Where's the text: cinema studies in the '80s.

"Here at Satire U.," wrote William Satire in the April 6 New York Times Magazine, "our undistinguished professors are curriculating their courses in finger painting and rock-music appreciation together under act sciences, headed by a 10-yeared chairman of art policies studies, or art studies policies. . . ."

Among other things, this passage is a good example of satirical parody Satire obviously disapproves of both the form and content of university "studies" disciplines By simultaneously using and exaggerating "studies" jargon, Satire announces his superior distance from such discourse, a distance presumably shared by the credentialed readers of the Times.

Parody - and its sisters: burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation. illusion, appropriation and intertextuality - were a major topic at this year's Society for Cinema Studies annual conference, which was held April 3-6 in New Orleans. According to my calculations, at least 30 of the approximately 160 formal papers delivered at the conference specifically addressed the subject of parody and/or intertextuality. These papers ranged from "Consumerist Parody: Intertextuality Between Film and Video in MTV" to "Parody, Intertextuality, and Signatured: Kubrick, DePalma, and Scorsese" to "The Postmodernist Parody of Alfred Hitchcock" and "Intertextuality: 'Vietnam: A Television History,' AIM, and 'Inside Story'" to "Who's in on the Joke: Parody as Evidence of Narration."

Before I say more about the conference itself, I want to return to Safire's parody and the issues it raises for film and television studies in general, and for the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS) in particular. For many neoconservatives like Satire, "studies - whether cinema studies, women's studies, black studies, American studies, even visual studies - are a travesty of older university disciplines like philosophy, art history and literature. Although some academic traditionalists may grudgingly accept the formalist study of certain art-house films, in general they consider film and television to be one of the direct causes of contemporary illiteracy, if not of the decline of Western civilization. What's more, the fact that cinema studies is built on the interrelated methodologies of Marxism, feminism and modern French philosophy further antagonizes the detractors of cinema studies.

Nevertheless, due to relatively favorable enrollment figures and sheer intellectual brilliance, cinema studies concentrations and programs exist within many United States and Canadian colleges and universities. Full-fledged doctorate programs in cinema studies, however, exist in only a few, mostly public, universities. Most prominently, these include New York University, the University of California at Los Angeles. the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin at Madison and at Milwaukee, University of Texas at Austin and Northwestern University. Many SCS members, perhaps the majority, are either a faculty member, a graduate, or a soon-to-be graduate of one of these programs. If this sounds incestuous, it is. Though to be fair, with just 700 members, SCS is no more incestuous, if that's the proper adjective, than other university associations such as the Society for Photographic Education (SPE), the College Art Association, or the Modern Language Association.

Unlike SPE, where photographers outnumber theorist/historians by at least 10 to one, very few SCS members are either filmmakers or teachers of filmmaking. However, some SCS members also belong to the University Film and Video Association (UFVA), which is the film/video equivalent of SPE. The forthcoming issue of the UFVA Journal will contain a history of SCS by Ramona Curry titled: "SCS: A Socio-Political History." Building on Richard Dyer MacCann and Jack C. Ellis's introduction to Cinema Examined (1982), an anthology of essays drawn from the pages of SCS's Cinema Journal, Curry argues that "the primary goal of the Society at all stages has been to constitute cinema studies as an academic discipline." Although Curry's narrative of the early years of SCS is quite fascinating (for instance, SCS was founded during the Conference on Motion Picture Education at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959; SCS's original name was the Society for Cinematologists), her discussion of SCS in the '80s is much more pertinent to this essay.

In 1963, SCS had 34 members; in 1969, 100 members; in 1976, approximately 200 members; in 1979, more than 300 members; and in 1984, 600 members. A significant factor in the rapid growth in membership in the mid- to late '70s was the admission of graduate students, who were enrolling in record numbers in the aforementioned cinema studies programs. This influx of "Young Turks," as they are called, has helped change SCS from a stodgy "learned society" to a dynamic "professional association." As Check Kleinhans put it to Curry, "an old boy network has become a young women network."

