Sam Rohdie

Sam Rohdie was first and foremost a film scholar. Between 1971-74 he was the editor of a British film magazine called Screen published by the Society for Education in Film and Television. Sam was also a university professor. He had taught in Australia, Ghana, Hong Kong, United Kingdom and the United States. He read History at Brandeis University and Yale University. Sam received his PhD. (Cinema Studies) from La Trobe University, Australia.

 

Sam loved food, women, and the cinema (not necessarily in that order), but his passion was in learning new things and new ideas. Sam never stopped working. He was constantly reading, thinking, researching, and writing. At the time when he fell ill, he was doing research on some French film directors.

 

Sam had written extensively about the cinema. In his own words, "My writing is speculative and interrogative, open rather than conclusive, playful rather than humdrum... What I write about and the way I write differ from prevailing conventions in film studies that increasingly have been less concerned with aesthetic values than with film as illustrative of cultural concerns, ideological positions, and social and sexual identities. I want to address cultural questions by grounding these in formal structures whereas current work has tended to ignore formal structures, the artistic value of film, for the sake of social and political contents. My work is at odds with what has become current orthodoxy. It is traditional by its attention to style and new in concentrating on formal transformations and experiments . It seeks to find connections between films founded on stylistic means as part of a project to establish new historical relations and associations and innovative critical categories and approaches."

 

 

 

 

 

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