Hanlon received his PhD in Film Studies from the University of Iowa in 2009. His dissertation, Moving Cinema: Bolivia’s Ukamau and European Political Film, 1966–1989 was awarded the University of Iowa’s Graduate Dean’s Distinguished Dissertation Award in 2011. His research examined the transnational relationships among politically engaged film movements of the 1960s through the 1980s, with particular attention to Latin American, South Asian, and European cinemas.

His scholarship explored the circulation of revolutionary film aesthetics across national and regional contexts, with a focus on filmmakers and movements engaged in political struggle and cultural transformation. His essay “Traveling Theory, Shots, and Players: Jorge Sanjinés, New Latin American Cinema, and the European Art Film,” published in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories (Oxford University Press, 2010), offered an important account of the global movement of political film practices and ideas.

Hanlon published in journals including Jump Cut, Transnational Cinemas, and Film & History. His research interests ranged widely across the study of global cinema, including Latin American revolutionary film movements, Indian and South Asian cinema, the transnational circulation of genre—particularly gangster films—and the relationship between cinema and political theory, including the application of World-Systems Theory to film studies.

At the time of his passing, Hanlon was co-authoring a monograph on the Indian filmmaker Manmohan Desai that explored questions of authorship in popular Hindi cinema. Additional research projects examined the influence of New Latin American Cinema on Bengali Third Cinema filmmaker Mrinal Sen, the Chilean films of East German documentarians Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann, and the transnational circulation of politically engaged genre cinema.

Hanlon taught at Beloit College and later joined the faculty of the University of St Andrews, where he served as Lecturer in Film Studies and supervised doctoral research. Through both his scholarship and his teaching, he contributed to a deeper understanding of the global circulation of political cinema and the complex cultural and historical relationships that shape it.

SCMS extends its deepest sympathies to his family, friends, and colleagues during this time of loss.

After earning his master’s degree in Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, Don completed his Ph.D. in Film at Northwestern University, where he was among the earliest cohort of doctoral students in the country to focus on transforming film from a trade into a subject of rigorous academic study. He went on to author numerous scholarly articles and reviews, write and co-author books, and contribute significantly to the development of curricula devoted to cinematography and film history from an aesthetic perspective.

Don’s academic appointments included teaching at six universities across a forty-five-year career. In 1979, he joined the University of North Texas as Chair of the Radio, Television and Film Department, later retiring as Professor Emeritus in 2004. His leadership at UNT strengthened the department’s academic profile and helped train generations of students who went on to careers throughout the film and media industries.

In addition to his scholarly and pedagogical contributions, Don was an active film critic for forty years, writing for Films in Review and providing annual Oscar analyses for national and local media outlets. His work bridged the worlds of scholarship and public discourse, bringing thoughtful film criticism to broad audiences.

Don’s professional service to the field was extensive. He served as President of the Society for Cinema Studies, helping guide the organization during a formative period in its history, and also as President of the University Film and Video Association. During the Cold War, he represented the United States as Vice President of the International Center of Schools of Film and Television, traveling internationally to support collaboration among film schools across geopolitical divides.

Donald Staples’s career was defined by leadership, institutional service, and a sustained commitment to advancing film studies as a respected and enduring discipline. SCMS extends its deepest sympathies to his family, friends, former students, and colleagues during this time of loss.

Born and educated in Italy, de Lauretis earned her doctorate in modern languages and literatures from Bocconi University in Milan before relocating to the United States in the 1960s. She held positions at the University of Colorado–Boulder and the University of California–Davis before joining the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where her cinema studies course drew hundreds of students and helped mark a pivotal moment in the emergence of film studies as an academic field in the United States. At Milwaukee’s Center for Twentieth Century Studies, she participated in a series of historic conferences that brought British and French film theory into sustained conversation with American scholars. With Stephen Heath, she co-edited The Cinematic Apparatus (1980), a landmark volume that confirmed film theory as one of the most influential intellectual movements of the late twentieth century. During this period, she also served on the editorial board of Ciné-Tracts: A Journal of Film and Cultural Studies, one of the earliest U.S.-based film theory journals. The publication of Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1984) established her as a formidable and original thinker at the intersection of feminism, semiotics, and cinema.

In 1985, de Lauretis joined the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she remained until her retirement in 2008 as Distinguished Professor Emerita. In 1990, she organized the now-legendary working conference on lesbian and gay sexualities titled “Queer Theory,” a gathering whose name would come to define a field of inquiry that reshaped the humanities in the 1990s and beyond. Essays from the conference appeared in a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies in 1991. Across eight books and more than one hundred essays in English and Italian, she addressed cinema, literature, science fiction, opera, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and feminist and queer theory with rigor and unmistakable stylistic precision. Among her most widely cited works are Technologies of Gender (1987), The Practice of Love (1994), and Freud’s Drives (2008). Her scholarship has been translated into more than fourteen languages and has influenced generations of scholars around the world. In 2010, she received the Distinguished Career Achievement Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Beyond her extraordinary intellectual contributions, Teresa de Lauretis was a devoted mentor, an exacting reader, and a deeply generous advisor. As Patricia White reflected, “No one commanded language(s) like Teresa.” Her writing changed the trajectory of feminist, semiotic, queer, and psychoanalytic theory, and her mentorship shaped countless students and colleagues who carry her influence forward. She is survived by her son, Paul Loeffler, and is remembered by a global community of friends, collaborators, and scholars whose lives were enriched by her brilliance and care.

SCMS extends its deepest sympathies to her family, friends, students, and colleagues. Teresa de Lauretis’s intellectual legacy and singular voice will continue to resonate across disciplines for generations to come.

Beyond her scholarship, Rabinovitz was a dedicated teacher, advisor, and mentor who directed at least 19 dissertations and inspired generations of students. Known for her rigor, generosity, and creativity, she sustained and expanded American Studies at Iowa, serving as department chair from 2000 to 2008. She also provided leadership in the wider field as a member of the original Board of Console-ing Passions and through her work with the Mid-America American Studies Association, where she served as Vice President and President and received the Kolmer Award in 2015.

