University of Toronto

An Interview with James Cahill

The Cinema Studies Institute welcomes its newest faculty member James Cahill, who holds a cross-appointment with the Department of French. In 2010-11, he will be teaching INI314Y1Y (Film Cultures II), the Spring term of INI212Y1Y (Film Cultures I), and FCS310Y1Y (French Cinema). We asked him to tell us a bit about himself.

 

What's your background in cinema? What are your areas of specialization, and what drew you to those areas?

My background in film stretches all the way back to when I was 4 and my older siblings and I remade Jaws in our backyard using our parents' Super 8mm camera. This was also my acting debut, as I kept entering the frame to take back my toy shark.

As for my professional formation, I just received my doctorate from the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles. I also did graduate work at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where I taught several classes in 16mm film production, the University of California, Irvine, and the Paris Program in Critical Theory.

My primary areas of specializations are French cinema; nonfiction and experimental cinemas, including non-theatrical cinemas such as the use of film in scientific research and in educational and industrial contexts; film theory; and critical and cultural theory, particularly 20th century French thought.

I have long been a cinephile, but I was initially drawn to dedicate many of my waking hours (and some of dreamtime too) to French and nonfiction cinema by the work of Jean Painlevé, a zoological filmmaker and dissident surrealist, who made over 200 short films between 1926-1986. I saw one of his films (Le Vampire) at a screening rather early in my graduate career and found myself coming back to it again and again (I'm now writing a book on Painlevé and surrealist documentary in interwar France). In order to better understand his films, I found I needed to learn French, to learn French film history, to learn the history of nonfiction cinema, to learn about the broader historical contexts of the films (including the aesthetic movements of the time), and to learn about zoology and biology during the early twentieth century. Studying cinema has a snowball effect: it can take us in some surprising and fascinating directions, but also force us to confront questions of politics, philosophy, and identity. The sense of discovery and the intellectual diversity of cinema studies is something I aim to share with students in my classes.

What are your top 3 favourite films of all time, and why?

One of my favorite films of all time is The Umbrellas of Cherbourg/Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy and Michel Legrand's 1964 Technicolor musical starring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo. 
Every line of dialogue is sung. The first time I saw this film I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head, it was a dizzying, almost intoxicating experience. The colors are incredibly intense and over-saturated, they are almost lurid in the way over-ripe fruit can be, and I've never been so enraptured by wallpaper in a movie. But the film is more than just an exercise in pitch-perfect style and surface, it is also a skillful retelling of the familiar star-crossed lovers narrative, with a sly examination of class ambitions, thwarted desire, colonialism, and everyday life in post-war France. I find this film to be irresistible on so many levels, similar to way Douglas Sirk melodramas and Jacques Tati's comedies are irresistible, but also slightly subversive.

Another favorite of mine is Jean Painlevé's The Seahorse/L'Hippocampe (1935). The Seahorse is a fascinating documentary about seahorses (as the title suggests). But it is also a very witty essay on the magnificent eroticism of the cinema, on plasticity of forms, and the tenderness and cruelty of the cinematic gaze. Much of the film was shot in aquariums in Painlevé's tiny basement studio in Paris, though he also attempted to film seahorses in the Bay of Arcachon in southwest France using primitive scuba gear. The film's lighting is exquisite—he illuminates salt water like a starry sky. The film simultaneously evokes the realm of dreams and that of scientific observation and study. It is a perfect example of the surreal potential of documentary images.

I also really love Alain Resnais' The Song of Styrene/Le chant du styrène (1958), a short industrial film commissioned by Société Pechiney to valorize the modern wonders of plastic manufacturing. It features commentary written entirely in alexandrines by the poet and novelist Raymond Queneau (who also wrote Zazie dans le métro). I'll be showing this film in my French Film course this year, so I won't say too much about it, except than it's a real revelation: visually stunning, witty, politically astute, and slightly absurd.

What special topics course(s) would you love to teach in the near future?

I think it would be really fun to teach a special topics course on 'cinematic wildlife'—examining the history and theory of wildlife films and television, but also narrative and experimental films that address questions of the status of the animal, the wild, ecology, environment. Animals are an almost ubiquitous presence in film from its earliest forms, and there's much to be explored about our fascination with recording and watching animals, whether in Technicolor Jacques Cousteau adventure films, National Geographic style television documentaries, fictional films like Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar, Bambi, Jaws, The Birds, The Bear/L'Ours, blockbuster documentaries from Disney's The Living Desert (called a 'Technicolor nightmare' when it was released) to March of the Penguins, experimental films by Karl Kels, Phil Hoffman, Peter Kubelka, almost anything by Werner Herzog, and purely strange films like Pathé's The Dancing Pig/Le Cochon danseur. I also hope to teach courses on surrealism and cinema; interwar French film and literature; and cinema and exploration.

What is your favourite film festival?

I have not had much opportunity in the past few years to globetrot around to Berlin, Cannes, or Rotterdam, so I cannot really say I have a favourite film festival. I have attended and really enjoyed the Images du réel festival held at the Georges Pompidou centre in Paris as well as the Views from the Avant-Garde programs at the New York Film Festival, which is usually a good deal of fun, as much for the social interactions as the 24 hours of experimental films screened during the course of a weekend. I am really looking forward to attending TIFF for the first time, and hopefully getting to see "Coming Attractions," the new piece by the Austrian camera-less filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, which apparently addresses the relationship of early film, avant-garde cinema, and advertising. But beyond festivals, I am really just excited about experiencing Toronto's famous cinema culture.

 

 

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