Academic publishing
Too much and too poor
Roy Armes is not someone I hear people refer to, but I recently read his book Patterns of Realism from 1971, about Italian neorealism. It is very good. It has the inevitable flaw of wanting to define neorealism (this film is neorealism but that film is not) which is not possible to do without contradicting yourself, but it is good because Armes obviously cares about the subject matter. He is writing from a position of love; he wants to express his knowledge and appreciation and share it with the reader. This means it is the opposite of a main strand of academic writing today.
In my day job, each year hundreds of academic film books pass through my hands and before my eyes. Not that I read all of them, but I at least hold them and flip through them, and think about them. Many of them are, judging by their titles and abstracts, about things I am interested in, things I want to learn more about.
When you are handling hundreds of film books each year, it gives you a sense of the range of the field. If you could once sum up what was hot and what was happening within film studies a given year or decade, that is not possible anymore.
Today it is not possible to be even aware of all the different sub-fields and theoretical approaches that are available out there, much less knowledgeable about them. Each field has their own heroes and unofficial leaders. You can also see this in the hundreds of film journals out there. The days when “everybody” read Laura Mulvey or Tom Gunning are long gone. This is in itself not something I have an opinion about; it seems neither good nor bad.
But there are two things that are bad, one to do with quantity and one with quality, both related to the way academic publishing works. The quantity issue is that there are far too many books, journals, and articles. The days of Oxford in the 1950s, as in this quote, are lost and now everyone is trying to publish as much as possible.
[J.L.] Austin’s reluctance to publish was partly characteristic of his own attitude, but also it was part of the culture of Oxford at the time: 'Oxford had a long tradition of not publishing during one’s lifetime, indeed it was regarded as slightly vulgar to publish.'1
The most common reaction I have whenever a new book lands on my desk is “Who is going to read this?” It is one of several related questions that should be asked more frequently. Does anyone read these books? If so, why? How much of a given book do they read? How did they find out about it? Could they afford to buy it? Recently I listened to a podcast interview with a philosophy scholar about his new book and he said “I wish I could recommend people to buy my book, but it is just too expensive.” That is a common complaint, and the reason for it is the perverse system we have for academic publishing, where a handful of huge conglomerates control the market.2
The majority of these books will probably not be read, maybe not even by the friends and lovers of their writers. They will not be read because they will disappear among all the other books, they are too expensive to buy, and they are about too narrow a subject to interest more than a handful.
This leads to the issue of quality.
Many of these books are terrible. Regardless of subject matter they are terrible in the same way; written in the same clichéd style, using the same references, being politically shallow and ignorant about cinema, and mentioning “neoliberalism” without it making any sense at all. It is almost a rule that any book with the word “neoliberalism” in its title might just as well not have it.
The cognitive dissonance between the extended criticism in these books of alleged conformity and cliché-based narrative in mainstream cinema and the conformity and cliché-based narrative of the books themselves does not need to be further underlined. They are just as generic and clichéd as any superhero film, even the titles. Having titles divided into two parts, where one part is three words is one such cliché, like these three recent books, whose titles were almost certainly decided by the publishers and not the writers.
Atmosphere, Architecture, Cinema: Thematic Reflections on Ambiance and Place
The Representation of Economics in Cinema: Scarcity, Greed, and Utopia
Music in Star Trek: Sound, Utopia and the Future
Titles are one thing, and not that important. But the main texts of far too many academic books and articles are equally standardised. Things are ”at stake,” there has always been “a turn” (the nonhuman turn, the neospatial turn, the realist turn), and whatever thing is discussed “emerged in a time of crisis.” Exactly what kind of crisis and for whom is always unclear, but considering the frequency with which “crisis” is used, the most plausible explanation is that we are all, always, in a state of crisis. The authors of these books are always “mapping” things, and declaring something as a “site of contestation” or “a key site for negotiating the emergent discourse.”3
Nobody talks like this, and does anybody outside film studies or the humanities write like that? As experience has told me though, it is not always the fault of the writers. Editors often rewrite drafts they have received, making them more jargon-y and buzzword-y. This has happened to me too, including editors adding one of my pet peeves, the academic then. (As in “This, then, shows that…” or “Japanese cinema, then, has over the last decade…” Sometimes a sentence can have three or more of these thens.)
In short, if you read a couple of these books/articles, the feeling of being trapped in some kind of content loop is overbearing. When all of your writing is jargon and clichés it is often the case that the arguments and ideas are equally clichéd and derivative. A closed loop, a perfect echo-chamber where people only write for themselves and those on whose panels they sit. What it does not do is expand our understanding or knowledge of cinema.
Anyone could read Roy Armes, and take pleasure in his work. That is hardly the case today. The language is instead a barrier and there is no pleasure to be found.
It has always seemed to be, from when I first enrolled in film studies, that a certain kind of film scholars are not necessarily interested in films. They want to do other things, study and write about other topics, such as psychology, philosophy, anthropology, ecology, or whatever else it might be. Since they are stuck at departments for cinema studies, or communication studies, they are forced to write about these topics in relation to, however tenuously, film. This would partly explain the poverty of much of this research, and why so many of these books are using films to discuss some urgent political question. There are plenty of books that are inevitably said to be a “necessary intervention” or “timely.” Books that are “necessary interventions” or “timely” are usually dated, or irrelevant, as soon as they are published.
I am sure that often these books are not meant to be read but are only published to further the career, for cultural credibility and status, and to flatter your CV. And who can blame them? Early-career researchers, for example, often face lots of pressure to publish frequently to secure tenure or funding.
At the same time, academic writing is hard and frequently unrewarding. It is a cumbersome process, projects are inevitably delayed, articles and books pushed forward, and review processes can feel endless. You are not reimbursed for your work, and then some big multinational company makes a substantial profit on your writing. All you get is a notch on Google Scholar.
This whole system is bad, and unsustainable. It is expensive and exploitative, while good, important research is drowning in a sea of useless content. Meanwhile, film studies, and probably the humanities in general, are increasingly splintering off into smaller and smaller subsections, like an archipelago of tiny islands, each populated by a handful of scholars unrelated to the inhabitants of the other islands, barely speaking the same language.
Somewhere in all of this, there are still people writing about cinema the way Roy Armes did; they cannot imagine doing otherwise. The current system is not built for them.
From the entry for J.L. Austin in The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://iep.utm.edu/john-austin/
There are several websites that will provide you with ready-made clichés and titles, as a joke, but parody does not work with academic writing because some distinguished scholar will always have written something more awful, and celebrated for it, than what any parody could come up with.