Anyone who has visited Caméra-Stylo over the past six months probably noticed I was on hiatus while I was studying for my Ph.D. Qualifying Exam. The process entailed a semester of intensive reading for each of my core research areas: Film Authorship & Director Reputation Studies, Contemporary Film Theory & Aesthetics, Genre Historiography, and Cultural Modernism & Modernity. I knew I wouldn’t have much to blog about—let alone time to post regularly—while I was buried under the load of nearly 100 scholarly items with all four reading lists combined. Well, I’m happy to report that I completed my essay exam responses at the end of May and passed my oral defense earlier this week.
Although I looked forward to returning to the blog in June, a part of me knew how difficult it would be to keep up with it again. My posting had been only sporadic in the fall during my last semester of coursework, with fewer and fewer pieces of the substance I’d hoped to maintain when I began in 2008. It seems like my nomination to Ph.D. candidacy marks an appropriate time to lay Caméra-Stylo to rest (I created it, after all, towards the end of my M.A. studies at Northern Illinois University) and focus on my upcoming academic projects. Yet, I think the blog always best served as my outlet for non-academic writing, mostly in the form of film reviews (you can take the kid out of the college newspaper, but you can’t take the college newspaper out of the kid) or random thoughts and opinions about film studies and film-related topics. I know I’ll miss that.
You can find me online now at my website, but I will leave the blog up for at least another year or so. If anyone is wondering where I’m honing my writing energies these days, I’m presently working on an article about Marilyn Monroe for Routledge's new journal Celebrity Studies. Most of my long-term graduate research will be devoted to director Nicholas Ray, my dissertation subject, and in the coming months I will begin the dissertation prospectus, along with editorial work for a centenary collection on Ray that I’ve enthusiastically undertaken with a colleague in Georgia.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the level of visibility Caméra-Stylo received over the past three years, and my heartfelt appreciation goes out to all of those who read, checked back during stretches of inactivity, encouraged me to keep writing, and had such nice things to say. To be honest, I wasn’t exactly sure what purpose this blog was supposed to serve when I started, nor was I sure what audience I had or at whom I aimed to address. And while I’m not sure I ever found answers to those questions, I certainly had fun writing about movies here. In the words of Mr. Thompson from Citizen Kane, thanks for the use of the hall.
