the departments of English, History of Art, German, Women’s Studies, Comparative Literature, and Italian. In 2014 he received the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Award for Outstanding Pedagogical Achievement and the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.