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.

Godard has developed a new camera style in his later period. Its prime element is a long, slow tracking shot that moves purely laterally­ usually in one direction only (left to right or right to left), sometimes doubling back (left to right then right to left, right to left then left to right)-over a scene that does not itself move, or strictly speaking, that does not move in any relation to the camera’s movement. Examples of this shot are the automobile trilogy or trip­tych: the backed-up highway of cars in Week­end, the wrecked cars piled up in One Plus One, and the auto assembly line in British Sounds; most of the studio scenes with the Stones in One Plus One; several of the guerilla scenes in Weekend (“I salute you, old ocean”); and the shot of the University of Nanterre and environs in La Chinoise. Before we consider this shot as part of a stylistic complex and in the various contexts in which it appears, we must consider the shot in itself-its structure and implications as shot.

This article is part of a longer critical study, “Weekend and History,” which considers that film in its various historical contexts-cinema and dra­matic history, history of the bourgeoisie, human history.

Access to the complete article now

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