Received the sad news this afternoon from Richard Allen, the chair of our Cinema Studies department. In an e-mail both informal and affectionate, he wrote:
“It is with much regret I announce that after a recent and short-lived struggle with cancer – Scholar, Professor, Alum, Colleague and Friend Paul Arthur has passed away at the age of 61. Paul was a 1985 doctoral graduate of our department and everyone is familiar with his groundbreaking dissertation, Shadows on the Mirror: Film Noir and Cold War America, 1945 – 1957 which he completed with distinction under the guidance of advisor Annette Michelson. Paul was a Professor in the Department of English at Montclair State University and co-editor of Millennium Film Journal. He was the author of A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde since 1965 as well as a frequent contributor to journals such as Cineaste and Film Comment. Paul was a frequent guest and adjunct faculty member in our department during the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, and he was much loved by his students. I’m sure all of you share in my sadness in the loss of Paul as a friend, former student, and colleague, and for the field of Cinema Studies. Paul was a physically robust man who stood tall, let us all remember him in his prime.”
As film noir and the avant-garde fall a little outside my primary areas of interest, my love for Arthur’s writing was based predominantly on his work on documentary. His regular Film Comment column on the subject, “Art of the Real,” had become my favorite feature of the magazine, in which he shone his critical spotlight on unexpected, underappreciated and often un-hip facets of the form.
In a late-2007 piece assessing the relevance of once-seminal PBS documentary showcase P.O.V., he cuts to the heart of the matter:
“It is not that P.O.V. necessarily suffers from a lack of nerve - although its tepid coverage of globalization, a key political flashpoint since the Nineties, might involve fears of offending a PBS patron like agribiz titan Archer Daniels Midland - but that it succumbs to the lure of disseminating docs with progressive themes to the widest possible audience. Hence I’d be shocked if in today’s climate PBS went to bat for the kind of provocative genre-buster epitomized by Tongues Untied. By way of contrast, Frontline, since 1983 PBS’s flagship current-affairs series (drawing from both in-house and independent producers), has had few qualms about attacking corporate domination, albeit within rather stodgy visual formats.”
Perhaps his single best piece of writing, or at least the one to which I always return for inspiration and insight in my own writing on documentary, is his 1993 essay “Jargons of Authenticity,” tracing “the formal embedding of truth claims, guarantees of authenticity, and hierarchies of knowledge” in three historical junctures in which mainstream American documentary (the New Deal films of the 1930s, the cinema-verité features of the 1960s, and the 1990s wave of self-staging documentaries) has mustered a serious challenge to the dominance of the fiction film.
I recall receiving a postcard last fall from a university press (either Columbia or Rutgers) advertising a forthcoming book on documentary by Arthur to be released in 2009. Hopefully the manuscript was completed before his untimely demise.
I’ll miss you, Paul.
