Stanford Humanities Center

By Armine Pilikian

Adams Bodomo, an FSI- Humanities Center International Visitor in October and November of this year, has been researching a relatively new and unexplored phenomenon: the migration of Africans to China and the type of Sino-African relations emerging from this process.

 Bodomo is currently African Studies Programme Director at the School of Humanities, University of Hong Kong, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics.

We asked him to tell us about how migrant African populations interact with Chinese civilians on a daily basis, and how this is creating types of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic collaboration.

Tell us a bit about communication between these two populations.

Africans don’t know much Chinese; they don’t speak, read or write it, and vice versa. One of the most unique communication techniques I’ve seen is what I call “calculator communication.” In a buying and selling situation, the African customer approaches the Chinese seller and points to the commodity, and the seller types out the price on the calculator and points to it, and this goes on until the sale is either agreed upon or aborted. I’m seeing that it’s possible to use all media available to us to communicate!

How does this migration affect language?

Africans have developed a form of pidgin, just picking up small words and intermixing them with their own language. So there are mixes of Swahili and Chinese, Arabic and Chinese, Hausa and Chinese. The primary way Africans in China communicate is through English or French.

What’s interesting is the influence that their presence has on the way that the Chinese learn to speak English. This phenomenon comes about because many Africans who have set up shops decide to employ Chinese salesmen. These salesmen end up beginning to learn English and they learn it in a way that is very clearly African-English, not Chinese-English.

By Armine Pilikian

M.K. Raina, an international visitor and SiCa Arts Writer/Practitioner this October, is known as one of the most prominent theatre artists throughout India and Southeast Asia. He speaks 13-14 different languages, has traveled and taught from Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, and works not only with professional performance artists, but also children who’ve had very little exposure to the arts.

Recently, his work has included revitalizing theatre and visual arts in his birthplace, the Kashmir Valley—a place that has suffered from militant terror for many years.

During a presentation in the Humanities Center Board Room on October 11, he discussed his creative work in folk and experimental theatre, as well as with his goals to rehabilitate orphaned Kashmiri children and to set up educational opportunities for performers.

What are some of the struggles the Kashmiri artistic community faces?

The country has suffered through terrorism, and there has been a ban on performance arts. These people are very poor. They don’t even have land for agriculture, much less the time and venues to put on plays, so they haven’t been able to perform for 10 to 20 years. Imagine a person who couldn’t play his instrument or paint for that long!

This also affects school children’s engagement with art. Violence had reached such a point that children could not go to schools. They had become victims of this violence and it impacted their minds, their imaginations. They don’t really know what it’s like to have a normal day, to go to school, play, come home—it’s not there. But I believe that through education and culture, I can break this frozen situation.

Describe some of your work with the Kashmiri folk performance group Bhand Pather.

I’m not letting the tradition of performing arts die out under the current circumstances. Recently I helped direct and make possible three different plays: two traditional plays, and King Lear. Five thousand to ten thousand people attended the plays, sat on hills and watched the performances.

How did the group engage with Shakespeare?

King Lear was definitely a challenge, since the performers do not read or write. I had to tell them the story, and then together we discovered the subtext and interpretation of the story. I began to see that they completely understood the depth of the play. We merely adapted it to our language and traditions.

When the performers compose the dialogue, they are fantastic. They made it their own King Lear. It was Shakespeare, yes, but the way they see it, the way they experience it.

In the storm scene, when King Lear realizes what he’s done, the performers felt as though Lear reached a stage where he realizes what life is all about, what the world is all about, what people are all about. They saw this as Lear taking this first step into the Sufi traditions, and so he sings a Sufi song.

Tell us about your work with Kashmiri youth.

My goal is to reclaim cultural space, to intervene through culture. So I organized a group of people: child psychologists, educators, painters, film-people, artists, creative writers, and we started helping children through the arts. We did four or five creative workshops.

How did the workshops start?

I gave them a lot of colors to paint with, but at the beginning, they painted only using one color, someone only green, another only brown. They couldn’t see the colors in front of them, even though they live in such a colorful valley! So I had to devise new exercises, new methodologies, to get them to start enjoying culture, to teach them to see color.

What did the children create as a result of these new ways of thinking?

