Fifty years ago, Thorold Dickinson kickstarted the first British film studies course at UCL. It didn't last long – but its influence did
It's 50 years since film first became a university subject in Britain. Earlier dates are arguable, but on 16 January 1961 Thorold Dickinson gave his inaugural lecture in the physics theatre at University College London, accompanied by a programme evoking the dawn of cinema. Later dates have also been argued, and the general perception of film studies and its origins still involves a very 1970s blend of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory. Dickinson's department was a more free-spirited affair and has paid the price in obscurity and misrepresentation.
The idea had come from the BFI, the money from Wardour Street, and the Slade was in the frame largely because its director, William Coldstream, had in his 1930s youth dabbled in documentary under the tutelage of John Grierson. Coldstream's old colleagues were more likely candidates for the post of lecturer than Dickinson, who had spent most of his career in commercial features; but whereas the documentarians took an increasingly utilitarian view of their medium, Dickinson remained a believer, quite brazenly, in film as a living artform. Moreover, he thought its best was yet to come.
The Slade would help it along. Recalling the "conservative sophisticates" who had rejected sound in the 30s and widescreen in the 50s, Dickinson explained that "no means of study or research existed for the layman or the artist or even the so-called critic. They could only live from film to film and judge by what they saw." Now that the means were available, Dickinson's programmes, which were open to students from all over London, would set out the historical background for what was everywhere felt to be an exceptionally exciting moment in European cinema – one in which his students eventually played a part.
A year-long series of French films concluded with selections from the still-rolling new wave. An overview of Italian cinema came to a close with Antonioni's then-recent La Notte. Terms were devoted to Polish film and cinéma vérité, and the students' Hollywood enthusiasms were not neglected. Dickinson, showman as well as teacher, put a large chunk of a tight budget into widescreen apparatus, and a smaller one into a "THEATRE FULL" sign. Having far exceeded what had been planned, he devoted himself to gathering films – some of them out of general circulation, others previously unseen in Britain – drawing on contacts built up during half a lifetime of international film-making.
It wasn't all fun and games and seminars with Renoir: Dickinson's postgrads produced a considerable body of scholarship. Charles Barr published a major study of CinemaScope; Gavin Millar rewrote the book on editing (still in print); Vida Carver conducted a survey of "value-patterns of working- and middle-class youths compared with those of professional critics". Raymond Durgnat seems not to have completed his thesis, but Dickinson credited him with starting "potentially an interesting book"; in time, his studies fed into at least four – including his last, on Psycho, screened at the Slade in 1962.
Though practical work lay outside the department's remit, the Slade nonetheless helped foster the talents of a number of film-makers. Dickinson forged an alliance with a well-equipped Nuffield Foundation research unit, enabling Peter Whitehead and Don Levy to make their first publicly shown shorts, while Lutz Becker's early compilation films grew out of the department's pioneering work in archiving newsreel and actuality footage. Marco Bellocchio wrote his debut, Fists in the Pocket, while studying Antonioni and Bresson in London; on its appearance in a double-bill with Whitehead's Wholly Communion in May 1966, Kenneth Tynan wrote: "I cannot recall a more impressive first feature since À Bout de Souffle."
Levy's full-length Herostratus, put together on the Slade's editing machine, had its first public screening at the Cinémathèque Française in January 1968, introduced by Henri Langlois just prior to his eviction by André Malraux; and it was at just that time that government austerity measures put paid to Dickinson's plans for consolidation. He wrote to Coldstream that "a new department has to climb till it reaches a viable size before it can level off into its own status and tradition", feeling his hadn't quite made it. But he had set out, according to one observer, to "produce personalities", to diffuse his influence throughout film culture, not merely academia, and in that he was surely successful.