<<Repeated from Friday>>

Another welcome message, it's so nice to see old friends 
logging on...

I just thought I'd mention a bit of background to the list 
as things are only now getting started, just to add to the 
introduction files that you all got in you mailboxes. I'll 
update and repeat the file every so often, with all the 
information you'll need about subscription, discussion, and 
administration. As will hopefully continue, I'd like to 
hear suggestions, queries and even any complaints that you 
might have in order to make the list work effectively and 
smoothly. These can be mailed to:
 
[log in to unmask]


And now, some background:

As some of you who have watched the progress of the list's 
'birth' will know, the subject of a list of cinema AND 
photography was mooted back in early April.

As a research student and lecturer, I was finding it 
increasingly frustrating at the huge gap that often seems 
to exist between film studies and photography in the 
academy. Colleagues and friends had also noticed this, 
summing it up as caused by various reasons ranging from the 
financial, such as departmental funding problems ("We're a 
film department, what's the point of paying for a 
photography course on it?"); to the cultural, with 
photographers and filmmakers often staring at each other 
across no-man's land and blindly refuting any similarity 
between media. With a culture of study so firmly entrenched 
on either side, the odd football kick-about in no-man's land
was very rare indeed (if you get the analogy...). There are 
relatively few interdisciplinary get-togethers through the 
year and many film conferences, and photography 
conferences, already have enough scope to fill their 
schedules without dealing with interdisciplinarity.

However, such an entrenchment can only lead to an un-
productive insularity. We often forget that many of the 
great early film writers all studied photography as part of 
their work: Bazin and Kracauer, Metz, Barthes, Wollen, Kuhn 
are all writers who've seen the photographic image as the 
unbreakable link between cinema and photography. Whilst the 
number of photographers who've gone on to make films is 
extraordinary. Yet the amount of written criticism on the 
latter, in either field of study, is often limited.

The progress and development of a film studies community is 
unmatched by photography, whose bookshelves are 
considerably lighter of written criticism and theory. I 
might suggest that this has often led to a readily accepted 
understanding of the photograph as cinema's poor cousin or 
grandparent, a view partly suggested also by the histories 
of photography and cinema that see the photograph 
as a stepping stone to the more expressive medium of 
cinema.

These views seem to me to be wholly inaccurate. Who's to 
say that film studies cannot tell us more about the 
photography, or that study of the photograph might not 
illuminate the study of cinema? More to the point, because 
of the common link of the photographic image, we might ask 
ourselves: In cinema and photography, have we always seen a 
difference in kind when there is merely a difference in 
degree? 

Lastly, and this is where the list really counts, we might 
see the advantage in sharing information, announcements, 
and discussion across the departmental divide, both to help 
the interdisciplinarians amongst us, but also to provide 
the odd film scholar with knowledge about the film posters, 
stills and portraits that might help their understanding 
of genre, or the odd photography scholar with the knowledge 
of linguistics or narrative that might otherwise pass them 
by. 

This list exists to discuss the differences and 
similarities between cinema and photography. It exists to 
pass bibliographic information from scholars of one to 
scholars of another. It exists to provide 
announcements from either discipline that might be 
of interest to the other, whether conference 
announcements, gallery invitations, screening 
programmes, arts festivals, or other events. Finally, it 
exists to provide a forum of discussion for issues that 
might be taken on, in whatever way, by scholars across the 
disciplines.

<<Now it's time for me to shut up, and let someone else do 
the talking!>>



----------------------
Damian Peter Sutton
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