They shared a scroll many feet long to create their paintings. It took them almost all day to paint it, and then we held it up and all the kids stood there with their eyes wide open. There were all kinds of things: peacocks, boars, and huge lions. It was a wonderful mural painting.

I told them to find stories in their painting. Out of one scroll they came up with 10 different stories. We weren’t telling them anything; it was all their imagination!

And then we said: now enact a play out of this. And then they started to write songs for the play. There was one girl who by the end of the program was writing poetry and then singing those poems.

By Armine Pilikian

Sarah Carey, a Stanford alum and former resident of our very own Casa Italiana, has spent the decade since she’s graduated developing a new lens through which to view nineteenth and twentieth-century Italian literature—through the lens of an actual camera. With a PhD from UCLA, she returned to Stanford as a Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow last year. Carey’s work on campus includes developing her new book Envisioning Italy: Photography and the Narrating of a Nation, alongside teaching a class based on the intersections of photography, literature, and cinema in Italian art. She will be introducing and screening Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “The Passenger” at the first meeting of this year’s Humanities Circle on October 26, 2011 in Building 260, Room 113 at 6:00 pm. 

You teach several courses at Stanford. Can you get into depth about one of them?

I’m most interested in the course that I’m teaching right now, which is based on my primary research interest: the relationship between photography and Italian literature and film. I am very interested in looking at texts with students that not only describe photography, but also include images, as well looking at films that seem to draw upon the aspects of still photography.

What I’m asking students to think about are the ways in which visual culture influences national identity: how do photographs give us an idea what Italian identity might be, what Italian nationhood might be? What I’ve found from my own research is that photography has been used, ever since it’s invention and dissemination, to create a visual representation of the nation that the citizens can then identify with.

It’s great because it’s so interdisciplinary. It’s not tunnel vision on one subject, but it opens up into many other fields. It gives students a lot of flexibility on what they want to do for a final project: they can work on film, the history of photography, or even hybrid texts that use both photographs and prose.

What is it that’s really particular about the way photography functions in Italian culture, that sets it apart?

Well take the Civil War. It was heavily documented in that States by photographers, right on the field. But that didn’t happen in Italy.

What’s interesting is that Italy, even in comparison to the United States, is a very young country. It didn’t become a country until 1861, and that was about twenty or thirty years after the first inventions of photography. So those first couple decades of photography happened to be a time in which the Italian peninsula was in a lot of turmoil, and in the process of unification.

You would think they would have documented a lot of these events with photographers on the field. But it wasn’t used during those years. It was used after the unification. Oddly enough, they wanted to use photography to recreate the events during that time. So they would stage certain battles, or even take pictures of locations and then paint in representations of what had happened. So photography didn’t serve its natural documentary purpose, but as a way to tell a story, sort of after the fact. They used photography to narrate, rather than to document. I think this appeals to Italian writers and directors. For a scholar in any art field this would provide a lot of material that has not yet been explored, and there could be a lot of projects that delve into archives that have not yet been tapped into.

Any ways to get involved with Italian culture?

Italian Cultural Institute in San Francisco is a great reference point. On campus, I lived in Casa Italiana, which has a lot of great events. It’s funny because I taught a course last year which I had to take when I was a student, “Italian Literature and History.” And actually, the study abroad program in Florence was probably what led me to pursue the path that I’m on right now. So it’s a blessing to be back at the place that started it all.

by Marie-Pierre Ulloa, Stanford Humanities Center

Graham Leggat, Stanford alumnus and former executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, transformed the Bay Area film scene. Tobias Wolff, the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor of English at Stanford, remembers him with “immense fondness and admiration” as “one of the most interesting students I had.”

Visionary executive director of the San Francisco Film Society, Graham Leggat, class of ‘87, died on August 25th at his home in San Francisco after an eighteen-month struggle with cancer. He was 51.

In recent years, Leggat collaborated frequently with various Stanford institutions to bring foreign films to campus. I had the pleasure of working with Leggat on four different occasions, first, on behalf of the Mediterranean Studies Forum and then for the Humanities Center.

Leggat became the executive director of the San Francisco Film Society in October 2005 after two decades in the non-profit arts world where he held executive positions at the American Museum of Moving Image, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York City.

