Film theorist to address reports of cinema’s demise at Friday talk

Preeminent film scholar and former University of Iowa Professor Dudley Andrew will return to campus for a talk, “Is this Really the End of Cinema?” on Friday, Feb. 19.

He will address the slew of doomsayer filmmakers and theorists, like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, who are proclaiming “the end” of cinema.

“It seems to me that the anxiety felt by film scholars [about film’s supposed demise] presses them to respond in ways that are self-fulfilling,” Andrew said in an email.

He’ll discuss contemporary film and said he looked forward to hearing how “friends feel about this state of affairs.”

Andrew, the author of “Cinema & Culture” and What Cinema Is!, taught at UI for 30 years, focusing much of his research on French film and the film theory of André Bazin.

Bazin, in a collection of his works called What Is Cinema?, proclaimed that because it was based on wave after wave of technological evolutions, “…cinema has not yet been invented!”

Andrew, currently the R. Selden Rose Professor at Yale University, said he was excited to have just completed a contribution to a book, Roland Barthes’ Cinema. He studied Barthes in the early 1970s at UI. “This project grows out of my Iowa roots,” he said.

Andrew also praised the university’s film studies program: “Iowa can claim to be among the universities with the most solidly based and long-lived film studies programs.”

His talk is free and open to the public.