> In a recent post, the remark is made by Daniel Humphrey that "I'm finding
> hardly anyone who'll actually defend his work anymore."  Why does his work
> require defense at all?
>
> Jesse Kalin, Vassar College

  I took Jesse's question somewhat differently than, maybe,
  others here did.  I thought Jesse was essentially asking
  why an academic would consider themselves to be in the
  business of defending or attacking *any* director's work,
  in the "thumbs up, thumbs down" sense of the term.  That's
  a good question indeed.

  In the last couple of years, for example, I've written
  papers that used, as their focus, Bergman's "Persona",
  Carpenter's "The Thing", and Cameron's "Titanic".  In each
  of these cases, someone has asked me, with an astonished
  look on their face, if I "actually *like* that film..."

  Most of us *do* go into film studies because we love the
  cinema (well, maybe not all of the 70s theorists!), but I
  think, for myself anyway, that "liking" a film (or not) is
  hardly the point when I write about it.  A film theorist
  or historian isn't a critic in my book, and a discussion
  about historical trauma, or mourning and melancholia, that
  uses "Titanic", isn't a jargon laden attempt to defend the
  film as a work of art.

  There's nothing wrong with criticism, it's just not what we do.

  What one finds oneself have to do, constantly, is to defend
  the choice of *working on* a given director's work, of
  finding it *interesting*, precisely because some people
  tend to think that film studies *is* about validation on one
  hand or discredidation on the other.  The response to my
  interest in Bergman has quite often been met with these
  kinds of reactions.

  Dan Humphrey

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