“For nearly six exciting and transformative years, Graham Leggat led the San Francisco Film Society with irrepressible determination, dash and design,” wrote Pat McBaine, president of the Film Society’s board of directors. “His vision, leadership, passion, work ethic, tenacity, imagination and daring along with his colorful language and wicked Scottish sense of humor have indelibly marked our organization with a valuable legacy and left it in the best shape - artistically, organizationally and financially - in its 54-year history.”

A Quest for Enlightenment

Leggat was born in England in 1960, of Scottish parents. He came to Stanford in 1979 on a soccer scholarship. Commenting on his athletic gifts he once joked, “Dad was a professional soccer player, so I had a genetic advantage.”

On his journey of “looking for enlightenment,” he spent eight years earning his B.A. in modern English and American literature and American studies at Stanford. This extended period of study was, to paraphrase Thoreau, because he “loved a broad margin to his life” and spent three of those years studying Zen in the monastic setting of Tassajara, the San Francisco Zen Center.

During his tenure at Stanford, he was the editor of the campus literary magazine, and earned a $1,000 prize for being named outstanding undergraduate-in-the-creative-arts. Graham Leggat then went on to earn his M.A. at Syracuse University where he studied fiction writing with acclaimed author Tobias Wolff, who would later join the Stanford English Department.

Sharing a Love of Film

Leggat’s collaboration with Stanford began in 2007 when, as the Associate Director for Mediterranean Studies, I worked with him to organize a screening of the acclaimed Algerian film, Rome Rather Than You in Palo Alto. After the screening, students and community members joined in a discussion with Tariq Teguia, the film’s director. In 2008, Mediterranean Studies co-sponsored a SF Film Festival presentation of the Greek movie, Valse Sentimentale, directed by another young and daring Mediterranean filmmaker, Constantina Voulgaris.  

The same year, Graham and his team facilitated a showing of the Venice Film Festival award winner, The Secret of the Grain, directed by Tunisian-French filmmaker Abdellatif Kechiche. Screened at the Cubberley Auditorium at Stanford, the event was well attended by students and sparked a lively discussion afterwards with film studies professor Pavle Levi. Students’ eyes were opened to the complexities of the Muslim migrant experience in southern Europe through the vision of a film director with a uniquely provocative storytelling style.

Our last collaboration took place in April, 2011 when renowned French film critic Jean-Michel Frodon was the 2011 Bliss Carnochan Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center. Together, Leggat and I arranged to have Frodon participate in the SF Film Festival during his time at Stanford. Leggat invited Frodon to give the master class in film criticism for the 54th San Francisco International Film Festival (see video of the SFIFF54 Master Class: Critic’s Response and Responsibility with Jean-Michel Frodon.)

Working with Graham was pure joy. He truly cared about including Stanford, his alma mater, in the life of the festival and the film society. He firmly believed in the inspirational and transformative values of films, and in educating the students in the art of cinema. It says a lot that in 2009 he hired the highly-talented Rachel Rosen, a Stanford’s alumna who earned her M.A in Documentary Film in 1993, to be the director of programming for the film society.

Remembering a Visionary in the Arts

Remembering Graham is remembering his charismatic presence, his talent in mentoring a “crack team” of collaborators, his clean cut elegance, his gracious way of being in the world, his commitment to the civic and cultural missions of film festivals, his humorous irreverence, delivered in one-liners with his “je ne sais quoi” of an accent, his amazing talent of making you feel that you are the most important person in the room.

Remembering him is remembering fun conversations about French cinema  - “a true cinephile is a cinephile of French films” he’d say, knowing how the French love to bask in those kinds of compliments!

Remembering Graham Leggat is also remembering his legacy. He boldly (and baldly) took the San Francisco Film Society where no one had taken it before. He gave film lovers in the Bay Area permission to believe that San Francisco can be both an international and local “futurist” destination. He and his team brought star power to the festival, such as bay area icons George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Sean Penn, Robert Redford but also international artists Tilda Swinton, Walter Salles, Ewan McGregor, Werner Herzog, Mike Leigh.

Under his charismatic leadership, the Film Society extended his programming to being on a daily, year-round basis; the Society offers a magnificent autumnal season of seven festivals: Hong Kong Cinema, Taiwan Film Days, the NY/SF International Children’s Film Festival, French Cinema Now, Cinema by the Bay, the San Francisco International Animation Festival and New Italian Cinema.

