Malcolm Turvey


Malcolm Turvey is a British film scholar. He is currently Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture at Tufts University, and was the founding Director of Tufts's Film & Media Studies program. He previously taught at Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has been an editor of the journal October since 2001 and also serves on the editorial board of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind. He is a longtime board member of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image, and was a faculty fellow at Stanford University's Humanities Center in 2011-2012, and at Tufts's Center for the Humanities in 2024-2025.

Early life and education

Turvey was born in Barnet in North London, and grew up in nearby Finchley. He attended the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he earned a BA in Film Studies and English, and an MA in Film Studies. After moving to the States in 1992, he earned a PhD in Cinema Studies from New York University, where he studied primarily with avant-garde film scholar Annette Michelson and philosopher of film Richard Allen. Other notable film scholars who have influenced his work include David Bordwell and Noël Carroll.

Scholarship

Turvey works primarily in the areas of film theory, the philosophy and aesthetics of film, avant-garde film, and film and modernism. His work is deeply informed by analytic philosophy, and his first book, Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts, co-edited with Richard Allen, explores the implications of Wittgenstein's later philosophy for the study of film and the other arts. An exchange about these implications between Turvey and film scholar David Rodowick was published in October in 2007, and Turvey has recently been interviewed about the book's legacy. Turvey's first monograph, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition, employs the techniques of ordinary language philosophy to elucidate and criticize a strain of classical film theory Turvey refers to as "revelationism." Focusing on the film theories of Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, the book helped reignite scholarly interest in classical film theory and introduce film scholars to the tradition of ordinary language philosophy as practiced by Wittgenstein, Gilbert Ryle, Anthony Kenny, and others.
Turvey's work is also informed by cognitive psychology and cognitive film theory, although he believes there are significant limits to the kinds of questions about film and the other arts that can be answered by psychology and other sciences. He explores these limits in his most recent monograph, Film, Art, and the Limits of Science: In Defence of Humanistic Explanation, where he mounts a trenchant defence of the purpose and value of humanistic explanation, one that nevertheless acknowledges and welcomes the legitimate contribution of the sciences to the study of the arts. In 2020, David Bordwell published a section of this book criticizing some mirror neuron research on cinema as a guest entry on his blog. There followed an exchange of views between Turvey and proponents of mirror neuron research on cinema, Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra.
Turvey is also a scholar of modernism and avant-garde film, about which he has written two monographs. The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s, published as part of the October Books series, examines five canonical avant-garde films from the 1920s and the complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity they express: Rhythm 21, Ballet mécanique, Entr'acte, Un chien Andalou, and Man with a Movie Camera. It also criticizes the "modernity thesis" propounded by Walter Benjamin, Tom Gunning, and others. The book was a highly recommended Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book in 2012.
Meanwhile, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism —the first English-language book on Jacques Tati in several decades—analyzes Tati’s unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism. Considering films such as Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Play Time, and Trafic, Turvey shows how Tati drew on the rich legacy of comic silent film while modernizing its conventions in order to encourage his viewers to adopt a playful attitude toward the modern world. The book was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2020.
As a longtime editor of October, Turvey has edited numerous special issues and clusters of essays for the journal including, most recently, "Notes for Wavelength" in honor of legendary experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. Other special issues and essay clusters include: "Special Issue in Honor of Annette Michelson," co-edited with Rachel Churner, October 169 ; "Comedy and the Avant-Garde," October 160 ; "A Return to Classical Film Theory?" October 148 ; "Experimental Digital Cinema," October 137 ; "New Vertov Studies," co-edited with Annette Michelson, October 121 ; "Béla Balázs," October 115 ; "Michael Snow," October 114 ; "Hollis Frampton," October 109 ; and "The Projected Image in American Art of the 1960s and 1970s," October 103.
On the occasion of her retirement from New York University, Turvey co-edited, with Richard Allen, the festschrift in honor of Annette Michelson, one of the founding editors of October. In addition to the introduction to the festschrift, Turvey has published several essays about Michelson's seminal work.

Personal life

Turvey lives in Massachusetts with his wife and son. He plays the violin, and was a longtime member of the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra.

