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August 25, 2004
Marxist Film Theorists Revisited
I was digging around in my blog archives tonight (looking for material for my Fight Club paper) when I came across an entry I wrote over a year ago on an LA Times Sunday Magazine article on film professors, and it reminded me of George's recent efforts to convey to public audiences how an English departments works.
I think the comments are more interesting than the original entry itself, which veers dangerously close to righteous indignation in places (and does little to positively define what we really do), but the essential point of my entry back then was similar to George's: academics do need to define themselves correctly or risk seeing public misrepresentations our work persist.
Posted by chuck at August 25, 2004 10:20 PM
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Comments
Sorry, I haven't yet waded through all the comments on your earlier post, so I might be repeating something that has already been stated, but I really couldn't quite believe that Weddle got his undies in a knot over Ed Branigan. Sheesh! I wonder what Weddle would have done if his daughter had taken a course from a real Marxist.
I wonder if the animosity has less to do with anit-intellectualism per se as with the study of popular culture, which Media, Inc would prefer to assure us "speaks for itself," so that we its customers do not to think too much about it. Such thought, after all, is potentially dangerous to the profit line.
jwb
Posted by: Jimbo at August 27, 2004 1:17 PM
I think you're probably right about the question of "profit." There's a sense in which Weddle takes for granted that films speak "for themselves." One of many troubling aspects of this essay is the use of Roger Ebert's anti-theory screed when Ebert himself often refers to the work of David Bordwell in his film commentaries.
To be honest, I haven't really looked back at the comments in a while, but on a quick glance, they seemed a little more substantial than my original entry.
Posted by: chuck at August 27, 2004 1:51 PM