An Interview with Brian Price
The Cinema Studies Institute welcomes one of its newest graduate faculty member Brian Price, who teaches at the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. In 2011-12, he will be teaching CIN1005HF L0201 (Colour and the Moving Image). 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?
Brian Price
I did my MA and PhD in Cinema Studies at New York University—drawn there, as I was then, by an intense interest in modernism across the arts. I was fascinated as an undergraduate by how much film shared with allied art forms like painting, poetry and the novel. So, directors like Rene Clair, Jean Epstein, Sergei Eisenstein, and others who articulated a poetics of cinema in relation to and also against a history of the arts were entirely exciting to me. They seemed to represent not just an area of scholarly inquiry but a way of life. I still believe this, even if I no longer believe in the medium specificity claims that animate early classical film theory and modernist filmmaking. But in that sense, my major areas of specialization are very related, even if now in sometimes antagonistic terms. In terms of the work I do on colour, I am very informed not only by philosophical questions about perception, sensation, and eros, but also by art historical discourses about color style, and also questions about writing, which have preoccupied so many great writers like William Gass, Anne Carson, Wallace Stevens, and many others. Likewise, the bulk of my research is dedicated to developing a better understanding of ontology for film and media studies, one that moves away from more parochial conceptions of ontology, which concern only the specifics of how an image comes into being, and that can only understand style in a fundamental relation to the supposedly productive limits of a given medium. This kind of medium specificity feels to me now like a bad case of religious fundamentalism, or cinematic patriotism.
What are your top 3 favourite films of all time?
This is a really difficult question. I would hate to choose three, but: Phil Solomon’s Remains to be Seen, Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day, and Bobcat Goldthwait’s Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Tell us about your course, Colour and the Moving Image.
Remains To Be Seen
The class follows from Stan Brakhage’s famous provocation in Metaphors on Vision: “How many colours are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’”? We’ll be considering the perceptual instability of color not as a defect but as a positive aesthetic element that should change the way we think about film—about style and form, in particular. The field of colour studies is really starting to emerge, so this is an opportunity for graduate students to think about what it means to make a creative intervention in the field, especially when there’s no necessary vocabulary for what we see. An important part of this class, in fact, will be to consider the ways in which terms like medium shot, diegetic/non-diegetic, fabula, etc. function much like the word Green in Brakhage’s formulation. They both produce and limit ways of seeing. Colour raises very important questions about naming and the moral imperatives of categorization, which have dominated the writing of film history and film theory for quite some time. With this in mind, we’ll look—among other things—at the ways in which attention to colour, which makes demands of us as writers, might help us to move beyond distinctions between narrative and the avant-garde, cinema and painting, film and philosophy.
What directors have done amazing things with colour, in your opinion?
Ken Jacobs, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Varda, Stan Brakhage, Janie Geiser, Phil Solomon, Paul Sharits, Nathaniel Dorsky, Mary Beth Reed, Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder, Spike Lee, Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Olivier Assayas, Quentin Tarantino, Pedro Almodovar, Stanley Kubrick, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Douglas Sirk, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, Yasujiro Ozu, Takeshi Kitano, Michelangelo Antonioni, Eric Rohmer, Vincente Minnelli, Martin Scorsese, Francois Ozon, Alfred Hitchcock, Herschell Gordon Lewis, Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Michael Powell, Jacques Tati, Jacques Demy, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Sembene Ousmane, Rouben Mamoulian, Aleksander Sokurov, Ryan Trecartin, Stephen G. Rhodes, Piplotti Rist, Henry Hathaway, John Ford. I could go on.