It's hard to believe now, but the first presentation by a woman at an SCS annual conference occurred in 1970. The first panel devoted to the subject of women and film was at the 1975 conference at New York University. At the 1985 and 1986 conferences, however, almost half of the presentations were by women, and this despite the fact that women constitute only 30% of the membership. In any case, many of the major reforms of SCS during the early '80s were, in part, the consequence of women's demands to "democratize" Cinema Journal and conference programming. Prior to 1982, for instance, Cinema Journal's selection policy was pretty much at the discretion of the editor and the small editorial board. In 1981, a committee appointed to review the function of the journal concluded, according to Curry, "that a formal blind referee procedure was essential to its status as an academic publication." In addition to conferring more academic "respectability" on Cinema Journal, the blind-referee procedure, instituted in 1982, presumably benefits women and other minorities who might not otherwise receive a fair reading of their papers.

Over the years, the size and format of the annual conference has changed markedly. In the early days, as one might expect, almost everyone in attendance read a paper, which was heard by everyone at the conference. By 1977, however, membership had increased to the point where it was necessary to place two panels in each time slot. Push came to shove in 1984 when the conference/host committee of the Madison conference rejected almost half of the more than 200 paper proposals submitted. The conference/host committee's selection policy was a source of considerable controversy throughout the conference, and at its close the membership voted to establish a more accountable selection procedure for future conferences. Consequently, for the 1985 conference at NYU, the 11-person executive council of SCS appointed 3 of its own members to supervise the conference program. Henceforth this committee would appoint panel chairs, review all proposals and completed papers passed over by these chairs, and, if necessary, constitute new panels to accommodate the rejected papers. As with the blind-referee procedure of Cinema Journal, this programming procedure has made SCS both more "professional" and more "democratic."

For the first time in the history of SCS, the 1986 annual conference was held at a convention hotel, rather than at a university campus. By just about anyone's standards, the host committee - headed by Andrew Horton of the University of New Orleans - did an outstanding job of organizing the logistics of the conference. The amenable facilities of the conference center, the Hotel Inter-Continental, were offered to SCS at a substantial discount; good New Orleans-style coffee was always on hand, and the French Quarter was just four blocks away. The host committee, as you might expect, also scheduled a number of events designed to showcase the local film community. Of these events, the most notable was a "special sidebar" on American independent feature filmmaking, which featured Linda Gregoric, Mark Lussier, Robert Young, Glen Pitre, David Rosen and Brooke Jacobson. All in all, the various culinary and architectural pleasures of New Orleans compensated for the extremely exhausting program schedule.

The conference program committee, comprised of Richard Abel (chair), Beverle Houston and David Bordwell, put together a huge and diverse program. Approximately 160 individual presentations were delivered on 45 different panels. If you include the panel chairs, panel respondents, and various workshop participants, it's clear that over two-thirds of the 300 attendees participated in the program. In order to accommodate all these presentations, four panels were concurrently scheduled for Thursday's two time slots, Friday's four slots, Saturday's three slots and Sunday's two slots. Combined with various breakfast, lunch and evening sessions, plus the screenings of almost 50 films and videotapes, this added up to an extraordinarily dense conference program. Unlike those people who are capable of being in four different places at the same time, mere mortals were forced to pick and choose, and catch as catch can.

Over the past few years, a number of so-called permanent panels have been instituted at SCS conferences. These panels, whose topics form the syllabus for cinema studies in the U.S. and Canada, include early cinema, film historiography, ideology criticism, film theory, psychoanalysis, genre studies, comparative national cinemas, authorship, close readings, avant-garde, women and film, the film industry and documentary. This list, then, constitutes the various genres, so to speak, of recent SCS conferences, and each, of course, is quite susceptible to subtle and not-so-subtle revisions. One of the more notable features of the New Orleans program was the inclusion of television/video studies.

Examples include the panels "Commodity Theory and Film/Television as Industry," "Film/Television and the Body," "Television and Reception Theory," "Television as Object," "Television Tradition and History," "Sexuality and Race in Film and Television," "Studies in Early Television History," "Theorizing Television: Text, Textuality, Intertextuality" and "Legal Issues in Film and Video." Individual papers on television/video were sprinkled throughout the other conference panels as well. Since television/video studies have comprised one-third of all programming at the last three conferences, SCS is likely to change its name to the Society for Cinema/Video Studies or the Society for Cinema/Media Studies.

As I stated earlier, the unofficial topic of the New Orleans conference program was parody and its interpretive counterpart, intertextuality. This is not to say that most of the papers, or even a slim majority of the papers, were expressly concerned with this topic. Rather, it seems that "parody" encompasses most of what is considered state-of-the-art in cinema/video studies today' What accounts for the popularity of parody within SCS? In the simplest of terms, the rise of parody, I think, has accompanied the fall of textualism, which was the dominant "radical" cinema-studies position during the mid- to late '70s. Cinetextualism, as it has come to be called, is an amalgam of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Althusserian Marxism, Barthesian post-structuralism and French feminism. It is an attractive theory for cinema studies because it claims to analyze how filmic discourse ideologically positions or "interpellates" human subjects. Within this model, film does not so much reflect sexist, capitalist ideology as it actively constructs the subject/agents of that ideology.

Nevertheless, cine-textualism is problematic because its view of ideology is too selective (e.g., how do film theorists and other "revolutionary intellectuals" escape cinematic interpellation themselves?) and its conception of the "subject" is too abstract. Without exactly rejecting cine-textualism outright, many film and television theorists have recently shifted their attention from the "text itself" to the reception of texts; they have begun to consider, or re-consider, the work of the Frankfurt School, German reception theory, reader-response theory and progressive communications research The old Althusserian-Lacanian "subject," who strove only for coherence, has become a multitude of gendered, class-bound, national, racial, film-experiential and ideological subjects. The new attention to audience response by film/television theorists has also made them more receptive to the way that film- and televisionmakers play with their audience. And this is where the various notions and theories of parody fit it.

Contrary to popular opinion, there is nothing in parodia that necessitates the inclusion of the concept of ridicule. Parody, as Linda Hutcheon writes in A Theory of Parody (1985), "is repetition with difference. A critical distance is implied between the background text being parodied and the new incorporating work, a distance usually signaled by irony." Yet it's important to realize, as Hutcheon reminds us, that "this irony can be playful as well as belittling; it can be critically constructive as well as destructive." Of course, parody is not the only kind of "repetition with difference." Other kinds of relationships between texts - or intertextuality - include burlesque, travesty, pastiche, plagiarism, quotation, allusion, satire and appropriation. Since it matters a great deal whether readers or decoders recognize the "repetition with difference" of one text by another, today's theories of intertextuality depend on an implied theory of reader/audience response. Parody, then, is truly in the eye of the beholder.

Examples of parody analyzed at the conference include: Marsha Kinder's paper on Fassbinder's Veronica Voss, which Kinder takes to be a postmodernist rewriting of Sunset Boulevard; Steve Mamber's paper on Kubrick, DePalma and Scorsese, which considers these directors' uses of music as parody and their quotation of pop-cultural references; Lucy Fischer's "Shot/Counter-Shot: An Intertextual Approach to Women's Avant-Garde Cinema and the Dominant Tradition," which argues that "women's work must engage in an intertextual debate with dominant cinema"; Lisa A. Lewis's talk on the relationship between music video and "girl culture"; Peter Lehman and William Luhr's "Intra-Textual Parody in S.O.B and Victor/Victoria"; and Lynn Spigel's "TV in the TV Home," which analyzed television narratives of the postwar period that dramatized the problem of television's installation in, and disruption of, domestic space.

As the most specialized sector of the film/television audience, SCS members derive both pleasure and prestige from their ability to recognize intertextuality of every kind. Therefore, the only surprising thing about the prominence of parody and reception theory at the New Orleans conference was its belatedness. It would appear that SCS is finally catching up with contemporary film-. television- and videomakers, who have become quite savvy about parody and the like. "The makers of Dynasty have already anticipated reception theory," stated Jane Feuer in her audacious conference paper, "Reading Dynasty: Television and Reception Theory." "It may have appropriated reception theory for capitalism."

Michael Starenko is currently Editor of Afterimage.