Cinema Journal

Whenever I recount the history of my choice to study film and television, I always include a passage about film studies being "undisciplined" when I arrived at it in the early 1970s. Only recently having entered the academy in at least as widespread and visible a position as it was starting to have at that point,¹ film studies was also benefiting from the concurrent explosion of continental theory: structuralism, semiotics, Marxist cultural studies, French feminisms. I am thus sure that those theories also attracted me, for the 1960s leftist, working-class progressive that I was (and hope still to be) found those discourses revelatory and compatible with my view of the social formation. Of course, I did find having to be nominated for membership in the Society of Cinema Studies (SCS) by Douglas Gomery in 1978 so that I could present a paper at that year's conference to be a bit elitist, but at least it was not as selective as had I been considering joining in the 1960s when the original organization planned to restrict its membership to one hundred members. Still, other parts of the history of SCS have made me proud to be a member, now for thirty-one years. What I would like to share with my colleagues on the occasion of the Society's fiftieth anniversary is a bit of its history that may be little known: the liberal-leftist tilt that it evinced from its earliest years.

Jack Ellis (Northwestern University), one of the four organizers of the Society of Cinematologists (SOC) in 1959, has provided us with a "Personal Recollection of the Early Days."² Ellis notes that besides himself on the organizing committee were John Driscoll (Pennsylvania State University), Robert Gessner (New York University), and Gerald Noxon (Boston University), with Gessner providing much of the guidance for the early choices in name and purpose. Ellis also notes the dilemma as to whether SOC should be a learned society or a professional academic organization, with it leaning toward the former until Gessner's death in 1968, after which its members changed its name to the Society for Cinema Studies. Ellis mentions neither that membership [End Page 136] was juried nor the early idea that the Society would be limited to one hundred members. Gessner took advice on the founding of the "learned society" from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS),³ but SCS was not admitted to that organization until the late 1980s, with our first voting delegate being Richard Abel in 1991.⁴

Among other activities associated with such organizations, SOC promptly held its first annual conference in 1960 at New York University where Erwin Panofsky was the keynote speaker. SOC also elected Panofsky as its first honorary member as part of that event.⁵ SOC also began publishing academic papers, with the start of Cinema Journal in 1961, at first an annual publication but shifting to two issues per year in 1968.⁶ In 1964, Gessner chaired a committee to establish vocabulary and film notation symbols (something that obviously was doomed to failure).⁷ In the early years, SOC worked with other groups to educate the public about film studies. September 22–24, 1964, in a joint event at Lincoln Center with the American Council on Education, SOC held a seminar on the study of film as a contemporary art, and on September 28, 1964, SOC and the New York Public Library (NYPL) hosted a symposium on the New York Film Festival, moderated by William Sloan (NYPL Film Librarian) with panelists Hollis Albert, Gessner, Arthur Knight, and Andrew Sarris, as well as Amos Vogel, who had founded the Festival the year before.⁸

Like other learned societies, SOC wanted to acknowledge outstanding work (and achieve its own recognition in doing so). The Rosenthal Foundation, which had been providing literary awards through the National Institute of Arts and Letters for about a decade, initiated film awards in 1962. SOC worked cooperatively with the Foundation to vet these awards for five years, beginning that year. At SOC's third annual meeting, it gave awards to Vernon Zimmerman for his film Lemon Hearts and...