Cinema and Media Studies in the Age of Online Bibliography

Since July of 2010, I have been the Editor-in-Chief of the Cinema and Media Studies portion of Oxford Bibliographies Online. Cinema and media studies may be the fastest evolving discipline in the Humanities, constantly redefining itself as technologies and audiences change. Scholars are also desperately trying to keep up with new theoretical paradigms, even those with no connection to the latest technology. In the last few years, a large group of academics have been writing about YouTube, video games, smart phones, and everything else on which people fix their gazes when they could be going to the movies or just sitting in front of a television set. But trauma theory, in which scholars engage with the aftermath of horrific events that have little to do with technological innovation, has also become a growth area in cinema and media studies. Would someone who left cinema and media even six years ago recognize what is happening in the discipline today?

I asked myself this question because I had published a “snapshot” of cinema and media studies in a 2006 issue of the Review section of The Chronicle of Higher Education (issue 52.24, dated Feb 17, 2006). As chair of the Program Committee for the annual meeting of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, I had read through several hundred proposals for papers and panels submitted before a September 2005 deadline. After working with the committee to decide which proposals should be accepted and rejected, I spent several days designing panels and populating them with “open call” proposals that had come in one at a time. As I tried to arrange the proposals into coherent panels, I began to see patterns emerge, especially when I took into account the proposals that had been rejected. Emboldened with the conviction that I was suddenly in a position to assess the state of the discipline at that particular moment, I sent off my impressions to the Review. I reported that, at least for cinema and media scholars in late 2005, psychoanalysis was out, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze was in, and the cult of the director was essentially over.

Now I find myself in another unique position that gives me the courage to comment once again on the state of my discipline. Last year I signed on as editor-in-chief of the Cinema and Media Studies segment of Oxford University Press’s new venture, Oxford Bibliographies Online (OBO). Year One of the bibliography went live in November at

www.oxfordbibliographiesonline.com.

You should be able to find the OBO portal through your library’s home page. If your library hasn’t signed up yet, you can get a good sense of what is now available at

www.aboutobo.com/cinema

In many ways, OBO is the Anti-Google, providing paths around and through the Internet infodump with peer-reviewed, regularly updated, annotated bibliographies of essential books, articles, book chapters, Web sites, and quality journalism.

Last year my editorial board and I commissioned a large group of bibliographic essays from film and media scholars, of which fifty-six are now online. By Year Four, we hope to have 300 essays on line. In every case we have tried to find scholars who were not necessarily bibliographers but who have distinguished themselves as authorities in specific fields and who would know which texts were the most important. Each contributor was asked to assemble a bibliography of between 100 and 150 citations and to arrange them under clearly articulated headings and subheadings. They also wrote short introductory essays for each heading and subheading and gave every citation an annotation of about fifty words.

Cinema and Media Studies is one of more than eighty “modules” being assembled by OBO. Bibliographies for Sociology, Victorian Literature, Public Health, Buddhism, Communication, Classics, Music, and several other disciplines are already up and running. The rest will be appearing in the next year or two. When I came in as Editor-in-Chief of Cinema and Media Studies, one of my first assignments was to create a taxonomy that would present the discipline in a coherent order. At least at first Oxford decided that the standard number of entries for each module should be about 300. Breaking down all of cinema and media studies into 300 parts was not nearly as impossible as I had feared, if only because I was able to circulate my first halting efforts among a start-up editorial board of twelve trusted colleagues. I also reached out to scholars in some of the more arcane areas – arcane at least for me – to learn what was still missing.

The taxonomy is constantly changing, and some subjects inevitably overlap with others. So, there is an entry for “Latin American Cinema,” but there is also one for “Argentinian Cinema.” There is an entry on “Women and Film” but also on female directors such as Dorothy Arzner, who flourished in the 1930s, and Jane Campion, who directed the Oscar-winning The Piano in 1993 and is still active today. Acknowledging that movies have become less invested in the powers of sisterhood over the last few decades, a colleague from University College in Dublin is also writing an entry on “Postfeminism.”

Here is what a small segment of the taxonomy looks like:
Cassavetes, John
Cavell, Stanley
Censorship
Chan, Jackie
Chaplin, Charles
Character actors
Children
Chinese cinema
Cinematography and cinematographers
Citizen Kane
City Lights
Cocteau, Jean
Coen Brothers
Cognitive film theory
Color
Comedy
Computer-generated imagery
Coppola, Francis Ford
Copyright and piracy
Costume and fashion
Crosby, Bing
Cronenberg, David
Cuban cinema

As you can see, there are essays on stars, directors, film theorists, individual films, national cinemas, genres, technical features, academic debates, and issues within the industry. Anything that can generate at least 100 useful citations. What is useful will be decided first by the author of the bibliography with advice from at least one outside expert, then from the editorial board, and ultimately from anyone who wishes to press the “Contact Us” button on the Web site. Because each essay will be updated every three months, everyone involved in the project will be carefully monitoring suggestions from OBO users.

In the early stages of asking people to write on the subjects in my first taxonomy, I was surprised that some subjects have not attracted the substantial amounts of scholarship I had anticipated while others have become growth industries. As I have suggested, the literature is rapidly growing for “alternative media” like computer games, Facebook, and blogs. YouTube has only been up and running since 2005, but the Australian scholar Jean Burgess had no trouble putting together a substantial list of books, articles, and journalistic pieces.

