HOLDING ON TO THE REAL.

For two decades, I have taught cinema studies in an undergraduate program in a school of communications dedicated primarily to teaching and professional film production. These two categories summon profound philosophical debates and quite aggravated and contentious practical tensions about the epistemologies, social and political contexts, and intellectual groundings of media arts education that inform what I see as the state of our profession of critical media arts work. When the Society for Cinema Studies asked me to sit on the plenary panel addressing the "State of the Profession" in March, I hesitated. For me, the field of cinema studies seems rather remote, esoteric and disconnected. The field I have worked in for the last 20 years encompasses more than just scholars: it includes media artists, working professionals, curators, programmers, distributors and grants agencies--in other words, the larger infrastructure of non-profit media arts in the United States.

I have never had the luxury of living and thinking in an exclusively theoretical cinematic domain. My own professional location in a four-year teaching college in upstate New York has been both sobering and dialectical. On the sobering side, working in a program with more practitioners than theorists and more production courses than critical studies courses has kept me grounded in the dual realities of creating work and curating artists to produce something resembling an energized public space for real debate. Dialectically speaking, within my own institutional context, there quite simply is no possibility for ivory tower theorizing: theory and practice, for better or for worse, are and always will be intertwined, and are increasingly so. A creeping professionalization, corporatization and privatization have infused most sectors of the academy. They have wreaked havoc on our liberal arts humanist foundations for exploration of ideas and conversations with larger visions and values.

The almost excessive concentration at many institutions on securing students "professional jobs" has created quite palpable contradictions between professional instrumental education and spirited critical inquiry. Unfortunately, the instrumentalists and machine cultists seem to be winning, further delegitimating the worthiness and utility of critical thinking. The profession of cinema studies therefore desperately needs to be defantasized. It also needs to be rebuilt as a public activity in conversation with ideas outside of itself.

What is the "state of the profession," this realm of critical media arts work and writing, in the twenty-first century? All of these words trouble me: state, profession, twenty-first, century. Perhaps we hold on to this concept of professional orderliness because the whole field as we formerly knew it is vaporizing. It is difficult to map the field because our locations have expanded. We teach cinema everywhere--in film schools, nursing and medical schools, communications, arts, humanities and engineering departments. More books on the marginal areas of cinema studies--documentary, experimental, unknown histories, digital work, national cinemas, race, class and gender--are published than ever before. All of this combustion is exhilarating.

The word "state" worries me: it infers an orderliness that I find problematic within the context of the genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Chechnya and of the shooting of Amidou Diallo and others in the U.S. It feels too static, too grand, too universal, too limiting, not fluid or mobile enough. I do not like the word "field" if it means marking off borders for cinema studies, whose very libidinal economy is based on its outsider academic status, its pleasures in watching, its fluidities and disorderliness. If as scholars and writers we belong to anything at all, I hope it is the struggle to insure that cinema, as Salman Rushdie has said about literature, "argues with the world."

The term "profession" poses two problems. On the one hand, it creates a hierarchy of skills and status excluding those deficient in theory, method, criticism, history and publications. I worry about any edifice whose epistemological structure banks on inclusions and exclusions, official languages, standards, criteria and normative values. These strategies are deadly. On the other hand, the word "professional" can function as a form of camouflage. "Professional" film programs--the kind of training that exploits the very real fears of parents and students about post-baccalaureate paychecks and health insurance--have become rampant. While those messy sites of argument and contention called the humanities are deteriorating, instrumental education that performs worker training for transnational media corporations has accelerated. Curriculum, courses and programs that show students how, but not why, are increasing like the plague of fantasies, those images that blur one's clear reasoning, as Slavoj Zizek writes.

Remember that Hollywood male fantasy, Field of Dreams (1989, by Phil Alden Robinson), where Kevin Costner was informed, "if you build it, they will come"? Many programs invert that adage and claim: "if they want it, give it to them." The courses most frequently offered in distance learning curricula quite clearly materialize the end of the humanities. In their digitalization, they signal the end of those messy, disorderly, resolutely embodied, in-class discussions with other people where there is no right or wrong way to interpret Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997), Carma Hinton's The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), Martin Arnold's piece touchee (1989), Fina Torres's Celestial Clockwork (1993).