Last but not least, Leggat’s legacy will shine through the San Francisco Film Society’s New People Cinema, which will open its doors on September 1st, in a remarkable, state-of-the art theater in Japantown.  This new theater will enable the Film Society to make a daily impact on the cultural life of the community it serves, a realization of Leggat’s ultimate ambition.

Graham Leggat is the author of a science fiction novel, Song of a Dangerous Paradise, published in 2007 (Cambrian Press). He is also Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres de la Republique Francaise, in recognition of his outstanding contribution to cinema.

Leggat is survived by his parents Graham and Marilyn of Niagara Falls, Canada, son William and daughters Vhary and Isabelle, sister Alexandra Leggat of Toronto, partner Diana Chiawen Lee, former wife Ellen Hughes, mother of his daughters and former wife Lillian Heard, mother of his son.

In lieu of flowers, donations in Leggat’s memory may be made to the San Francisco Film Society. Condolences should be sent to inmemoryofgraham@sffs.org or c/o Jessica Anthony, SFFS, 39 Mesa Street, Suite 110, The Presidio, San Francisco, CA 94129.

A memorial service, open to the public, is planned for late September. For information visit: http://sffs.org/

 The Stanford Humanities Center is now accepting fellowship applications for the 2012-13 academic year.  External Faculty and a new Arts Writer/Practitioner fellowship have a deadline of October 3, 2011.  Stanford Faculty and Dissertation Fellows have a deadline of January 11, 2012.

The online application portal is now available.  For more information, contact Fellowship Program Administrator Robert Barrick.

 2010-11 Donald Andrews Whittier Fellow Richard White was featured on NPR’s Morning Edition on July 11, 2011.

White discussed his new book Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America as the first in a three-part series on 19th Century events that shape the America we live in today.

Listen to the story.

Nomination Deadline: November 1, 2011

The Stanford Humanities Center and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) intend to offer up to four short-term residencies to international scholars in academic year 2012-2013. Residencies will be approximately four weeks. Depending on the availability of funds, longer visits of up to eight weeks may be possible.

This will be the fourth year of the program; the list of 2011-2012 visiting scholars is available at: http://shc.stanford.edu/people/visiting-scholars?fellowship-year=2010-2011

The purpose of the residencies is to bring next generation leading scholars into the intellectual life of Stanford, targeting those scholars who would be of particular interest to departments and other units on campus and who fit within the respective missions of the Humanities Center and FSI.

International scholars in residence will be given shared-office space at the Humanities Center and be invited to weekday lunches with the Humanities Center fellows. They will also participate in a research group at one of the FSI centers. They will receive a stipend of $2,000 per week for the duration of their visit plus a housing and cost of living allowance of up to $3,000. The Humanities Center and FSI will cover travel expenses (economy class) for one round trip from their place of origin.

Stanford departments, programs, and research centers and institutes are each eligible to nominate one candidate for consideration for a residency in 2012-2013.

Details on the nomination process are below. Nominating units are asked to commit to hosting at least one activity with the candidate, should the nomination be successful. Examples of such activities include: student workshops, faculty discussion sessions, departmental lectures, participation in departmental colloquia, etc. Note that these visitors may not offer courses for credit.

Selections will be made by a committee convened by the Humanities Center and FSI. Especially appropriate are candidates who are finishing a project and are in a position to share the results with colleagues on campus.

Eligibility and Nomination Process

Stanford University departments, programs and research centers are each eligible to nominate one candidate through their chair or director. Preference will be given to departments, programs and research centers that have not recently hosted a FSI/Humanities Center visitor.

Nominations should include: 

• Brief rationale for nomination, including a précis of the candidate’s profile and an explanation of how the candidate would fit with the respective missions of the Humanities Center and FSI and engage collegially with the intellectual communities of the institutes (approx. 500 words: seehttp://shc.stanford.edu and http://fsi.stanford.edu for more information about the two institutes).  
• A commitment from the nominating unit to host at least one activity with the candidate if she or he is selected, along with a brief proposal for a possible activity (one to two sentences).
• Indication from one of FSI’s research centers or programs that the candidate would be of interest to their community. (For the list of FSI’s research centers, and programs, see http://fsi.stanford.edu/centers/).
• Candidate’s CV. Candidates will normally be scholars affiliated with a non- U.S. university or research institution. Candidates must be non-U.S. nationals working abroad. Candidates are expected to be able to function in an English-speaking academic context, although at the department’s discretion, their departmental activity may be conducted in another language.