Her intellectual curiosity extended into food studies, where she illuminated how food practices and politics reveal broader histories of modernization, identity, and culture. Colleagues and students alike remember her not only as a brilliant scholar but as a generous mentor whose guidance and support left a lasting mark.

Dr. Rabinovitz’s legacy endures through her influential publications, innovative projects, and the many students and colleagues she inspired. We extend our deepest condolences to her family, friends, students, and colleagues. She will be greatly missed.

Hark crafted a scholarly legacy that includes seminal edited volumes such as Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema (Routledge, 1993), The Road Movie Book (Routledge, 1997), Exhibition: The Film Reader (2001), and Screen Decades: The 1930s (Rutgers University Press, 2007) as well as key essays on Hitchcock and Curtiz, among other central figures in film. In the world of television studies, she contributed foundational work through her many essays and her two books, Star Trek (British Film Institute, 2008) and Deadwood (Wayne State University Press, 2012), which remain go-to texts for those two series. Her favorite genres, needless to say, were science-fiction and the western, though she also had a special fondness for the Biblical and Classical epic. She was one of the first critics to take that genre seriously with her essays on The Robe, Ben-Hur, and Spartacus. And for her entire life she was a proud and devoted Trekker. If her  fandom informed her TV scholarship in exciting ways, she also brought her scholar’s critical eye to her fandom, enjoying her engagement with other fans on various forums and making many friends along the way.

Hark’s influence extended beyond her publications. At the University of South Carolina she founded the Film and Media Studies major in the Department of English, and in 2015, the university established the Ina Rae Hark Award in her honor, recognizing rising seniors in Film and Media Studies for outstanding academic achievement and scholarly engagement. She was a popular teacher and advisor and was known for her great wit and energy, as well as her brilliance, in the classroom. Until her retirement from the university in 2009, her mentorship inspired generations of young scholars to approach media studies with rigorous critical attention to plot, authorship, and genre, and with a strong sense of film history and cultural insight. For many years she served her university as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences.

She was a longtime member of SCMS, rarely missing a conference until ill health prevented her attendance, and she served as the organization’s secretary from 1998–1999.

Hark was a dedicated member of her temple, taught Sunday School and reading to disadvantaged children, loved to play poker and bridge and attend the local symphony, worked in community theatre, wrote fan fiction, and enjoyed going to New York City several times every year to see the latest in Broadway theatre. Most of all, she treasured her friends and adored her many pets—no stray cat was homeless for very long if she had her way. For a long while she had four cats and a dog, and each one was spoiled and very happy.

Throughout her career, Ina Rae Hark exemplified the blending of intellectual curiosity and colleague-centered collegiality. Her scholarship was always pointed, thoughtful, and accessible. Her generosity in teaching and mentorship mirrored her scholarly contributions, nurturing a community of inquiry that remains one of her deepest legacies. She was always warm and welcoming to everybody.

SCMS joins the university and the broader field in mourning the loss of Ina Rae Hark, while celebrating a life devoted to understanding media’s complexities and to lifting others along the way. Her work endures, and her spirit continues to guide those she inspired.

To the SCMS community, Barbara was an indispensable expert, aide, and writer who shared her wide and deep knowledge of archival resources about the history of Hollywood filmmaking with generosity, enthusiasm, and discernment. Many members of this organization researched their books, articles, dissertations, and even undergraduate theses, with the benefit of Barbara’s interest and expertise, and due to her commitment to making many archival resources, such as the Production Code Administration files, more accessible to scholars. At the news of her passing, many film scholars described her as a rare archivist who acted as a bridge builder among scholars, journalists, and industry artists and as a scholarly collaborator in the researching and writing of film history.

Barbara grew up in Redondo Beach, California and graduated from the University of Southern California in 1983. She began her undergraduate pursuits as a French major but switched to Cinema-Television after taking a number of film history and theory courses in what was then called the USC School of Cinema-Television; she was particularly drawn to the American film courses taught by Prof. Richard Jewell, who became a life-long friend and mentor (one of Barbara’s last projects before her passing was conducting a SCMS Field Notes interview with Rick). During her senior year (1982-83) she interned at the American Film Institute library under the supervision of Howard Prouty, who would become another life-long friend and mentor as well as eventually a colleague at the Margaret Herrick Library, the library for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The AFI work led to a position in the Special Collections Department of the Herrick, where, between 1983 and 1985, Barbara worked on the library’s newly acquired collections of the Production Code Administration files and the Alfred Hitchcock papers under the direction of Sam Gill. It was at this time she met her husband Val, who was doing research for the National Film Information Service, and who later became a collections archivist at the Herrick.

Barbara left the Herrick in 1985 after her acceptance in the University of Iowa’s M.A. program in Film Studies. After she earned her M.A. at Iowa in 1987, she was accepted in the doctoral program at USC. She cultivated treasured relationships while in both graduate programs and many of these people would become library patrons where she worked as archivist, and remain long-time friends for whom Barbara and Val generously opened their home for social gatherings and sometimes for short-term stays when out-of-towners in the group visited L.A. to do research.

Barbara left the USC doctoral program in 1989 to take a position—which she had a hand in creating—as Oral Historian at the Herrick. This was a role in which Barbara’s personal charm, congenial sociality, and affective investments in the historical past were wedded to her professional expertise in Hollywood film history. And it allowed Barbara to develop her interest in showcasing the significance of multiple crafts and kinds of labor in the studio system while complicating and nuancing historical accounts of Hollywood by attending to the words of those who worked and lived there. The range of oral histories she conducted is dazzling: among them, interviews with Hitchcock’s assistant and script supervisor Peggy Robertson; production designer Alexander Golitzen; costume sketch artist and designer Adele Balkan; agent-producer Sam Jaffe; actress Laraine Day; screenwriter Daniel Taradash; Production Code staff member Albert Van Schmus; MGM foreign department director and Production Code liaison Robert Vogel.