As for accepting the words "twenty-first" and "century," our inner historians should cry out for better periodization. For many of us both within and outside of the academy, the new century started in 1989. The Berlin Wall came down. The Tiananmen Square protests were brutally squashed. The fatwa against Rushdie ensued. The arts were aggressively defunded. A war against cultural difference was launched by neo-conservatives targeting queers, feminists and women and men of color who make media. And the first wave of media mega-mergers that vanquished public space unfurled. Deadly nationalism, both in our own country and abroad, killed and maimed millions.

These histories should also help us get our bearings as we navigate cinema in our research, in our classrooms, in our public lives. These events push us resolutely toward arguing with the world. Trinh T. Minh-ha encourages us to look at the spaces in between, the intervals. Right now, it is impossible to imagine being anywhere else than in the interval: any other place seems too fixed, too national, too simple, too white, too American, too male, too straight.

We should all oppose mapping out anything that is not collective in organization, passionately collegial in purpose and generous in execution. If anything, my intuition is that there is far too much "me" in our field these days, and far too little "we." There is far too much competition, and far too little creativity. We need a less defined field. We need much more "organized chaos," as Tim Murray puts it, or more "unsettledness and rewiring" as Zillah Eisenstein frames it. A politics and strategy of disorderly order makes more sense now.

What is exciting about cinema studies, which I now define in terms of any moving image--film, video, CD-ROM, the Web, cyberspace, installations--is its glossolalia, its ability to speak in tongues. It means possession by ideas. It means explosions into some passionate public space that moves you outside of yourself. Cinema can do that. It puts you in conversation with things larger than yourself or your pathologies. It is an occupying force that emanates from within but connects you to the world. Speaking in tongues means moving beyond all borders.

When I survey cinema studies after 20 years of teaching and writing, I see much more speaking in tongues than ever before. When I was in graduate school, we waged bloodthirsty civil wars between Marxism and psychoanalysis, between theory and practice, between experimental and documentary, between film and video. Today, these wars seem quaint and tame when public culture has gone underground. Few public spaces for cinemas survive outside the market economy. Yet, weirdly, our discipline is a joyous cacophony of methods, models, theories, content areas and practices. It has moved from binary oppositions and civil wars into a more pluralized and inclusive form of speaking in tongues. Only now, the war is much bigger and perhaps more lethal.

Moving images matter. Cinema studies has morphed into a worm on a rusty hook to help the embattled humanities endure. In some ways, this ribald heterogeneity depends upon a fantasmatic that critical film analysis matters somehow. Yet the repressed infrastructures of higher education everywhere are like the Titanic without James Cameron's digital effects. We are sinking into a cold ocean of transnational corporatization, efficiency and mutations into a service economy. Despite e-mail, faculty retreats, book and journal launches and a variety of conferences where we can all pretend that the battles at our home institutions have evaporated, most of my colleagues around the country--of all different theoretical and political stripes--feel as if they are under attack, fighting for space, angry, marginalized, overworked and exhausted. They feel alone.

These beloved colleagues remind me of a multicultural Knights of the Round Table. They launch quests for what is right and what is just. They joust at almost every turn without armor and without reinforcements. They engage in epic battles--almost always devalued as insignificant--about teaching load, rental budgets, new degree programs, the place for critical work. It seems everyone wonders if there is anyone else who thinks or speaks as they do. And almost everyone I speak with tells me that e-mail, life in that bodiless virtual fast lane, is simply not enough. They delete more than they reply to these days.

Most of us work under these conditions of seige. The Camelots of higher education and cinema studies are repeatedly pelted by a wide, devious variety of assault weapons: distance learning, work speed-ups, part-timer labor, budget cutbacks. I have yet to unearth anyone who does not have a fantasy that gets them through the ripped films, the depleted rental budgets, the bitter faculty meetings or the lack of a full-time tenure-track job. Everyone seems occupied with the same fantasy of a better job at a more prestigious institution. This job, of course, includes the following: lighter teaching load, more research support, higher salary, more respect, more intellectuality, better students, less professionalization, less backbiting and finally, more adoration.

While I am not one who believes in adopting socialist realism for my fantasy life, I would argue that these fantasies are symptomatic of trauma. They suggest that our rewards should come from some institutional heaven outside of ourselves, rather than from the collectivities across borders that we remake daily as a matter of psychic and political survival. This fantasy allows us to pretend that where we are does not matter, and that what we do daily is a minor narrative that does not count.