Deadline: Nominations must be submitted by November 1, 2011.

Questions: Please direct all questions to Marie-Pierre Ulloa, the Executive Officer for International Programs, Stanford Humanities Center.

By Armine Pilikan

Research within the humanities can seem like a daunting task. We’re used to short quarter sessions, where terms and dates fly by in a conceptual whirlwind of midterms and profoundly caffeinated essay writing. In our classes, we might spend one week analyzing a book, two weeks on a social phenomenon, three on an entire epoch. So, how do we escape the curse of the cursory?

The Stanford Humanities Center, an intellectual haven stocked with visiting and on-campus professors, international artists, graduate students, researchers and, most importantly, delightful lunches, provides undergraduates with all of the resources and scholarly Sensei they need for an in-depth research project. Four undergraduate students, coming from any and all disciplines, spend an entire year at the Center developing a single topic with one of the Center’s annual fellows, academic giants in their fields (from a pool of 250 applicants, 6 are awarded fellowships). So, yeah, it’s a little intimidating. But that’s to be expected when you travel deep into the complexities of an intellectual movement, when you look a concept squarely in the face and decide it needs some reconstructive surgery.

The Center: A Bubble Within a Bubble

Luckily, the students have exclusive researching tools and the fellows’ sharp wits to guide them. Fellows at the Center, external faculty with fresh, outsider perspectives, spend the year working on a specialized focus, with students taking on a subset and making it their own. Students build unique, symbiotic relationships with their advisors: they help fellows further their research, by reading assigned materials and pitching new ideas, and the fellows help them engineer independent projects. They also get paid—$1400 per quarter, for 10 hours a week. To conclude the experience, the students present their work during one of the Center’s weekly show-off-your-research lunch meetings. These presentations, called the Undergraduate Symposium, took place at the Center on May 25.

These luncheons are miniature academic ventures in themselves. Professors, students, and artists come together to chat over Indian food and brownie squares. Harley Adams, an undergraduate fellow researching the colonial archives of the Indian Ocean with Giorgio Riello, loves being brought into these conversations. “At this one lunch table you have guys that are doing global history from so many different perspectives, Giorgio is working on cotton, someone else is working on Chinese history, or Greek instruction manuals, and they all have different ideas about how history should best be done,” said Adams. Alongside conversational companions, the Center provides a beautiful, reclusive area for studying, its courtyard sprinkled with whimsical plant-life and burbling fountains.

A Wonderful Alternative

This project provides firm grounds for research, without one having to commit to an Honors Thesis. “I ended up not doing an Honors Thesis, because I’m double majoring, so this is my way of doing a mini-thesis,” said Richard Sajor, majoring in English and Archeology, who’s currently researching the perception of death in Medieval London alongside faculty fellow Amy Appleford. Sajor was itching for the exposure: “So I’m somebody who has taken all the Medieval courses that I could take…this filled in a lot of places where I felt like there weren’t enough classes,” said Sajor.

Sometimes, the Center is the only place you can turn to. For Elizabeth Rasmussen, a junior focusing on Latin American Studies, the Center’s an academic jackpot. Cecilia Mendez, a fellow investigating civil wars in 19th century Peru, offers a wealth of knowledge about Latin American political trends and social customs. “At Stanford, I would not have learned anything about this time period ever.” Furthermore, she does all her reading and writing in Spanish, and she and Mendez always communicate in Spanish. Having taken all possible language courses, this was her one chance to master the foreign tongue. She has been writing profiles on key guerilla leaders in Peru, “organizing them in a more concrete fashion that really hasn’t been done before,” said Rasmussen.

Carving Academic Pathways

In some cases, the applicant may have only vague inklings of what they’re interested in, which, turns out, is totally fine. Elias Rodriquez, a sophomore undertaking his first research project, entered into it thinking, “Yeah, the mind is kind of cool and I like this book…I didn’t really know what I was doing.” But the guidance of his fellow, Heather Love, led him to a thesis on the transience of identity in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, which relates to her topic, the power of group stigmatization. “She recognized what I was interested and pushed me in certain directions,” said Rodriquez. “Now, I feel like a lot of questions she asks are the questions I ask about all my other papers, basically anything I’m really interested in. She helped me figure out a method of better intellectual engagement, just by virtue of interacting with her.”

