> 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 ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu