James Leo Cahill will complete five years as Director of the Cinema Studies Institute at the end of June 2024. Before James races into the sunset, he answered questions about his term, which straddled the COVID-19 pandemic.
What achievements from your term as Director are you most proud of?
Being Director is like getting handed the baton in a relay race: somebody else has done really hard work, you try to take up the task and move it forward, and eventually pass it along. I start with this perhaps overused simile simply to foreground that anything I cite as a success had many collaborators involved.
I’m most proud of how the Institute has grown in terms of the extraordinary new faculty we hired—including Nadine Chan, Bliss Lim, Brett Story, Rakesh Sengupta, and æryka jourdaine hollis-o’neil; in terms of our international profile; and in terms of the breadth and diversity of courses we have been able to offer. These colleagues wonderfully complement and expand the strengths of the faculty. I envy our students for the sorts of classes they get to take and opportunities available: in a way I think I got to oversee the flourishing of exactly the kind of program I’d truly want to study in. Having the chance to work closely with all my colleagues in new ways also deepened my respect for how impressive—truly extraordinary—they all are as scholars, teachers, staff, and people, and how lucky we are as a unit.
I’d say the same of the undergraduate and graduate students. It was a privilege to be Director as we started minting our first PhDs who are launching their own exciting careers. I’m also really proud of working with Henryk Hiller and Erica Hiller Carpenter to help establish the Arthur Hiller Award for Admission to the Cinema Studies Institute and the Hiller Scholars program—I cherished getting to know the students who received it—and I hope it helps make the Institute a more inclusive and interesting place for all of us long into the future, and is just the tip of the iceberg for such initiatives in the future.
In a nutshell I’m proud of who we have collectively become as the Institute and how we’ll continue to build on these strengths as we grow and change in the future.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic change your role as Director?
It transformed the job almost completely, and honestly, it seemed to make it much bigger than anybody could have anticipated (which also never quite made sense to me, since we’re an academic cinema studies program and not a hospital). The set of plans I had coming into the job mostly got thrown to the side in March 2020. If prior to the pandemic I felt a care and concern for our community, it was no longer an abstract sentiment once the pandemic registered as a long-term and dangerous event, where no decision could be taken lightly.
Suddenly we (again, I say we because I didn’t do anything alone as Director) had to become proficient in so many new skills and rethink so much of what we took for granted in terms of teaching and running a program. This entailed working closely with brilliant members of the University of Toronto Libraries, Media Commons, and Innis AV on figuring out how to legally keep teaching films by remote means (which involved supporting some truly impressive systems and solutions, and a pretty deep study of the Copyright Act); working closely with the faculty, instructors, and graduate students and becoming great partners in figuring out how to be effective instructors online and in hybrid situations; getting much better—though we still have work to do—at investing in infrastructure to better ensure accessibility, at refreshing and reinventing our pedagogy, and trying to find ways to sustain a sense of community in the face of a lot of unknowns.
I regret how difficult it made my favourite part of being at CSI—gathering together—being a bustling place, getting to chat with random students or community members in the hallways and atrium, and I’m glad that we are seeing some return to our home at Innis as a lively hub of activity.
What will you miss about being the Director?
I will miss getting to work closely with everybody in our community—students, faculty, staff, Principal Keil and his team, as well as the broader university and city—and having a chance to help create opportunities, help people, and elevate the community, as individuals and a heterogenous whole. I loved how many new people I got to know because of the job, and all the surprising skills I needed to learn to do it.
It was also lovely having the opportunity to hire great sessional lecturers and visiting instructors and bring in cool filmmakers, scholars, and creators for talks. I really loved getting to bring in filmmakers whose work I truly admire to serve as teachers, such as Guy Maddin, Kazik Radwanski, Stephen Broomer, and Chandler Levack (2024 Screenwriter in Residence), as was bringing in some of the sharpest film programmers/scholars, such as Diana Sanchez and Robyn Citizen, who will teach with us in 2024/25.