The students meet with their fellow every week, simply to bounce ideas off each other and clarify their goals. For Sajor, sometimes when he mentions a certain idea to Appleford, “all of a sudden she gets a spark and I’ll have 50 million books piled up on my desk the next week that I have to pore through. It’s just awesome to have someone who knows everything about what I want to do.”

Resources? Yes please.

The fellows got connections. The external faculty, coming in from top universities nationwide, provide students with off-campus and eye-opening resources. Sajor, who needed to do tons of manuscript reading, got most of his information from Appleford. “She was able to hook me up with resources from where she works and that was really helpful as well…she’s from the East Coast and that’s where all the manuscripts are,” said Sajor.

Harley Adams has been working on a quantitative spreadsheet of every factory and every node in the Indian Ocean from 1500-1800, so as to view the exchange of commodities within a more globalized trading structure. Under Riello’s tutelage, Adams was able to work with the Spatial History Lab to digitally render this information on an interactive map, which shows geographic and chronological changes. “What’s interesting is that this information has never been collected in such a way before, centered in one place…it is an important, new way to view history,” said Adams. The course of his voyage has led him to believe that “through just looking at the Indian Ocean, you can see the entire world.”

That Personal Touch

These guys get to do some pretty cool things. Beyond that, they get to work with mentors who are as relatable as they are brilliant. Adams, who found his sole-interest-mate in Riello, says that together they “look at and admire pictures of Dutch vessels, or 17th century drawings of Canton ports, so we get to mutually admire and engage in art from the field.” Rasmussen and Mendez always start of their meetings with the latest in South American politics, always in Spanish. Sajor and Appleford commiserate and procrastinate together. Love and Rodriquez, always gushing over the same authors, were literarily meant for each other.

And the fellows are not just resources to cling to now—they serve as a lens into the future. Adams states, “Right now, I feel like I know nothing, and then I look at someone like Riello who knows so much and can speak and touch on any subject…So as well as giving me actual quantifiable help, it’s also an inspiration to know that if you work on something, you can get to a level where it really is rewarding, and you can really understand history in a much deeper way.”

View the Stanford Daily article here: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/06/02/honing-in-on-the-humanities/

Email the Fellowship Program Manager at rbarrick@stanford.edu for further information

The Humanities Center is pleased to announce that it will fund 16 Theodore and Frances Geballe Workshop Research Workshops for 2011-12. Of the 16 workshops, 6 are new for this year.

The workshops cover a broad range of topics, including “Verbal and Visual Literacies of Ancient Rome,” “Cognition & Language,” and “Visualizing Complexity and Uncertainty,” which focuses on the digital humanities. Chosen by an interdisciplinary Stanford faculty committee, the workshops aim to bring together faculty members and graduate students in cross-disciplinary dialogue. Many workshop meetings are open to the public and will be posted on the calendar as soon as information is available.

View the workshops for 2011-12. Formal descriptions and faculty and graduate student coordinator information will be posted mid-July, 2011.

by Armine Pilikian

In April, the Stanford Humanities Center welcomed Jean-Michel Frodon as its international Bliss Carnochan Visitor. Frodon is one of the most well-known film critics in the world, and surely the most notable in France.

A Man of Many Charming Hats

Born Jean-Michel Billard, Frodon chose his pseudonym (a pre-trilogy-release tribute to J.R.R Tolkien’s novel “The Lord of the Rings”) not from any particular identification with the power-hungry, hairy-footed hobbit, but, first of all to distinguish himself from his father, Pierre Billard, a prominent film critic in France, and, secondly because of his genuine love for the stories. Frodon actually possesses more of a Gandalf-esque aura, sporting a scruffy silvery beard and radiating phenomenal wisdom.

As former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinema, the preeminent journal of film criticism in France, Frodon has helped define the role of film and film criticism in society. He has been a fascinating presence in the world of cinema for much of his life, starting his career as a critic for the French weekly Le Point in 1983, moving onto the leading French daily Le Monde in 1990, and then joining Cahiers du Cinema in 2003. He currently works for Slate, where he runs the film criticism blog “Projection Publique.” And like any influential public persona, he maintains an active and tasteful Twitter account.  