Books

  • Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey
  • Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey
  • Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition, Malcolm Turvey
  • The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s, Malcolm Turvey
  • Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism, Malcolm Turvey
  • Film, Art, and the Limits of Science: In Defence of Humanistic Explanation, Malcolm Turvey

    Articles

Turvey is the author of over 75 articles, including:
  • "Empathy: On Its Limitations and Liabilities," in What is Film Good For? Varieties of Ethical Experience in Cinematic Spectatorship, ed. Julian Hanich and Martin P. Rossouw, pp. 91–101.
  • "The Medium Matters! In Defense of Medium-Specificity in Classical Film Theory," in The Oxford Handbook of Film Theory, ed. Kyle Stevens, pp. 95–116.
  • "Cinematic Specificity, Intermediality, and the European Avant-Garde," in A Companion to Experimental Cinema, ed. Federico Windhausen, pp. 40–58.
  • "Parallelism and Complex Storytelling in Film and TV," in Contemporary Television: Cognition, Emotion and Aesthetics, ed. Ted Nannicelli and Héctor J. Pérez, pp. 214–33.
  • "Jacques Tati and the Philosophy of the Sight Gag," in Philosophy of Humor Yearbook, volume 2, pp. 27–44.
  • " Seeing-In and the Possibility of Progress in Analytic Philosophy," in Philosophy and Film: Bridging Divides, ed. Steven Gouveia, Diana Neiva, and Christina Rawls, pp. 11–25.
  • "Avant-Garde Film as Philosophy," in The Palgrave Handbook for the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa-Knoop, Shawn Loht, pp. 573–600.
  • "'Familiarity Breeds Contempt': Why Fascination, Rather than Repeat Exposure, Better Explains the Appeal of Antiheroes on Television," in Screening Characters: Theories of Character in Film, Television, and Interactive Media, ed. Aaron Taylor and Johannes Riis, pp. 231–47.
  • "Kaufman and Kopalin’s Moscow," in The City Symphony Phenomenon: Cinema, Art, and Urban Modernity Between the Wars, ed. Steven Jacobs, Eva Hielscher, and Anthony Kinik, pp. 76–85.
  • "Against Post-Cinema," with Ted Nannicelli, Cinéma & Cie: International Film Studies Journal XVI, nos. 26/27, pp. 33–44.
  • "Epstein, Sound and the Return to Classical Film Theory," Mise au Point no. 8 ; translated into French and reprinted in Jean Epstein: Actualité et Postérités, ed. Roxane Hamery et Éric Thouvenel, pp. 153–66.
  • "Vertov, the View from Nowhere, and the Expanding Circle," October 148, pp. 79–102.
  • "The Continuity of Narrative Comprehension," Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6, no. 1, pp. 49–56.
  • "Ken Jacobs: Digital Revelationist," October 137, pp. 107–24.
  • "Hitchcock, Unreliable Narration, and the Stalker Film," in The Hitchcock Annual, ed. Richard Allen and Sidney Gottlieb, pp. 153–78.
  • "Arnheim and Modernism," in Arnheim for Film and Media Studies, ed. Scott Higgins, pp. 31–49.
  • "Persistence of Vision: On the Films of Chantal Akerman," Artforum 46, no. 9, pp. 312–14.
  • "Theory, Philosophy, and Film Studies: A Response to D. N. Rodowick's 'An Elegy for Theory,'" October 122, pp. 110–20; reprinted in Film Theory Reader: Debates and Arguments, ed. Marc Furstenau, pp. 38–46.
  • "Vertov: Between the Organism and the Machine," October 121, pp. 5–18.
  • "Fiction, Imagination, and Simulation," Film Studies: An International Review 8, pp. 116–25.
  • "Dr. Tube and Mr. Snow," Millennium Film Journal 43-44, pp. 131–40.
  • "The Child in the Machine: On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow's *Corpus Callosum," October 114, pp. 29–42; reprinted in Michael Snow, ed. Annette Michelson and Kenneth White, pp. 181–196.
  • "Can Scientific Models of Theorizing Help Film Theory?" in Philosophy of Film: Introductory Texts and Readings, ed. Angela Curran and Tom Wartenberg, pp. 21–32.
  • "Philosophical Problems Concerning the Concept of Pleasure in Psychoanalytical Theories of Film," in Freud's Worst Nightmares, ed. Stephen Schneider, pp. 68–83.
  • "'A Neutral... Average Way of Looking at Things': The Films of Babette Mangolte," Framework 45, no. 1, pp. 70–84.
  • "Is Skepticism a Natural Possibility of Language? Reasons to be Skeptical of Cavell's Wittgenstein," in Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, pp. 117–36.
  • "Can the Camera See? Mimesis in Man with a Movie Camera," October 89, pp. 25–50.
  • "Seeing Theory: On Perception and Emotional Response in Current Film Theory," in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith, pp. 431–57.