I also loved being involved in event planning, both in terms of the scholars I got to invite to campus to share their research and the films and filmmakers we hosted both at the Institute and in our collaborations with Innis College and other programs. I’m also still really proud that one of the first things I got to do as director, in collaboration with curator Jesse Cumming, was to bring the radical Japanese documentary duo Kazuo Hara and Sachiko Kobayashi to Canada. I came interested in making CSI a space hospitable to the most radical possibilities cinema and I’d like to think I exit with that still being true.
Is there a film that speaks to your Directorship experience?
Without being too dramatic, the Indonesian action film The Raid (Gareth Evans) kind of captured what the workflow felt like some days: things coming from all sides, nonstop. Sometimes it felt like Fritz Lang’s The 1000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, if less sinister, in terms of how life become so oriented toward peeking through screens but also my position getting to oversee and coordinate a complex operation with many fascinating moving parts, and perhaps Jacques Tati’s Playtime, with its fascination for modern bureaucracy but also a sense of invention and play possible from within institutional spaces. In the end, I think I learned how to approach being Director much like I approach scholarship, as a creative endeavour.
What films/media helped you get through the pandemic/Directorship?
The film I saw more than any other in the past 5 years, and that really framed the whole experience of my Directorship, was… Cats. It was among the last movies I saw in a theatre before the pandemic, it was the first movie I saw in a theatre after the pandemic (thanks to an invitation from CINSSU), and I decided to write about it, so I’ve seen it a few times since, and recently gave a talk on it and what I’m calling the wtf-effect that feels like the right way to return to serious scholarly inquiry with a bit of a sense of humour. Some people say it caused the pandemic, so perhaps my relationship to it is homeopathic.
Perhaps the best moment for me in terms of being sustained by films was watching Wong Kar-wai’s As Tears Go By for the first time during the lockdown and coming to the sequence set to Sandy Lam’s Canto-pop version of “Take My Breath Away.” This was for me a brief moment of respite, it really took me elsewhere, to the elsewhere promised by the best moments of cinema, which isn’t quite an escape but an opening up or opening back up of a world. In the midst of the lockdown this brief experience felt really vital, revitalizing, if tinged with melancholy. The mise-en-scène is gorgeous—the orange-red glow of a juke box, the indigo floor and red table clothes in the bar, the lighting in the metro stop, the slow closing of an automatic gate, and of course the attractive and impossibly cool performers. Andrew Lau’s cinematography is extraordinary. And these aspects coalesce beautifully to capture all the longing and missed connection that are signatures of Wong Kar-wai. But the use of this song is also such a brash and gutsy move coming just 2 years on the heels of the prominent place of Berlin’s version of the same song in Tony Scott’s Top Gun (1986). I love that mixture of genuine melancholy and absolute brio. It is as if Wong wished to disarticulate and reclaim the tune for young dreamers and not the military industrial entertainment complex. That moment was a bit of badly needed medicine.
What are you looking forward to now that your term as Director is finished?
Being Director was wonderful, but it made it difficult for me to sustain the kind of thinking that characterizes my research: slow, concentrated, archival, at times dreamy or divergent. Now that I’ll have a leave in which to focus on research, I’ll be able to devote large blocks of time every day to writing and will hopefully make serious progress on my current book project Neither Dog Nor Master: An Essay in Stray Thinking, get back into writing the book I had started before I became director, but had to set aside due to the administrative workload and pandemic, On the Plurality of Worlds, as well as get a jump on a new book project I’m cowriting on with my friend and colleague Juan Carlos Kase, How To Fall Off a Roof: Gravity, Grace, and Risk in Moving Images. I feel I have a lot of catching up to do in this domain!
I’m also looking forward to teaching again. I haven’t had a chance to teach French Cinema since 2018, and there’s so much exciting new work to think about (both in terms of films and scholarship), and I have ideas for some new courses I’ll be excited to give time and space to developing. Plus, the graduate students I work with have had to be extra patient due to my overload, so I’m excited to devoting more time to supporting their research and careers once I’ve had a bit of a repose.
I might try to teach my canine companions some new tricks.
I’m particularly excited about having time to read more for research and pleasure, to get back to going to the movies on a regular basis, and of course, I’m really excited to see what our new Director, Alberto Zambenedetti is going to do. I think the best days are ahead of the Cinema Studies Institute.