Frodon shares his knowledge in a manner effortlessly fluid, spouting aperçus as if a fountain of cinematic references. This openness reflects his overall approach to film criticism: films, and the resulting impressions and theories, should open up a welcoming space of aesthetic and cultural appreciation for all audiences. And so long as movies continue to tell regenerative stories, evolving to reflect social transmutations cutting deep into our psyches, we will continue to watch and listen.

A Spellbinding Presence on Stanford Campus

During his stay, Jean-Michel Frodon interacted directly with students in two separate on-campus events. One of these events was an illuminating Q&A session with a class spearheading the new student-run Stanford Arts Review, where he provided a shrewd run down of dos and don’ts for online criticism. Frodon also gave a lecture at a Structured Liberal Education (SLE) event, discussing his philosophical views on film’s role in society: past, present, and future. To top it all off, Frodon taught a master class during the San Francisco International Film Festival entitled “The Critic’s Response and Responsibility.”

The Role of the Critic: Recognizing the Ethics of Aesthetics

According to Frodon, the images we see on screen change how we see the people in our lives. In every cinematic journey, a relationship builds between the viewers and the oversized people on screen, whether it’s bred of opposition or admiration, of power or submission, of sympathy or disgust. We develop our sense of empathy because we immediately relate to each scene, each interaction. Before we know it, the characters in the story transform into actual individuals, bridging that troublesome gap between non-fiction and fiction: “they are real human beings, and this always brings up something more,” said Frodon.

Clearly, watching a movie isn’t just a nice way to spend Saturday night—it’s a mind-opening experience. “It is a part of this idea, this larger idea that art is this object that is constantly opening these questions: who we are, where we go, how do we relate to others, to friends, children, neighbors…and these issues are constantly brought to light, not finished,” said Frodon. And so it is the critic’s job to zero in on these issues, inventing new insights after each reel.

Same Purpose, New Venue: Film Criticism in the Digital Age

During his Stanford Arts Review class Q&A session, Frodon explained the need for the critic’s presence, particularly in the increasingly relevant virtual realm. Frodon certainly practices what he preaches. In June 2001, he initiated an e-version of Cahiers du Cinema. His reasoning: “it’s a huge new market of course, but it’s also the possibility of making an original and exacting voice heard, based on the love of cinema.” If you love something, you have to let it grow.

If, as Frodon states, the “critic is an artist that directly interacts with society,” then digital media is a necessary, and surprisingly creative, tool for the artist-critic. Creative composition kicks in because now we get to hear and see the critic’s ideas: “What we can do now is mix writing with images, sound, hypertext links, to promote circulation and navigation,” said Frodon in the class. Modern critics are at liberty to layer their words with a host of vibrant stimuli, stirring new associations and emotional responses.

Scott Hutchins, the Stanford Arts Review class instructor, said after his visit, “Frodon really emphasized the importance of making the magazine speak to the audience, always being wary of becoming a magazine that speaks to itself.” Communicating with an audience takes conscious effort on the part of the source, and for Frodon, it is an effort crucial to the persistence of art.

Film, Alive and Well

Although many argue that film, along with other art forms, needs to be put on life-support and fast, Frodon argued for the vitality of cinema at a SLE lecture, which was a part of a cultural series the program holds every Thursday night. One of the students, Vanessa Moody, felt comforted by his perspective: “He had a really optimistic view of film, in terms of the digital realm, in not seeing film as a dying art, but rather as it being reborn in different ways.”

Frodon believes movies are fueled by this eternal, restless human need—“the need of storytelling.” With each work, the filmmaker announces: “I’m going to tell you a story, and you’re going to listen to my story.” And, despite modern conveniences, we go out of our ways to hear those stories, “we go, all of us, out of our home, into the cold… we have to be in the car, in traffic jams, in the train, but we go to theatres and we keep doing it.” So this love of movies, of storytelling and listening, will never subside. “It is not something that can be reduced. My opinion is that we are absolutely not ready to abandon this relationship,” said Frodon.

But to keep this relationship going steady, some things have to change. Frodon fights against the belief that cinema is dying, that the moving image is accelerating towards a cultural cul-de-sac. He must even struggle with those who truly love film, because they “love cinema so much they will not acknowledge that to keep cinema, for it to remain alive, it has to evolve deeply.” So long as filmmakers continue to adapt, to tell engaging stories in fresh forms, they’ll continue to enchant audiences virtually everywhere.