Barbara was active in the Southwest Oral History Association throughout her career, serving as the organization’s president in 1996-97. At the Academy, she transitioned from Oral Historian to Herrick’s Special Collections Research Archivist in 1998, beginning a fifteen-year role for which is best known to many SCMS members, as well as to those who worked in other libraries and archives with significant collections of films and film-related documents, and to biographers, independent historians, and researchers employed in media industries. Barbara’s ability to match archival materials in the Herrick’s Special Collections with patrons’ research and writing projects was perhaps unparalleled (rivaling the talents of her late friend Ned Comstock at USC) and the many mentions of Barbara’s encouraging, knowledgeable, and unfailingly creative archival aid that appear in the acknowledgment pages of  hundreds of books and essays published in the last thirty years are testament to her lasting influence on American film history scholarship. More than one scholar found, through Barbara’s help, not only what they were hoping to find, but also intriguing artifacts that would inspire their next project.

Barbara was also a leader in the Herrick’s move to making some of their materials available in digital format, and her role in selecting case files from the Production Code collection for publication by Gale Publishers (first on microfilm, then in digital form and now accessible to many SCMS members through their institutions’ research libraries) will certainly be part of her professional legacy for many years to come. One of Barbara’s most joyful experiences at this time was her mentorship of, and collaboration with, Jenny Romero, who became Barbara’s successor when Barbara left the Herrick in 2013; Jenny held the position for several years before she left the Academy and later started her current position as the Robert De Niro Curator of Film at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

Barbara was Corporate Archivist at Warner Bros. during the studio’s tumultuous year in 2013-14. Between 2015-18 she volunteered as a docent at the Los Angeles Public Library, worked as a free-lance researcher and as a Library Fellow at the Writer’s Guild Foundation, organizing their archival library and helping to prep special events. In this position Barbara expanded her knowledge of screenwriting as craft and labor and wrote several essays for the Guild’s magazine Written By, one on the history of writers’ pensions and three essays on facets of the blacklist for the magazine’s special 2015 issue on that topic. During this period she connected with writer-producer Rocky Lang, son of studio-era agent and producer Jennings Lang, to collaborate on a book that would view the history of the Hollywood studio system and its films through correspondence between significant or representative Hollywood figures between the 1920s and 1970s.

In Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Filmmaking (Abrams, 2019) Barbara and co-author Lang juxtaposed letters—137 of them, from such figures as Bette Davis, Alfred Hitchcock, Gregg Toland, Dalton Trumbo, Irving Berlin, Hattie McDaniel, John Huston, Cary Grant, Jane Fonda, Tom Hanks—with contextual texts illuminating key films and filmmaking relationships in American film history. The book was a smash success, a best seller for its publisher, inspiring stories on NPR and in Vanity Fair. The co-authors were invited to be interviewed at Turner Classic Movies (TCM) fan film festival and the channel aired, as interstitial material between films, a number of video interviews Lang produced with the grown children of Hollywood figures in which they read letters from their famous parents. For Barbara, who by this time had already moved from outside the archival space to participate at scholarly conferences (such as SCMS and Women and the Silent Screen), serve on editorial boards (for many years on the board of Journal of Film and Video), and publish her work in a variety of venues, this book was a new way for her to expand telling history through the words of the people who lived it, and to explore the overlap between the personal and the professional as a key factor in how the Hollywood film industry has operated.

At the time of her passing, Barbara had been working as Archivist for the Art Directors Guild, where she organized their archival holdings to make them accessible for working guild members. She was especially proud of participating in a cooperative Herrick-Art Directors Guild “Visual History” interview with Jeannine Oppewall, production designer for such films as L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys, Catch Me if You Can, Pleasantville, and Bridges of Madison County. Barbara felt art direction and production design has been understudied in our field, and she strived to make a difference by showcasing the creativity and labor of the craft artists in this profession. Her essay, “Art Direction: The Drive to Unite Hollywood’s Designers and Artists,” which documents the complicated history of unionization for this craft labor, was recently published in Hollywood Unions, edited by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola. It provides an indispensable start for scholars to turn their attention to art direction and production design.

As impressive as Barbara’s contribution to historical scholarship on Hollywood filmmaking is, she is also remembered by her family and close friends as an enthusiast of: her family and friends; her pets; travel; new restaurants in L.A.; pie from The Apple Pan; a good cocktail; the work of Stephen Sondheim; The Mary Tyler Moore Show; the movies The Best Years of Our Lives, The Little Shop Around the Corner, and All About Eve; Fred Astaire singing “Just the Way You Look Tonight.” She also loved exploring the history of southern California, especially the history of Los Angeles, and she lovingly curated and displayed relevant California objects (postcards, photos, craftsman-design tiles and ceramics) in the visual design of her home with Val. She was delighted to learn that silent film star Renee Adoree was an earlier resident of her house.

Barbara will be greatly missed by her family, friends, and co-workers. Her influence on Hollywood film scholarship is a lasting legacy for the SCMS and film archiving community.

For those interested in Barbara’s writing on Hollywood history, please enjoy the following:

Rocky Lang and Barbara Hall, Letters from Hollywood: Inside the Private World of Classic American Moviemaking (NY: Abrams, 2019), with an introduction by Peter Bogdanovich.

Barbara Hall, “ ‘Oh, Pioneers!’ The Academy’s Embrace of Early Film History, 1945-1951,” The Moving Image 13:1 (Spring 2013).

