He also served as President of the African Literature Association and inaugurated its African Film Caucus. Along with many other awards, he most recently received the prestigious African Studies Association’s Distinguished Africanist Award in 2023. Professor Harrow created the African Studies Association’s Film Prize to promote African films and filmmakers and served as the Chair of the Prize Committee for several years. Over the years, he helped bring many African filmmakers to the US to screen and promote their art, including John Akomfrah, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Djibril Diop Mambéty. He was a tireless advocate and beloved advisor for countless colleagues and students around the world. In the coming weeks, a tribute will be posted on the SCMS website.

A Fieldnotes interview with him is also available on our website.

Read more here.

Read more here.

Gilberto Perez was perhaps best known for his highly original and wide-ranging book The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998: in 2007, an international poll of film scholars and critics assembled by the online journal Screening the Past identified the book as the most important contribution to the field of film studies in the previous decade, tied alongside Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du Cinema. Professor Perez’s many articles and reviews appeared in The London Review of Books, Raritan, The Yale Review, The Nation, Film Comment, and Sight and Sound, among other publications, often selected to address general as well as academic readers.  At the time of his death he was close to completing The Eloquent Screen, a study of film rhetoric that awaits publication.

Professor Perez’s career was marked by many honors and awards, including a Noble fellowship for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts at the Museum of Modern Art, a Mellon Faculty fellowship at Harvard University, and the Weiner Distinguished Professorship in the Humanities at the University of Missouri.  A number of personal tributes to Professor Perez, an especially admired and beloved teacher, mentor, and colleague, can be found at this site on the Sarah Lawrence College website: https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/gilberto-perez/

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

It is with profound sadness that we report the death of Alexander Doty, who passed away on August 5, 2012 after being struck by a motorcycle while on vacation in Bermuda. He was 58 years old.

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.