God, Kant and the Transcendental Object: an Investigation into the Kantian Critique of the Ontological Argument

An address to the 4th International Kant Congress, Mainz, Germany, 8 April 1974 on the nature and consequences of Kant's remarks within his Critique of Pure Reason on the notions of 'God' and the 'Transcendental Object', a text of which was published later the same year within the proceedings of the Congress as pages 347-355 of the Akten des 4 International Kant Kongresses, Mainz 6 10 April 1974, Teil II.1 (Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 1974)

Course Materials for 'The Screenwriters' Cinema - Jhabvala, Hopcraft and Curtis', FA/FILM 4128/5128 3.0, Fall Term, 2006-2007

Outline and Examination (for student use) and the Schedule of Lectures and Screenings [for private use of EWC] for an upper-level one-term course for advanced students of screenwriting on the work and achievement of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Arthur Hopcraft and Richard Curtis offered during the Fall Term of 2006-2007, typical of the half-term courses taught by the author during the final decade of his teaching

A Note on the Proper Study of Film: A Response to C. B. Hunt

A cautionary response, published within the Newsletter of the American Film Institute in November-December 1980, to suggestions to the contrary about the teaching of film and the administration of those doing it made within a previous issue by Dr. C. B. Hunt, Jr., Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication at Southern Illinois University

Eisenstein, Part 1: 'A Fly in the Fly-Bottle' – Montage to 1930

Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay (Part I) I shall unpack what Eisenstein said early on of the mistake that he was making – before recognising it as such. I shall then in a second essay (Part II) reconstrue it definitively as he did later on – after the recognition

Review of The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, edited by John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), x + 175 pages

A review of The Cinema of Roman Polanski: Dark Spaces of the World, edited by John Orr and Elżbieta Ostrowska (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), x + 175, published in The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, Vol 13, No. 3 (Spring, 2008).

IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT and STAGECOACH

A survey and assessment of the reception and influence of IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT (1934) and STAGECOACH (1939)

Course Materials for 'Understanding Screenwriting' - FA/FILM 4501 12.0, Fall and Winter Terms, 2002-2003

Overview, Outline, Readings and Guidelines (for students) with the Schedule of Lectures and Screenings (for private use of EWC) for an extraordinary double-weighted full-year course for advanced students of screenwriting, meeting for six hours weekly with each term of work constituting a full six-credit course, that the author was permitted to teach within the Graduate Programme of the Department of Film & Video, Faculty of Fine Arts, York University during the academic years 2001-2002 and 2002-2003

Francis Bacon and the Pragmatic Theory of Forms

A summary of Francis Bacon's ontology of nature followed by a pragmatic reading of his theory of 'Forms', concluding that Bacon construed the mark of a true form to be its usefulness (or, as he put it when insisting upon the necessity of usefulness to the very being of a form, 'These two directions, the one active and the other contemplative, are one and the same thing; and what in operation is most useful, that in knowledge is most true.')

Spengler's List: Screenwriting, the Wilderness and the Civilising Death of the Arts

A lament upon the dying of the art of screenwriting, alongside the other 'liberal arts', provoked by the pondering of two texts: Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West and John Livingston's The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation

Eisenstein, Part 2: '[As] in Life Itself' – Montage from 1930

Few artists have tried harder than Sergei Eisenstein to understand what they were doing, how and why, as they fashioned early on the works that made them famous, and no one among them has ever affirmed later on – with such clarity and conviction – how and why they had at the time misconceived what they were doing, and what lessons they had learned about their art from having done so. Though some filmmakers understood afterwards what Eisenstein had achieved by rethinking what he had done, few commentators, unable to sense hands-on its impetus or consequences, have proven capable of acknowledging it. Within this essay (Part II of two on the evolution of Eisenstein's conjectures about 'montage') I shall unpack what Eisenstein said in 1938 of the mistake that he had made early on and how to correct it, reaffirming thereby, though unwittingly, that Pudovkin had been right all along