York University’s Department of Film launches its inaugural Summer Institute in Film today. The three-week intensive program, which runs to June 12, features four public lectures, June 8 to 11, by eminent film theorist Dudley Andrew, R. Selden Rose Professor of Film & Comparative Literature and director of graduate studies in the Film Studies Program at Yale University.
Right: Dudley Andrew
Titled "A Film Aesthetic to Discover: André Bazin’s Line of Thought", Andrew’s talks are based on his current research on the influential French film critic and theorist André Bazin. Andrew will speak on "Composing or Compositing a Film" (June 8), "The Camera: Capturing or Generating Images" (June 9), "The Screen and the Filter" (June 10) and "The Subject of Cinema" (June 11).
Andrew’s research is slated for publication by Wiley-Blackwell next year under the title Where Cinema is! André Bazin’s Line of Thought.
The Summer Institute in Film is a graduate level course exploring the theme Theoretical Issues in Film: Time and Cinema. The institute is taught by York film Professor Temenuga Trifonova and enriched by Andrew’s lectures.
The course investigates cinema’s relation to time, with a particular attention to notions of temporality, contingency and ephemerality. It explores cinematic time from a variety of perspectives, including modernity and drift; photography and cinema; cinema and philosophies of life; theories of film editing; and André Bazin’s film theory, among others.
During his residency at York, Andrew will also lead a graduate student seminar.
"A major appeal of Dudley Andrew’s interdisciplinary work is that it situates theoretical discussions of film within a broad intellectual history of ideas," says Trifonova. "Andrew’s evocative, intellectually 
nimble writing, which spans topics from film to philosophy, is layered with suggestive cross-references and provocative thematic links that sensitize us to the possibilities and limits of the cultural contextualization of film."
Left: André Bazin
Andrew’s areas of research include world cinema, especially the cinemas of West Africa, France, East Asia and Ireland; esthetics, including theories of the image and the place of film among the arts; and French cinema and culture. His publications include The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford University Press, 1976), Concepts in Film Theory (Oxford University Press, 1984) and Andre Bazin (Columbia University Press, 1990) and a series of ambitious works dealing with France in the 1930s: Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film (Princeton, 1995) and Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (with Steven Ungar, Harvard University Press, 2005). He has edited the anthology, The Image in Dispute (University of Texas Press, 1997), has programmed films for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and served as a film festival judge. He is the recipient of a 1987 Guggenheim Fellowship and several fellowships from the US National Endowment for the Humanities. An Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006.
The Summer Institute in Film was created to offer York University graduate students and the wider community the opportunity to meet internationally renowned film scholars and filmmakers through lectures, seminars, workshops and courses co-taught with a member of York’s Department of Film.
"Dudley Andrew’s specialization particularly suits the interdisciplinary nature of our graduate programs," said Professor Michael Zryd, director of York’s graduate programs in film and in cinema and media studies. "He is one of the most influential scholars in the areas of theory, history and criticism, topics he integrates within the wider realm of media and culture."
Andrew’s lectures take place at 2:30pm in the Nat Taylor Cinema, N102 Ross Building. Admission is free and all are welcome.
The Summer Institute in Film is presented by the Norman Jewison Series and the Department of Film and Graduate Program in Film, Faculty of Fine Arts, in collaboration with the Graduate Program in Communication & Culture and the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University.