Foreword

Summary

As readers of this volume are about to see, over the course of his still-stellar career, Bruce Kawin regularly has committed two sins, for a film scholar. The first is that his ideas and insights stress that the ultimate purpose of cinema is to enlighten human beings about the nature of actual life, not merely to enhance the careers of film teachers. This book reminds me of a medical humanities meeting a few years ago at the University of Colorado's med school, when Rita Charon of Columbia University described getting members of the Columbia English Department up to the teaching hospital to work with patients, nurses and doctors. As she put it, the literary scholars who made that journey discovered why they'd studied literature in the first place—because they cared about people, not because they cared about theory. Kawin has known that all along. Kawin's second sin, a cousin of sin number one, is that his writing is utterly, utterly clear. You don't have to belong to a club or be an initiate to understand what Bruce Kawin writes about; you simply have to care enough about film to read and think along with his fine prose. In fact, it might be more accurate to say that Kawin is simultaneously scholar and critic, which makes him a teacher. He brings to his work the love of cinema and brightness of insight and discovery that mark the best criticism, but backed by the scholar's discipline, depth of knowledge and willingness to look at films and ideas that have not attracted attention before.