The State of Things

intellectual and emotional energy we have brought to our discipline that it has not grown as fast as it should have. There are obviously many administrative and financial reasons for this, but I'm sure that, again, despite our best efforts, we have not been able to convince enough people that studying film is a serious business. I cannot avoid the thought that, for most people, the movies remain one of the few things that do not require intellectual engagement, and such people grow resentful when we try to say otherwise. Just look at a New York Times review of a museum exhibit or art opening, in which the formal elements of the artist's work are analyzed. Then turn to a movie review and what do you get: plot summary. Fine, so film studies gets no respect, but the paradox is that many of our graduate students are getting academic jobs and are writing scholarly books and articles. Film studies may not have grown as fast as we would have liked, but the field has become moderately accepted, especially in the academy. It has become part of larger academic disciplines, including cultural studies, visual studies, and media studies. These are largely administrative maneuverings, good ones, I think, and the recent name change of SCS to SCMS reflects this. But even with this shifting ground, are things going to get better, or is the study of film going to become more diffuse and more off the mark? The mark I'm talking about is the film text-or the television text, or the text of a video game or Web site; or the larger texts of medical imaging, of the interrelationship of film and painting, photography, and the graphic arts. Will we shift back to the text and return to the seriousness and a celebration of complexity, history, and politicsmarks of modernist practice and criticism that have been ignored or made light of by postmodernism? Let's first consider the text. Lev Manovich's The Language of New Media, the best book on the subject, takes the construction of screen space as his text.1 He nicely weaves cinematic metaphors with the digital domain and comes up with ferences and journals. What does it mean for the discipline of film studies e is no scholarly organization or conf rence devot d exclusively o it? In , I applaud SCMS's new pluralism but am concerned about the consequences.