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July 2003, Week 3

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Subject:
From:
Jeremy Butler <[log in to unmask]>
Reply To:
Film and TV Studies Discussion List <[log in to unmask]>
Date:
Tue, 15 Jul 2003 08:01:28 -0500
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There's a particularly snide rehashing of the film theory's perceived
irrelevance to film production in the LA Times (13 July) article, "Lights,
Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology:  Film school isn't what it
used to be, one father discovers," by David Weddle.

Here are two excerpts:

Is there a hidden method to these film theorists' apparent madness? Or is
film theory, as movie critic Roger Ebert said as I interviewed him weeks
later, "a cruel hoax for students, essentially the academic equivalent of a
New Age cult, in which a new language has been invented that only the adept
can communicate in"?
...
I read from my daughter's study guide to Gary A. Randall, who has served as
president of Orion Television, Spelling Television, and as the executive
producer of the TV series "Any Day Now." "That's what your daughter's being
taught?" he says. "That's just elitist psychobabble. It sounds like it was
written by a professor of malapropism. That has absolutely no bearing on
the real world. It sounds like an awfully myopic perspective of what film
is really supposed to be about: touching hearts and minds and providing
provocative thoughts."

http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-filmschool28jul13.story

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