Keep Academics Away from the Cinema

13 September 2008 at 11:01 am Peter G. Klein 6 comments

| Peter Klein |

Because they produce purple prose like this:

I have tried to show how the impossibility of a single filmic representation can serve as a refractory surface against which a series of analogies, paradigmatic shifts, and disarticulations located within distinct yet convergent planes of historical actualisation come into a view. It is in turn, across the strata of this unstable causal field (the discontinuities of which have been reconciled or reduced within the binary logic of the dominant supratext) that the reconstitution of the various ontogenetic stages of It’s All True (planning, production, dispersion) can be sketched.

This verbal assault is quoted, with appropriate mockery, by Simon Callow in the preface to volume 2 of his engrossing biography of Orson Welles, Hello Americans (2006). The reference is to Welles’s unfinished film It’s All True (about which an interesting documentary was made in 1993). Adds Callow: “The author of this remarkable passage, which, as far as I am aware, has not yet been translated into English, is a serious researcher who no doubt has much to tell us about Orson Welles, but we will never know what it is.”

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6 Comments Add your own

1. Chris Cagle | 14 September 2008 at 7:25 am

I know the post is in jest, but as a film studies academic, I should probably note that we don’t all write quite like that.

Who wrote the offending quote? Or am I going to have to track down the Callow book?
2. Peter Klein | 14 September 2008 at 7:55 am

Chris, don’t worry, we routinely poke fun at pretentious writing in many disciplines, especially our own.

The writer in this case is Catherine Benamou. Can you tell us about her?
3. Chris Cagle | 14 September 2008 at 9:20 am

Peter, thanks for the reference. I’ve not yet read Benamou’s work, so maybe I’ll pick up the It’s All True monograph. She’s currently at UC-Irvine, which has a niche as a high-theoretical program. There are some solid scholars there, but for abstruseness their reputation is probably second only to Harvard’s VES program.
4. Middento | 15 September 2008 at 11:45 am

Benamou only recently arrived at Irvine and was previously at University of Michigan.

Amusingly, Paul praises the It’s All True documentary…on which, if I’m not mistaken, Benamou served as a significant technical and historical advisor. (I may be wrong about this, because it’s not brought up in the book, but I think this is true.)
5. Catherine Benamou | 5 December 2009 at 6:26 pm

Since Callow’s book was published in 2006, he must have been quoting from my dissertation and not my book, which to my knowledge is the only comprehensive history of Welles’s activity in Mexico and Brazil to date. I suggest you read my book, go to the actual filming locations where Welles shot It’s All True, view yards of nitrate footage on a light table, and then come up with a reconstruction that not only reads better than mine, but places the film in its rightful historical and cultural context.
6. Catherine Benamou | 5 December 2009 at 7:40 pm

p.s. for the record, I was credited on the film as Associate Producer and Senior Research Executive; the people interviewed in the film were all interviewed by me three years before the shooting started and 8mm footage shot by myself and Marcos Bonisson appears in the film.

we all improve after a little copy editing, and frankly, I have read drafts from both academic and non-academic writers that could use significant stylistic improvement – but is that a reason to throw the historiography and the analytical insights away?