Barbara Hall, “A Diamond Formation: How Things Went Down at the Screen Writers Guild,” “You’ve Been Served: Decoding the HUAC Subpoena,” and “Jarrico v. Hughes,” Written By (Special issue on the Blacklist) 19:5 (September/October, 2015). Written By : September | October 2015

Barbara Hall, “Got Pension? Writers Made it Possible” Written By, 22:3 (April/May 2018). Written By : April May 2018

Barbara Hall, “Gladys Hall” [fan magazine writer, no relation!], Women Film Pioneer Project, eds. Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall’Asta (NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2016) Gladys Hall – Women Film Pioneers Project

Barbara Hall, “Art Direction: The Drive to Unite Hollywood’s Designers and Artists,” Hollywood Unions, eds. Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola (Rutgers University Press, 2025).

The transcripts of Barbara’s oral histories for the Academy are cataloged and available at the Margaret Herrick Library in Beverly Hills.

To listen to a 2019 podcast with Barbara talking about her professional background, researching Letters from Hollywood, and the skills and experiences necessary for a career in film research archiving, go to: Barbara Hall, Hollywood Historian-Episode #96 | Storybeat with Steve Cuden

--Mary Desjardins, with Val Almendarez

Mullen earned her BA cum laude from Bucknell University, followed by an MA in Canadian Literature from Carleton University and an MA in Library Science from the State University of New York at Albany. She completed her PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where her dissertation, The Rise of Cable Television Programming in the United States: Revolution or Evolution?, examined the transformation of the television landscape and contributed to emerging scholarship on cable media.

Over the course of her academic career, Mullen held faculty positions at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Wisconsin–Parkside, where she served as co-director of the humanities program. She was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Faculty Fellowship, recognizing her contributions to teaching and research. Later in her career, she served as a dean at Empire State College in Rochester, New York.

Mullen’s work reflected a sustained engagement with the cultural and institutional histories of media, and she remained connected to the broader field of media studies throughout her career. The Society for Cinema and Media Studies honors her contributions to the field and remembers her with fondness and appreciation.

It is always difficult to mark the passing of our colleagues, to acknowledge that those we have loved and learned from are no longer with us. Usually this act of mourning includes a list of their achievements and the legacy left behind after a long career and life. It is all the more difficult for me, and for those who knew her, to mark the death of our dear friend Hannah Frank because her life, already so rich in achievement for one so young, but richer still in promise, was curtailed so suddenly, unexpectedly and so prematurely this August. Our field has been robbed of one of its rising stars, one of its most original and inquisitive minds. Beyond this we have lost a spirit marked not only by her genius but her generosity, not only her tireless research, passionate in pursuit of details, but her startling originality, probing into fundamental questions. Hannah's life and work was imbued with sparkling wit, a sense of humor and delight. She embodied animation in every sense of the word.

Hannah Frank was my student, but every one who taught her, at Yale, Iowa and Chicago, experienced that essence of true education—learning from your students. Her focus was on the history and technology of animation, a passion she possessed from childhood (she once posted something she wrote at an astonishingly young age of her desire to study the evolution of cartoons). But as deeply as she penetrated into her topic her interests were broad and varied. Within animation she could cover everything from Disney to Len Lye, from Fleischer to Breer, from Soviet animation to Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Speaking as someone with a deep interest in animation but nothing like Hannah's erudition, I found she would sweetly correct my generalizations, pointing out on Facebook after I did a brief presentation on Bacall to Arms, that the wonderful Warner Brothers tribute to movie-going actually recycled an early WB cartoon I had never heard of. But if Hannah had the chops to challenge any buff, she was never just a fan.

What other scholar of studio animation could pull off a detour from a discussion of studio practices into details of the paper and handwriting of Emily Dickinson's poems? This section of her dissertation was more than a display of recherché knowledge, however. Through it Hannah opened the issue of the importance of the materiality and labor that goes into all artwork and which can be obscured in reproduction. Hannah probed animation, examining the individual cells and sketches in order to uncover the anonymous labor that went into them. Like art historian Michael Camille uncovering the grotesques in the marginalia of medieval manuscripts, Hannah found the traces of reuse, the moments of pentimento, left behind by the inkers or in-betweeners never meant to be visible, but brought to light by her caring eye. She could subject all films to this sort of scrutiny. I remember her demonstrating that a close-up of Claudette Colbert in Sirk's Sleep, My Love had actually been flipped in printing in order to avoid the side of the actress' profile that she hated, and yet preserve an eyeline match.

Hannah's Facebook page was filled with little discoveries, demonstrations and witty comments along with statement of political commitment (like her recent post on removing confederate monuments). They were alas ephemeral and of course my grief now is compounded by the sense that much that she knew will never make it into print, although one hopes her brilliant dissertation will become a book. But even after only her first year of full time teaching at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, it is clear she touched students through her teaching as much as her writing will continue to inspire us. Her humor was subtle, but could be biting, yet also generous and her kindness and consideration shone from her eyes and smile. No theodicy, no philosophy can reconcile me, or any of us, to this loss. In the midst of it we realize what a unique gift it had been to have her with us, even briefly.

Seth Feldman

When Joyce Nelson and I edited our anthology Canadian Film Reader in 1977 we decided to end the book with a chapter entitled, "Introduction." It was too cute a ploy, something I wouldn't do today. On the other hand I've never regretted our choice of author for that piece: Peter Harcourt.

Peter was the Introduction to Canadian Film. He began by introducing it to himself, coming around the long way as so many people did back then. As a University of Toronto undergrad he studied music and played jazz trumpet. Then he off he went to study English literature at Cambridge under the sway of F.R. Leavis who demanded only that the study of anything be productively engaged in the construction of a better world. Like Grierson or fellow Leavis student, Robin Wood, Peter came to believe that film was his path to exactly that sort of critical engagement. The early sixties found him working at the British Film Institute's Education Department, contributing to the film journals of the day and eventually teaching film courses at a number of art schools around London.

England, as it turned out, was prologue. In 1964, Peter wrote a long article for Sight and Sound about the National Film Board's Unit B. In it, we find that self-introduction to his own national cinema:

There is something very Canadian in all this, something which my own Canadianness prompts me to define. There is in all these films a quality of suspended judgment, of something left open at the end, of something undecided…there is also something academic about the way Canadian films have been conceived. There is something rather detached from the immediate pressures of existence, something rather apart. "The Innocent Eye: An Aspect of the Work of the National Film Board of Canada" (Sight and Sound, 34, 1 (Winter, 1964-65), p. 21.

