Robert Allen, John Kuiper, and Russell Merritt discuss the history and future of cinema in the United States, saying that, by 1947, weekly moviegoers in the nation outnumbered the entire American population many times over. From their beginnings, movies clearly constituted important and aesthetic forces in American society, but what about the future of the cinema and cinema studies, as viewed from the mid-1980s?
At the time of this interview, Allen, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1986-87), was a professor in the Department of Radio and Motion Pictures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kuiper was director of the Department of Film at the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House, Rochester, N.Y. Merritt was professor of communications arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
This edition of Soundings was conducted by Wayne J. Pond.
