Jeremy Butler writes: >There's a particularly snide rehashing of the film theory's perceived >irrelevance to film production in the LA Times... While there are one or two cheap shots and the author fails to distinguish between higher education courses which are intended to train practitioners and those which are more general academic qualifications (if Alexis wants to be a professional film-maker I'd say she should never have enrolled on the course she's doing, because what it's teaching isn't going to help her in that specific objective), on the I'd call it a eloquant illustration of the obsolescence of politically movitated film 'theory', full stop. Barry Salt had it just right in his opening chapters to 'Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis' (one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable work of film-related scholarship ever produced, IMHO) in pointing out that a lot of the conclusions that these methodologies produce are fundamentally undermined by empirical historical research based on hard evidence. OK, history and historiography may be harder work - you actually have to go and find things out, rather than sit in an office armchair dreaming up polysyllabic jargon. But personally I find that our understanding of cinema is informed more effectively by analysis of hard information regarding a film's production and reception than speculation as to what Freud thinks happened to the director's mother or a pathological urge to bring down the bourgeois elite. Leo Dr. Leo Enticknap Curator, Northern Region Film and Television Archive School of Arts and Media University of Teesside Middlesbrough TS1 3BA United Kingdom Tel. +44-(0)1642 384022 Fax. +44-(0)1642 384099 Mobile: +44-(0)7739 412022 Web: http://www.nrfta.org.uk/ ---- Online resources for film/TV studies may be found at ScreenSite http://www.ScreenSite.org