It seems to me that when Peter wrote this he had found his Leavis-mandated cause, the nexus of his critical work: a non-negotiable demand for purposeful detachment, manning the barricades of a space "rather apart."

So began Peter's second work of introduction, introducing this understanding of Canadian cinema, Canadianness, Canada to Canadians themselves. He returned home to a perfect storm of cinematic energies: a crescendo of Canadian documentary at Expo and Challenge for Change; the chaos (creative and otherwise) of a newly subsidized feature film industry, a free for all of emerging talent finding its way into every genre. Peter was hired to add one more ingredient to the mix: university film studies. He founded the program at Queen's in 1967, shaped the emerging York program beginning in 1974 and then went on to his permanent home, Carleton, in 1978.

Peter taught with humanity and passion, weaving together the cosmopolitan refinement gleaned from his London days and the pursuit of his Canadian mission. His classroom was a conversation that often spilled over to the campus pub. No one was left unheard. Peter's former students smile at the sound of his name.

He also wrote - constantly and on everything from European masters and emerging experimental filmmakers to the minutiae of government film policy. I don't recall him attacking films or filmmakers, not even those of the New Hollywood, our principal nemesis. What he did best was to champion filmmakers who mirrored his own discovery of detachment and the something rather apart. His pantheon was made of cinematic slow food, filmmakers who could wait for the point to make itself.

Peter's most lasting introduction - what I will remember him most for providing - was the introduction of all of us to each other. His pursuit of Canadian cinema took place at the personal level, over who knows how many dinners over who knows how many years. He always cited people, no matter how elevated their stature, by their first names. This wasn't entertainment sleaze-speak. Peter really knew everyone across and well beyond the spectrum of Canadian cinema. And he expected them to work for the common goal. If there was an impenetrable cultural divide or a deathless ideological struggle going on, you would never know it from the people sitting at Peter's table. Not even the gender wars could shake his inclusiveness. He told anyone who would listen that feminism was the Copernican Revolution of our times. The cosmos, having shifted, wasn't going to shift back.

That glad, gregarious, prolific acceptance of the future is Peter's great legacy. He writes in his memoirs[1] of being a child in the grey Pre-War English Canada, a soulless, frozen outpost of the dying British Empire. After that, everything got better. Thanks to Peter's introductions, it also got better for everyone whose lives he touched.

[1] A Canadian Journey: Conversations With Time. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1994.

In Memoriam Scott Nygren by David Desser, Emeritus Professor, University of Illinois

Scott Nygren made a tall, striking figure. I remember asking Maureen (Turim, Scott's wife) how she met Scott and being struck by one comment she made: that they had met at an SCMS in Pittsburgh, when Scott asked Maureen to lunch after hearing her paper, and that Maureen thought he was very handsome. Indeed he was handsome, but what has made me remember this remark was how human it made both Maureen and Scott. Obviously we shared an interest in Japanese cinema, though both Maureen and Scott wrote well beyond this area. Yet it was Japan and Japanese cinema that brought us together in the summer of 1984 in Tokyo. It was a coincidence that we met-I am glad for the opportunity we had both to see some films and just pal around.

My favorite memory of Tokyo and Scott and Maureen is when we went to see Nagisa Oshima in his office. Now anyone who knows Tokyo knows that unless you have explicit directions and perhaps a map (hand-drawn, of course) it is hard to find anything not on a major thoroughfare. We had no map. There are addresses, to be sure, but they aren't used as in the States, except by the postal service. Naturally, we got a bit lost. We interviewed Oshima, and Maureen and Scott asked piercing questions. The interview was most helpful to my own work.

Scott was a pioneer in what we may generally call "postmodern" criticism. To say that his Time Frames: Japanese Cinema and the Unfolding of History is a brilliant book would be an understatement. What marks it more clearly is that it is the work of a brilliant mind, wrestling with the most timely and important issues of film criticism and theory. In this work and in many of his essays there is something very fierce at play-not that he was snarky about previous scholarship or ungenerous. Rather, that he was formidable in his thinking. He was a genuinely nice person, what we might say, a nice guy, and there are not as many of those as we need. A loss to scholarship-oh yes. But more than that, the world is depleted of someone who can laugh at getting lost on the way to see Oshima, but who could understand and appreciate the fact that this was only too perfect.

I was very sad indeed to hear of Stuart’s death. I had gotten used to going to visit him, along with Richard Dyer, at his comfortable West Hampstead house each Summer when in London visiting family. Our last visit was in June 2013. As always, once Stuart was comfortably seated, and we began talking, he was his old, smart, friendly, and ever curious self. His sense of humour was infectious and no matter how much pain he was in, Stuart was able to laugh in his deep, familiar, and unique way.

That day last June, our talk ranged from the most personal to philosophical, intellectual and of course political issues. We talked about criticisms of Obama and his dilemma dealing with newly intractable far right Republicans, but almost in the next breath we were sharing our likes and dislikes about a plethora of international TV Series. I recall thinking that all of us watching the same series—Wallander, Mad Men, Homeland, House of Cards and more—somehow made me feel we didn’t live that far away. I also recall that Stuart was somewhat amused by his status as "STUART HALL,” a famous personage he didn’t quite recognize. The brilliant triptych video installation by John Akomfrah about Stuart’s life was about to be shown in London, but I had already seen it in Taiwan in November 2012. It’s a remarkable work, making use of photos, newsreel and home video footage, brilliantly edited so as to show the different phases and faces of Stuart’s complex life. This included his journey from the Caribbean to Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1951 and then onto London where, in a teacher-training college, he was introducing the first cultural studies courses in film.

It was at that time in London (around 1960) that I first met Stuart. Paddy Whannel at the British Film Institute, starting BFI Publishing and promoting the teaching of film, invited a few of us representing a range of educational Institutions to write about our courses. I had just landed a job at Kingsway Day College, and Norman Fruchter (later Jim Kitses) and myself were developing early film courses on a range of topics suitable for our young working class students. Stuart and Paddy’s work (eventually published as The Popular Arts) influenced the content of our courses as can be seen in the small book I co-wrote with Jim Kitses, Talking About the Cinema. The series included a book by Stuart, and together the volumes represented the first British books on film from a cultural studies perspective.

But that was just the beginning. From London Stuart went to found the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University, and I went to do a Ph.D. at Rutgers University. But I continued to be guided intellectually by Stuart’s research and teaching. Each year in London I grabbed the latest volume of Working Papers in Cultural Studies edited by Stuart and containing then cutting edge research of students in CCCS being taught by Stuart. His influence reached far and wide in this way, and young left-leaning British intellectuals at the time produced innovative research under Stuart’s guidance. More recently, newly interested in work by young black artists, Stuart, as Chair of the Iniva Board, helped found Rivington Place in Shoreditch as a site for showcasing this work, among other things.

In yet one more phase of collaboration, Stuart visited The Humanities Institute (HISB) I founded at Stony Brook University several times. His characteristic generosity each time meant that he gave several presentations of varied kinds. The HISB was initiating a Cultural Studies Graduate Certificate during those years, and benefitted from Stuart’s visits which stimulated valuable thought and direction. Hall’s illuminating essays on Cultural Studies and politics always end up on many of our syllabi.

Stuart was perhaps the most brilliant conversationalist I have ever known. Because of this gift, Stuart was also a born teacher: He was always able to make new, complex ideas accessible to those not yet familiar with the discourses in play. He had a crystal clear intellect, and a sharp wit in addition to the marvelous sense of humour. He enjoyed interacting with students, faculty and the general public; his generosity—intellectual, personal, even political—is legendary. Listen to the series of interviews Stuart did with Caryl Philliips, Laurie Taylor or Pnina Werbner and you will see what I mean.

Stuart touched so many lives personally and intellectually. We will miss his balanced, careful yet creative thinking, and his sharp incisive intellect, but the ways in which his research has helped change the face of humanities disciplines remains with us not only as a powerful legacy but as an incentive to face the huge challenges before us with renewed effort.

E. Ann Kaplan, Stony Brook University

Image from Flickr user nicholaslaughlin under Creative Commons.

Robert was awarded first class honours for his B.A. degree in Histories of Modern Art, Architecture and Film at Sheffield Hallam University in 2004, and for his M.A. in Film and Television at DCU. He completed his Ph.D. thesis, entitled "The Visceral Screen: Between the Cinemas of John Cassavetes and David Cronenberg, a Barthesian Perspective,” at DCU in 2011 under the supervision of Dr. Pat Brereton. Robert lectured undergraduate and postgraduate students at DCU in courses on Analyzing the Media, The Social Applications of Film, and Science Fiction Cinema, while supervising M.A. students working on film and multimedia theses. He also taught courses and led workshops at Filmbase, Dublin’s non-profit resource center for aspiring filmmakers.

Robert presented his work at a number of international conferences, including a symposium on "The Writer on Film" at The University of York in 2010 and at "Media in Transition 7" at MIT in 2011. He published essays and reviews in various journals, including Convergence and Estudios Irlandeses; his co-authored articles on Avatar and The Tree of Life are forthcoming. He was completing a contracted book based upon his dissertation at the time of his death, and planning collaborative research on the aesthetic connections between video games and cinema. He was passionately dedicated to his chosen field. We hope that his work will serve as a partial tribute to a career that ended too soon.

Some of us had the pleasure and privilege of working closely with Elspeth, who was not only a loving daughter, sister and friend, but also a talented filmmaker and film and television scholar who made a vital contribution to our field. Her book The Critical Practice of Film (Palgrave, 2011) will be used to teach practice to film studies students and film studies to practical students for years to come. Her numerous articles on questions of race, passing, miscegenation and diaspora in everything from her own experimental film ("Looking for Home in Home Movies" in The Cinema of Me, Wallflower, 2012) to The X-Files and Star Trek ("Differences: The X-Files and the White Norm,"Journal of Film and Video, 2002, and "Star Trek's Allegorical Monomyth,"Jump Cut, 2011) indicate her wide range of interests and knowledge.

Fortunately for us, Elspeth not only wrote and published, but also left us her most recent film,a beautiful first person musing entitled Stone Street (2012), completed in the midst of her illness. Stone Street premiered in the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival in 2012 and took home the ACP Cultures prize. Her previous films (made with Gabriel Gomez) include Lick Bush in ’92 (1993) and Drag In for Votes (1991). We celebrate the life of an extraordinarily talented, soft spoken, dedicated and supportive colleague and friend.

Contributed by Dr. Alisa Lebow
Brunel University, London

In 2008 Alex became Professor of Gender Studies and Communication and Culture at Indiana University in Bloomington, where he was Chair of the Department of Communication and Culture at the time of his death. His joint membership in both departments allowed Alex to bring his interests in film and media and LGBTQ studies harmoniously together and he very quickly created a vibrant community of students and colleagues devoted to him and his work. As he often noted, he was excited to be affiliated with the university that had supported Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey’s pioneering work in sexuality studies and was especially honored to become a member of the Kinsey Institute’s Board of Trustees once he joined the faculty. He previously taught at the American University in Cairo, The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, and at Cornell University (where he held a post-doctoral fellowship in the Society for the Humanities) before working for many years at Lehigh University, where he also served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and Chair of the Department of English.

Alex was born in a military hospital in Waltham, Massachusetts, and after moving about in an "Army brat” childhood he later likened to a theatrical road show, his family settled in west Texas, where Alex eventually received his B.A. in English with highest honors from the University of Texas-El Paso. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he wrote a dissertation on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940s films under the supervision of Robert Carringer.

