Robert Phillip Kolker is an Americanfilm historian,theorist, andcritic. He has authored and edited a number of influential books oncinema andmedia studies. He is a ProfessorEmeritus at theUniversity of Maryland, College Park.
Robert P. Kolker graduated with a PhD inEnglish literature fromColumbia University in 1969.[1] In the early 1970s, Kolker began writing about filmmakers forFilm Comment andSight and Sound.[2][3] In 1972 Kolker interviewedJean-Luc Godard andJean-Pierre Gorin while they were on a U.S. film tour. The interview was originally published bySight and Sound in 1973, and later reprinted inDavid Sterritt's 1998 book of Godard interviews.[4]
Afilm academic andmedia studies scholar, Kolker has taught at theUniversity of Maryland,Georgia Tech, and theUniversity of Virginia.[1][5][6] He specializes incinema of the United States,international cinema,European art cinema,Latin American cinema, andcultural studies.[1][7][8][9]
His first bookA Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Kubrick, Coppola, Scorsese, Altman was first published in 1980 byOxford University Press, and is in its fourth revised edition.[6][10][11] TheDirectors Guild of America said it "remains the most acute and perceptive critical study of some of the finest films and directors of the Hollywood New Wave."[10] The book examined film directors of the "New Hollywood", who had been influenced by Americanfilm noir and theFrench New Wave, and how their films influenced American society of the 1960s and 1970s.[12] Kolker observed that "for all the challenge and adventure, their films speak to a continual impotence in the world, an inability to change and to create change. When they do depict action, it is invariably performed by lone heroes in an enormously destructive and antisocial manner."[13] InA Cinema of Loneliness, Kolker also wrote aboutbuddy films as an extension ofmale bonding, in which men in these movies could engage in nonsexual activity together while marginalizing women.[14] Kolker noted thatRobert Altman was one of the few American filmmakers to examine the results of men's violent acts, and that Altman's 1982 filmCome Back to the 5 & Dime dealt with the "crisis of women confronting the oppression ofpatriarchy."[15] Kolker also pointed out that the aural and visual simultaneity in Altman's films was critical as that represented an emphasis on the plurality of events, which required viewers to become active spectators.[16] According to Kolker,Stanley Kubrick's films were "more intellectually rigorous than the work of any other American filmmaker."[6] Kolker's second bookThe Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema, published in 1983 also by Oxford University Press, concentrated on image, form, and politics in film sinceWorld War II, particularly in Europe and Latin America.[8][17][18]
In addition to Kubrick, Kolker's analysis of filmauteurs includes books onOrson Welles,Alfred Hitchcock,Bernardo Bertolucci, andWim Wenders.[1] Luciana Bohne, co-founder ofFilm Criticism, said Kolker's 1985 book on Bertolucci was "first rate" in its exploration of the director'sMarx/Freud dialectic.[19] Writing about Bertolucci's 1970 made-for-TV filmThe Spider's Stratagem, about an allegedanti-fascist hero, Kolker observed the film was "about the political effects of spectacle" and how it permitted the viewer to identify and comprehend participating in it.[20][21] The book also observed that Bertolucci's representation of women was problematic, due to the way he "often places them in inferior or, worse, destructive roles."[22]
Kolker's books and articles of the 1980s, while heavily focused on male auteurs, analyzed cinema usingfeminist film theory (such as that ofLaura Mulvey).[9][18] And in 1989 he co-authored an article with Madeleine Cottenet-Hage on the cinema ofMarguerite Duras.[23] Hage was Professor Emerita of French at the University of Maryland, College Park.[24][25]
Kolker has also written forFilm Quarterly andCinema Journal.[26][27] Kolker, writing in 2004 forCinema Journal, pushed for film/media studies to return to a seriousness and celebration of complexity, history, and politics. "Film/media studies," he wrote, "is in many important ways, only getting started. As filmmaking itself turns more and more to the digital, we become archivists of past knowledge, scholars of the present, prophets of the future. As our outlook broadens and we begin to understand the intertextualities of film and all other visual and narrative arts, we can see that film is part of the overwhelming text of cultural practice."[27]
In 2006, a 30th-anniversary 2-disc "Collector's Edition" DVD ofMartin Scorsese's filmTaxi Driver was released. The first disc contained the film itself withaudio commentary by Kolker and screenwriterPaul Schrader, and the second disc contained special features with those two in addition to extensive reflections from Scorsese.[28][29]
In 2006, Kolker edited an Oxford University Press book on Kubrick's 1968science fiction film2001: A Space Odyssey to reexamine its complexities.[30] Contributors includedBarry Keith Grant, Marcia Landy,Michael Mateas, and Susan White. In 2019, Kolker co-authored a book on Kubrick's 1999 filmEyes Wide Shut. Kolker has also written about The Stanley Kubrick Archive atUniversity of the Arts London.[31]
In 2008, Kolker editedThe Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies, which included perspectives on film and media in the U.S., Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Articles in the book also explored developments innew media, examining topics such as copyright, globalization, and video game genres.[32] In the book's introduction, Kolker wrote,
"Traditional film studies starts with the individual work, genre, or director, and moves outward to larger issues of the ideologies of production and reception, to gender issues, to the effects of distribution on viewership, and increasingly to the ways globalization is affecting national cinemas, always attempting to solidify its ground in theory. Media studies starts with larger textual entities, sometimes isolating a media artifact – a genre of music, a television series, a social-networking site, a computer game — often analyzing these from the perspective of subcultural, audience-specific interaction."[33]
In his 2015 bookThe Cultures of American Film, Kolker said cultures are "expressions of our engagement — individually, by group, class, race, gender, by institutions — with one another and with the world at large," and film culture is created when filmmakers decide to "engage with the world by creating movies" and when viewers "engage with films according to...taste and the responses learned by seeing many other films."[34] The book chapters integrated technical and analytical aspects of American film into the book's cultural survey, although analysis of race andracism was mostly confined to examinations ofSidney Poitier,blaxploitation films, and the distressing legacy ofD. W. Griffith's controversial, racist 1915 filmThe Birth of a Nation.[34] For example, Kolker pointed out thatWilliam Joseph Simmons, future Imperial Wizard of theKu Klux Klan, had capitalized onThe Birth of a Nation's initial popularity to "run an ad for the Klan next to an ad for the movie," resulting in the dormant hate organization being "reborn atStone Mountain, Georgia."[34]
Kolker has co-authored with Nathan Abrams two books on Stanley Kubrick:
Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of his Final Film (Oxford University Press, 2019) is an "archeology" of the film from inception to pre-production, production, and post production, including discussion about whether the release print ofEyes Wide Shut is the film Kubrick wanted the public to see.
Kubrick: An Odyssey (Faber & Faber, Pegasus/Simon & Schuster, 2024) is a "cradle to grave" biography of one of the great filmmakers of the 20th century. It draws upon original research in the Kubrick Archives at the University of the Arts, London, as well as interviews with family members and co-workers.
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