An even larger literature has developed around “exploitation cinema,” all those disreputable movies that our parents told us to stay away from. Ernest Mathijs of the University of British Columbia has assembled a list of works that address the various exploitation genres, including the slasher film, “mondo” and snuff films, Nazisploitation, Blaxploitation, and porn chic, to name just a few. He has also divided the many attempts to theorize these films into the categories of freakery, paracinema, transgression, and fan studies. Who knew?

When I put together the panels for SCMS meeting in 2006, I was amazed to discover that there was not one panel on a well-established director. In the middle of the twentieth century, French critics declared that a handful of Hollywood directors consistently gave their films their own unique artistic signatures and were thus the authors or “auteurs” of their films in much the same way that Flaubert and Zola were the authors of their novels. In the 1970s, American scholars looking to justify their desire to teach cinema studies were happily embracing what had become known as the Auteur Theory. Contemporary American film studies began when deans and curriculum committees first decided to give the green light to courses built around genius directors. But auteurism was soon exposed by feminist critics and other revisionists who persuasively argued that Hollywood films were all pretty much the same when it came to their portrayal of women and their perpetuation of a few basic American myths, regardless of the fact some directors worked a few of their own obsessions into the mix. The auteur theory went out of style in the 1980s and was still on the outs in 2006.

But for OBO’s Cinema and Media Studies module, there is no ignoring a huge body of literature on canonical American directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, Charlie Chaplin, and Orson Welles, as well as international art house favorites such as Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, Michael Powell, and Satiyajit Ray, to name just a few. Some of the more recent work on these directors does not portray them romantically as creative geniuses but as workers in an industry who may or may not have figured out exactly why they make the same kinds of films over and over again. Nevertheless, scholars continue to focus on directors. To paraphrase an essential article by Yale cinema scholar and OBO contributor Dudley Andrew, “the unauthorized auteur refuses to die.”

Even with the knowledge that auteur studies have not quite reached the stage of zombiedom, I have been impressed by how some brand-name directors have not generated one hundred essential citations. Lisa Coulthard, who is writing the essay on Quentin Tarantino, found a long list of articles in newspapers and magazines but very little academic scholarship. Tarantino may be too recent to have generated a solid critical tradition. But then maybe cinephiles prefer pointing out to each other the many ingenious references to other films in Tarantino’s movies rather than writing about his work in academic journals and university press books.

Something similar seems to be the case with Ernst Lubitsch, who gave the world Ninotchka (1939), The Shop Around the Corner (1940), To Be or Not To Be (1942), and what may be my own all-time favorite film, Trouble in Paradise (1932). When I asked William Paul of Washington University, who wrote an excellent book in Lubitsch in 1987, if he’d be willing to write the bibliographic essay, he told me there was not enough material to reach the minimum of 100 citations.

So, I wrote to Sabine Hake, who studied at the University of Hannover before coming to the University of Texas to teach German cinema and culture. I thought there might be a substantial scholarly literature on Lubitsch in Germany, where he began his career and where he directed more than 25 films before striking out for greener Hollywood pastures in 1923. Prof. Hake also told me that there was not enough material to reach 100 citations, even if we listed German sources. (Oxford’s bibliographies are primarily for Anglophone scholars, but every effort is being made to include the best scholarship, regardless of language.) Lubitsch appears to be so loved by film scholars that they believe him to be above criticism. Or perhaps his films say what they have to say so elegantly that there is no point in saying it all over again it in scholarly prose.

The good news is that OBO is doing extremely well, and its senior editors are becoming more ambitious. I am now told that the Cinema and Media Studies bibliography will have more than the 300 essays that were originally planned. And the minimum of 100 citations is being scrapped. “Boutique” essays on topics that have not generated huge lists of publications are now possible. Because of a thoughtful article by Cynthia Lucia of Rider University on the increasingly intriguing career of Natalie Wood, I commissioned a bibliography from Prof. Lucia that will probably not go over forty citations. And there will be a bibliography on Ernest Lubitsch, even if I have to write it myself.

After a year of commissioning articles, I have been relieved to discover that many first-rate scholars are willing to devote a large amount of their time to putting together a definitive bibliography on a subject they hold dear. Only in a few areas has finding bibliographers proved difficult. For example, I have yet to find someone to assemble a bibliography on both “Cinematography and Cinematographers” and “Editing and Editors.” Most of the people who teach and write textbooks in this area are also working in the industry. At first I assumed that these people were tech nerds and thus not interested in writing bibliographic essays. But I soon realized that many of the people who now teach cinematography at universities and who could write such an essay are in fact successful practitioners and are not perhaps nerdy enough to compile a list of books and articles. I take no pleasure in confessing that I have had to revise my understanding of nerdiness.

Let me conclude by saying that I have learned even more about my discipline than I had expected when I signed on as an OBO editor. If I have learned to embrace my own professional nerdiness (I have contributed three bibliographic essays to the project), I have also learned to celebrate the breath-taking variety of scholarship taking place in every corner of the world as my discipline continues to expand and redefine itself.