Alex was the author of two influential books, Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture (Minnesota, 1993), and Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (Routledge, 2000), as well as numerous essays on topics including queer authorship, Hollywood stars, and queer representation in mainstream media. He also edited two special issues of Camera Obscura on divas (2007 and 2008), and co-edited (with Corey K. Creekmur) Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture (Duke, 1995). He served on the editorial board of many journals, including Camera Obscura, The Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Velvet Light Trap, and GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Among the first generation of "male feminist” and gay film scholars to embrace and elaborate the theoretical implications of "queerness,” in his work and teaching Alex not only embraced alternative challenges to mainstream media from queer artists, but located queerness at the heart of mainstream culture through his dazzlingly original readings of seemingly heteronormative films and television programs.

A longtime member of SCS and SCMS, one of Alex’s most notable contributions to the organization was as a founder and chair or co-chair (1990-1991 and 1998-2000) of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus (now Queer Caucus). In addition to vibrant leadership and advocacy that led to the regular visibility of queer scholarship within SCMS, Alex was an enthusiastic participant in the Queer Caucus mentorship program that paired senior and junior scholars.

Alex leaves behind a vast network of friends, colleagues, and students who have been empowered by his work and inspired by his personal example: he was an exceptionally generous scholar and person, whose research and activism were deeply intertwined. He will also be remembered for his campy (but rarely caustic) wit, his fabulous sense of what he called (after Stella Dallas) "stacks of style,” and his outstanding ability to balance the pleasures of popular culture alongside rigorous, politically engaged analysis.

For the past decade, the Columbia University Film Festival has honored the Professor Emeritus by presenting the Andrew Sarris Award for outstanding service and artistic achievement to distinguished alumni of the School of the Arts Film Program.

Andrew Sarris is survived by his wife, fellow film critic Molly Haskell, who he married in 1969.

Few working film critics have had the impact on the development of the discipline film studies as Sarris, whose 1962 Film Culture essay "Notes on the Auteur Theory” and 1968 book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968 followed the lead of the young French critics of Cahiers du Cinéma by championing the directors – elevated as "auteurs” — who had worked in the commercial Hollywood studio system. The American Cinema — "surely the most audacious, influential and glorious single volume in U.S. film history,” according to Time magazine critic Richard Corliss, who took classes from Sarris at NYU — became the Bible of college film societies and launched heated debates over the ranking of specific figures within Sarris’ "whimsical” categories, as well as general questions of authorship that continue to animate both academic film studies and the popular understanding of cinema. One measure of Sarris’s impact can be traced in the continual scholarly attention to filmmakers like John Ford, Howard Hawks, or Alfred Hitchcock after Sarris placed them in his "pantheon” of directors "with a personal vision of the world.”

Sarris served as an associate editor of Film Culture (1955-1965) and editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma in English (1965-1967), and Sarris eventually published and edited many more books, including one of the first extended studies of John Ford. However, he was best-known for his regular reviews for the NY Film Bulletin and especially for The Village Voice, beginning in 1960 with a then-audacious defense of Hitchcock’s Psycho; between 1989 and 2009, he wrote reviews for the New York Observer, continually demonstrating a range of interests – including a lifelong devotion to French cinema — that extended well beyond the classical Hollywood films he helped to legitimate for film studies.

Paul Willemen embraced academic life relatively late, arriving at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1999 after a short spell at Napier University in Edinburgh. He had already built a formidable reputation within film studies. While working for the British Film Institute, he played a key role in the 1970s and 1980s, helping define the subject area in the UK and also helping to shape and mould the subject's theoretical terrain and institutional structures. These earlier years were characterized by his dual commitment to promoting a "cinephiliac” understanding of popular cinema – especially mainstream American cinema – and to promoting an understanding of alternative cinema in all its formal and political diversity. He is particularly remembered for proposing the notion of "Third Cinema” as a way of understanding political cinema.

Paul Willemen helped to illuminate a range of other theoretical pathways as well, including the concept of comparative film studies and the pleasures of and political contexts of the action film, especially in its heroic classical mode. He was vexed and intrigued by the concept of national cinema and his dissatisfaction with the "national” was the spur to his interest in comparative film studies. During this time he co-edited the influential collection Theorizing National Cinema, which joined prior seminal interventions including Questions of Third Cinema (1990) and Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (1994). Paul Willemen's death has deprived us of one of the most accomplished and challenging intellects in our field.

SCMS notes with sadness the passing of Amos Vogel, a key figure in film education and exhibition in the United States. Vogel was co-founder of the New York Film Festival, creator of the influential avant-garde film club Cinema 16, and a pedagogue who taught film at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, The New School, and NYU, among other institutions. Deeply influential in the promotion of film culture, he championed/programmed the work of directors including Roman Polanski, John Cassavetes, Jacques Rivette, Maya Deren, and Kenneth Anger. Throughout his long career Vogel celebrated convention-breaking cinema, crusaded against censorship, and advocated for representational innovation. His activities as a proponent for a robust, international, and humane film culture were wide ranging, though he is best known to scholars for his 1974 book Film As A Subversive Art.  

Amos Vogel was a lifetime member of SCMS and a recipient of the Honorary Membership Award (now known as the Distinguished Career Achievement Award).  His active involvement in the Society of Cinematologists, the predecessor to what we know today as SCMS, included membership on the Council 1966-1969 and service on the Nominating Committee 1974-1975. 

Vogel’s exemplary commitment to the furthering of film education and his impact on film culture constitute important and valued legacies. He will be remembered for his manifold contributions to the thoughtful reflection about and appreciation of cinema. 