A few recent experiences tellingly illustrate this crisis in film culture. I participated in an online forum on the state of non-profit media arts exhibition hosted by the National Association for Media Arts and Culture, that noble group of non-profit media centers that perhaps represents the front lines of our discipline. Participants wrote about precipitously declining audiences for radical edgy work in all genres and a creeping commercialization they find necessary to adopt in order to simply survive. On another listserve for film archives, one curator questioned how to get unknown cinemas out to audiences and academics. Then I attended a Women Make Movies board meeting where one board member asked why professors rent feminist films. Someone from marketing replied that faculty "only" rent what gets written about, so most of the fabulous, gutsy collection goes unrented and unseen. A board member from the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar, which has flourished for nearly half a century, asked me if film academic s really care about cinema anymore. He perceived that theorizing was increasingly disconnected from film culture. These episodes underscore the fact that public spaces for film culture have slowly been eaten away, as though deer had invaded our garden and chewed all the rhododendron leaves, one by one.

I offer you these anecdotes to suggest that perhaps our sense of isolation and loneliness could be remedied--and our political resolve energized--if we transgressed the borders of academia a little more. We need to stretch beyond the confines of the academy into other realms of film and media arts culture. The despair in most media arts sectors, including our own, is almost overwhelming. It is as though some monster is sucking out the oxygen and then cramming us into one very tiny room with no windows.

However, in many ways, we are living through one of the most exciting and complicated historical periods with new technologies, new challenges, new media art and artists, and new ways of thinking boiling up all around us. So perhaps our angst could be retooled into the passionate courage to move beyond the academy. We need to forge life-sustaining and empowering alliances with these vast, energetic and struggling non-profit media arts sectors and media artists across the globe. The commercial transnational media sector is like those ogres in the fairy tales my son loves: they do not need our help to rule their empires.

But the labyrinthine non-profit sector--museums like Pacific Film Archive; archives like the Japanese American National Museum; media arts centers like Anthology Film Archives and Street Level Media; distributors like Women Make Movies, Canyon Cinema and California Newsreel; film festivals and artists--actually do need us. They need us to produce the people who will continue to keep such public spaces alive. They need us as audiences. They need us to write about the works they discover. They need us to screen gutsy new work by artists of difference. And if we do not have budgets for public exhibition, it is our job to find the money. We desperately need this media arts realm so we can hold on to the real in the midst of the virtual. As intellectuals, we should never lose that spirit that Erik Barnouw has called "an open sense of the marvelous." Maybe we should all be a little more like Erik, who at 92 is still scrutinizing new work by artists one-fifth his age.

I want to end this essay with a wish list, not to conclude or summarize, but to open up a marvelous, messy and disorderly public space that we might as a collective forcefield imagine as our new future. I have 10 wishes:

1. For an anti-racist, feminist and pluralized politics to become the foundation for all that we do, think and show.

2. For the end of all categories: national, international, documentary, experimental, narrative, film, video, television, digital. Pluralize cinema into cinemas!

3. For tenure-track jobs for everyone. An end to the maquiladora system developing for emerging scholars.

4. For an end to careerism and individualism. In its place, generosity of spirit, collectivity of intellect and shared purpose.

5. For larger rental budgets for everyone, and programming budgets to invite to our campuses more media artists--the true vanguard of theory.

6. To take back the term "convergence" from AOL/Time Warner. To work instead toward a radical convergence between scholars, artists and the media arts communities.

7. To take back public spaces from commercial interests so that those films, ideas and people who are unseen and unheard can be seen and heard.

8. For a disorderly order, where everyone is always displaced yet always in solidarity across borders.

9. To teach, write and program so as to unsettle the universe. Restore the dialectic between history and the future.

10. To speak in tongues--marvelously--with courage and with passion.

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College and is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000).

The author would like to thank Ruth Bradley, Zillah Eisenstein, John Hess, Scott MacDonald, Jacqueline Stewart and Amy Villarejo for the ideas and conversations they contributed to this piece.

Ed. note: This essay was originally delivered as one of the plenary addresses at the Society for Cinema Studies Annual Conference, March 9, 2000, in Chicago, IL. It is published here in slightly altered essay form.