Ivan Illich’s call to deschool society is certainly a challenging one, and even if I have a hard time imagining many of his propositions coming to fruition given the stacked deck against which such endeavorsContinue reading
Author: James Kendrick
James Kendrick is an assistant professor in the Film and Digital Media Division of the Department of Communication Studies at Baylor University, where he teaches classes on film theory/aesthetics, the history of motion pictures, the history of radio and television, and media and society.
He earned a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture from Indiana University, Bloomington, and also holds a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Journalism, both from Baylor University. His primary research interests are post-Classical Hollywood film history, violence in the media, cult and horror films, media censorship and regulation, and cinema and new technologies. He has published several book chapters and peer-reviewed journal articles in The Velvet Light Trap, the Journal of Film and Video, and the Journal of Popular Film and Television, as well as presented papers at several conferences. In addition to his academic work, he is also the film and DVD critic for the web site Qnetwork.com (where he has written over 1,600 feature-length reviews). He is a member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, the University Film and Video Association, and the Online Film Critics Society.
He lives in Waco, TX, with his wife, Cassie, who is a doctoral student in Baylor's Psy.D. program, and their two beautiful "children," Ripley and Red.
What We Talk About When We Talk About …
Near the beginning of Sherry Turkel’s chapter “Video Games and Computer Holding Power,” she makes a curious statement that resonates with many of my own experiences regarding the media. Writing about the controversy and debateContinue reading
Understanding McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan broke into the world of communication theory in 1964 with his equally heralded and deplored third book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. In a single brilliant, maddening work, McLuhan, a Toronto-based EnglishContinue reading
Of Anti-Westerns and Fish Bowls
This isn’t related to probably anything we will discuss in class regarding Computer Lib / Dream Machines, but in my routine background research on Theodor H. Nelson I discovered that he is the son ofContinue reading
You Gotta Respect the Man Who Invented the Mouse
I’ll be honest–I had no end of difficult in making my way through Douglas Engelbart‘s “Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework.” This is not to say that the essay, which is actually a report heContinue reading
Knowledge, Retrieval, and My Unshakeable Love of the Printed Page
Vannevar Buch’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is amazing in its forward-thinking approach to the nature of content management–essentially how we store information, retrieve it, make use of it, and develop knowledge as aContinue reading
Lola Montès (Max Ophuls, 1955)
This lavish CinemaScope epic is a fitting testament to the enormity of Ophuls’ vision even though it was a commercial and critical disaster that was unceremoniously butchered by its producers to try to recoup theirContinue reading
The Crazies (Breck Eisner, 2010)
Eisner maintains the underlying themes—distrust of those around us, the thin line between sanity and insanity, the complementary terrors of organized versus hysterical violence—of Romero’s original film while also remedying its fundamental budgetary problems andContinue reading
Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010)
At his core, in his soul, Scorsese is a genre filmmaker, and from that perspective, Shutter Island is the perfect Scorsese vehicle, as it allows him to take a well-worn genre (the psychological thriller withContinue reading
Make Way for Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)
With a complete lack of both sentimentality and judgment, this touching, deeply moving drama pursues the hard-edged truths about the physical and emotional dispersion of the modern American family and the way in which differentContinue reading