It is with great sadness that I must report to you the death of our beloved colleague, Robert Sklar. On Sunday, June 26, Bob had an accident while bicycling in Barcelona with his wife, Adrienne Harris. He lost control of his bike, fell and hit his head. He was removed to a Barcelona hospital with head injuries. At the hospital he was diagnosed as having extensive bleeding of the brain. He underwent brain surgery, but the injuries were too severe for recovery. On Saturday, July 2, he expired from his injuries. He will be cremated and the ashes brought back to New York. Our thoughts go out to Adrienne and to Bob's entire family at this time.

Bob began his academic career as historian of American culture earning a Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard in 1965. In 1967 he authored a book on F. Scott Fitzgerald with Oxford University Press, which was followed by an anthology of essays on The Plastic Age: 1917-1930 in 1970. However, it was to the good fortune of his colleagues that he decided to bring his deep general knowledge of American society and culture to bear upon understanding the history of American film and media. His books on American film and television history pioneered a politically informed socio-cultural approach to the analysis of media long before "cultural studies" as a field was invented. His seminal work, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975), set a standard for historical scholarship in the field that inspires each generation of film scholars anew. Bob brought an historian's breadth and insight to understanding the social forces that shape the emergence and transformation of media and sought to convey in his writing the possibilities and promise of film as a medium of social change.

Bob assumed a leading role in the development of the modern fields of film and media studies. He helped to shape the modern Society for Cinema and Media Studies, taking leadership of the organization at a crucial phase of its development between 1978 and 1981 when it was then still the Society for Cinema Studies. He was also an important advocate for the preservation of our media heritage through his position on the National Film Preservation Board and by helping to establishing the Program in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation at New York University. Bob began his professorial life teaching history at the University of Michigan and he joined the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU in 1977. Through his thirty plus years of service to the Department (he retired in 2009), Bob was a beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague who led countless courses on the history of American Cinema and trained generations of film historians through his caring and disciplined guidance.

As a scholar and intellectual, Professor Sklar, who began his career as a journalist for the Los Angeles Times in the 1960s, always sought a broader public for his thinking and writing. Aside from his books, that were written with such extraordinary clarity and verve, Bob consistently engaged with that broader public not only in his journalism for national newspapers like The New York Times and The Boston Globe, and as film critic for the weekly newspaper Forward, but also through his nearly three decade association with the film magazine Cineaste, one of the few remaining independent magazines devoted to sustaining what used to be called "film culture." Bob also served for a number of years served on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival. His extensive viewing experience of world cinema was distilled in the notable, prize-winning, book Film: An International History (1993).

Before his death, Bob co-edited a volume of essays entitled Global Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style with Saverio Giovacchini, which is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi. He also contributed two essays to the forthcoming Wiley-Blackwell History of American Film that is being edited by three of his former students, Cindy Lucia, Roy Grundmann and Art Simon--the key, opening essay to the four-volume series: "Writing American Film History" and an essay in volume three of the series: "Authorship and Billy Wilder."

Bob always had a keen interest in sport both as a participant and viewer and his avid baseball fandom led him to become a member of the very first fantasy baseball league, Rotisserie Baseball. Bob will be sorely missed by all of us who knew him in his various lives, and in particular by his colleagues here in the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. Yet Bob will remain with us in our fond memories of his kindness, his dry sense of humor and his wise counsel, and through the contribution of his elegant writings to the field. There will be a memorial service for Bob in the fall that will be announced in due course.

Richard Allen
Professor and Chair of Cinema Studies
New York University

A Tribute from SCMS Member Tom Gunning:

Miriam Bratu Hansen died on February 5, 2011. She had been Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago in the Department of English and the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, which she founded, shaped and guided for two decades.

She was born in Germany in 1949, the daughter of Jewish parents who had met in exile during the war and returned to Germany. Miriam received her PhD in 1975 from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt, Germany, studying with Jurgen Habermas and Theodor Adorno during a turbulent era. She worked in English and American Literature and wrote a dissertation on Ezra Pound, but soon was drawn to the realm of film, writing on Alexander Kluge, with whom she closely interacted.

Coming to the United States, she worked at the Whitney Humanity Center at Yale and taught at Rutgers University before coming to Chicago in 1990. Her research moved to the history of early American cinema and to the work of the Frankfurt school and its satellites on cinema. Both of these areas were evident in her book Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Cinema published in 1991, a work which gave shape to the research that had been emerging in the eighties on early American cinema, seeing it through the lens of Negt and Kluge's concept of the public sphere, and providing a magisterial analysis of D. W. Griffith's 1916 film Intolerance through the criticism of Walter Benjamin, and new work on gender.

Hansen was able to work out an intersection between film history, film analysis and film theory few have ever matched. Her boundless curiosity marked her teaching and writing in the next decade, as she evolved the concept of the "vernacular modernism" through probing the influence of Hollywood on early Asian (especially Chinese) cinema, working with her student Zhen Zhang, and especially extending her research into the Frankfurt school and cinema, producing a series of crucial essays and finishing shortly before her death a large manuscript on cinema and the Frankfurt school. She had also hoped to do a smaller book on one of her favorite directors Max Ophuls, and last year had organized a conference at Chicago on New Media, reflecting a strong belief on her part that New Media, far from putting an end to cinema, continued its project of innervating human perception in new and even utopian ways.

Although she had been battling cancer for the past decade, she continued new scholarly and theoretical work, and to mentor and advise students at the University of Chicago. She was committed both to the intellectual challenge that cinema posed for modern scholars and to its direct engagement with the senses (who else could write about how Jerry Lewis in Frank Tashlin's Artists and Models relates to Clement Greenberg's writings on American painting?) Her wit, her energy, her insight and rigor not only produced key concepts for our field, but provided the best of models for film studies at the moment that it moved from its pioneering focus on Grand Theory to a broader sense of a field that must include archival research, political perspectives, aesthetic awareness and theoretical ambition. We are devastated by her loss, but we all are better for having had her grace our field with her brilliance, breadth of perspective and elegance for a while.

After long suffering, Miriam, I do wish you peace, but, knowing you, I would more accurately say: rest in your glorious energy.

To read more about Miriam's life and legacy, please click here.