Quorum

In Memoriam: Brian Henderson

In Memoriam: Brian Henderson April 17, 1941- March 1, 2017

We are extremely sorry to announce that Brian Henderson passed away March 1, 2017 in Getzville, NY after a long illness.

He was a scholar, a professor, and by many indications—from tributes coming in via social media—a generous mentor to countless students. From 1974-2010 he taught at SUNY Buffalo. He was present at the creation of Gerald O’Grady’s Center for Media Study, which also included James Blue, Tony Conrad, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Woody Vasulka, and Steina Vasulka.

He is the author of the book A Critique of Film Theory (1980)  and the editor of Five Screenplays of Preston Sturges (1986), still available from UC Press.

Brian Henderson’s love of film was cultivated in California, and with FQ. He crafted his own doctoral course of study in film theory in the History of Consciousness program at UC Santa Cruz in the late 1960s after having already received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy (Johns Hopkins, 1962) and a law degree from Harvard (1965). He taught film courses at San Francisco State University, and spent time in Berkeley writing film criticism before taking up his position in Buffalo in 1974.

He was a frequent contributor to FQ under the editorships of Chick Callenbach and Ann Martin, and served for many years on FQ’s Editorial Board. Together with Lee Amazonas, Henderson and Martin edited the anthology Film Quarterly Forty Years—A Selection (1999).

To celebrate his contribution to the field of film and media studies, we offer here his first feature-length article published in FQ‘s pages.

Access to the complete article now

Header Image: The car crash scene in Weekend (1967).

Copyright: © 2017 Film Quarterly. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/