Tagged: In Memorium

Remembering Edward Branigan

Professor Edward Branigan at the 2005 SCMS Conference in London.

Over the weekend, I learned that Professor Emeritus Edward Branigan had passed away on June 29, succumbing to leukemia. During my time as an undergraduate at UCSB, I took only one class from him—Film Studies 192A: Classical Film Theory. The class was one of the most intensive classes I took at UCSB, although it would be unfair to characterize my other classes as easy.

The Classical Film Theory course was very different from most other college film courses. First, there were no film screenings. There were only readings, and there were a lot of them. Second, the class met three times a week, for a hour each day, plus a discussion section with a TA. Third, the class was not actually about film. It was a philosophy class about film. So rather than stressing concepts like aura, montage, or realism, the course was based around concepts such as ontology, epistemology, and aesthetics. And we used those to understand not just how to criticize a particular film—but to understand the nature of all film—those that had been produced and those not yet even imagined. Many students struggled in this course, but I was managed to stay afloat largely because I had already taken an experimental film course. And that course helped me understand that film was much more than we see at the movies.

The Department of Film and Media Studies posted a memorial tribute to on its website. It chronicles many major milestones of Branigan’s life and catalogs his many achievements in film studies. He lived a rich life, serving in the military during the Vietnam War era and practicing as an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood before transitioning to academia in the 1980s.

One accomplishment from that tribute that I would like to highlight is his developing Film Studies 146: Advanced Film Analysis, a class that “weeded out” the students who could not keep up with the major. For those of us that remained, it was an important part of crafting film scholars. Professor Branigan didn’t teach 146 when I took it: Donna Cunningham did. But now that I think about it, it is clear that this was a “Branigan class” in that it was not like the other film classes.

Unlike Classical Film Theory, we did screen films, but only ten of them. We met three times a week—once on Monday afternoon, again that same evening, and once more on Wednesday afternoons. On Monday, we would watch a film and study how it employed a specific narration technique: such as space, time, and sound. We talked about it some more on Wednesday. Then, the following Monday afternoon, we would screen a different film—which would be unknown to the class—and be asked to write an eight-page paper on the film’s narrational techniques by Wednesday afternoon. We would repeat this pattern four times throughout the semester. If anything, it taught me to quickly identify the “moral” of the film and to outline how the film communicated that moral through cinematography, editing, sound, mise-en-scène, etc.

The last time I saw Professor Branigan was in 2005 at the SCMS Conference in London, which is where I snapped the above photo of him. I was at NYU at the time. My friend Scott, from our UCSB days and who was studying at Berkeley, was with me. Scott and I approached… no, we cornered… Edward at an evening reception on the conference’s first day. The Film Studies department at UCSB in the 1990s was pretty small, and the students had a very close relationship with the faculty: we even called our professors by their first names. I believe Scott asked him about his new role as the department’s Director of Graduate Studies. I feigned surprise and brashly asked Edward, “Wait! They put you in charge of the graduate students?” Everyone was aware that Edward had married one of his former graduate students, who herself passed away in 2016.

He responded with a smirk on his face, with a tone of sarcasm, and in his distinctive raspy voice: “Oh, I like graduate students.”

Rest in Peace, Edward.

Update: David Bordwell wrote a touching and personal memoir of Edward Branigan, one that spans decades and maintains close contact throughout that time. Because of the Independence Day holiday, I didn’t keep up with Observations on Film Art as closely I usually do. I only found out about his passing from the UCSB Alumni newsletter.

Remembering Robert Sklar

Robert Sklar at the 2004 Cinema Studies Conference

Although it’s how I found out about the Japanese earthquake, I cannot fully believe what I read as “news” on Facebook or Twitter. Not until I can confirm with some kind of journalistic news source. Sorry.

Because I haven’t been able to verify it with an authoritative source, I have been in disbelief over the death of former NYU Professor of Cinema Studies, Robert Sklar. I saw that he had died this weekend on my Facebook News Feed two days ago from some very trusted and accomplished friends, but I haven’t seen anything from the local newspapers or from the university. (I mean no disrespect to fellow NYU alum J. Hoberman, Frances Guerin, and Matt Singer, who all wrote touching tributes to a great scholar.)

[Update: The New York Times has published an obituary on Thursday, July 7, and Richard Allen penned the department’s official tribute on the Cinema Studies website.]

Unlike most Cinema Studies students at NYU, I never took any of his classes. During my years, he taught only the masters-level introduction to historiography, a course I had been excused from taking because of my extensive undergraduate coursework at UCSB. Despite missing out on this ritual of passage at NYU, I had some great moments with Bob Sklar over the years.

For one thing, he needed a lot of help with his computer. Having heard from someone in the department that I was good at “computer stuff,” I was contracted to help him and his wife, Adrienne Harris, an intellectual powerhouse in her own right, with their computers. I did a few things over the years, like get their printers installed and working with their Windows machines, installing and securing their wireless network, and finally convincing them to get an iMac. However, after migrating them to Macs, I never heard from them again about needing help with their computers.

While we waited for downloads and installations, Bob and I would talk. Sure, we chatted about film and my own research, but we didn’t talk about that for long. I think he and I shared a certain weariness about “shop talk.” So we talked about baseball. A lot. He was a Yankee fan, and he held a certain disdain for my loyalty to the Dodgers. It was mostly because, like me, he was a transplanted Los Angeleno (Long Beach, actually), but, unlike me, he rooted for the Angels. The Los Angeles Angels. Not of Anaheim but of the Pacific Coast League. I never argued with him, figuring that he deserved respect for even having been to a PCL game and that he wasn’t a fan of the San Francisco Seals.

One of my favorite recollections of him was when I submitted a Statement of Progress as part of my transition from the masters to the doctoral program. Having managed the Cinema Studies softball team for the prior two years, I thought it would lighten the mood if I included my softball hitting statistics with my statement. Professors Straayer and Sklar were in charge of my meeting, and since they were both baseball fans, I knew my stunt would go over well. Sure enough, Sklar looks over my documents and comes across my softball statistics. He nods approvingly and says, “pretty good. But why no home runs?”

I never talked about Fantasy Baseball, figuring it would be a sore point for him, given that he was one of the developers of the game but never made any money from it. But we did go to a few games together. He was nice enough to take me to a few Yankee games. It was the closest I ever felt to watching a game with my father, other than, of course, seeing a game with my father. I kept a neat and thorough scorecard, and deferred to him on whether it was a hit or an error. For a graduate student with no income duringthe summer months, it was a nice treat to be his guest at those games. And I’m glad that I had enough money left that summer to buy him a beer.