Dudley Andrew

Biography

Dudley Andrew studied English and Philosophy, then learned filmmaking before getting in on the ground floor just as Film Studies was taking off in the USA. His dissertation on film theorist André Bazin has funded several of his books, and has taken him frequently to France where he wrote two large histories of 1930s culture during the Popular Front era.   Andrew taught Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies at Iowa for years, directing the dissertations of many of today’s leaders in Film.  Coming to Yale in 2000, he chaired Comp Lit from 2009-2013.  In the department he has worked with graduate students primarily on the French literary and philosophical milieu, or on issues that cross between Cinema and Literature (aesthetics, translation, hermeneutics, critical theory, world literature/cinema).  He has taught undergraduate courses in World Cinema and in adaptation, as well as seminars related to the work of Bazin, whose writings he continues to edit in English translation. Andrew provides a link to French film history from personal encounters with Truffaut, Renoir, Resnais, Rohmer and other key figures. He is a “commandeur de  l’ordre des arts et des lettres,” a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he received the Lifetime Achievement award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Research Interests

French Literary, Cinematic, and Philosophical Culture 1919–1989; Aesthetics and Hermeneutics; Adaptation and Translation; Film Theory and Criticism; World Film (Asia, Europe, Africa).

Publications

Selected Recent Publications

• André Bazin on Adaptation, Cinema’s Literary Imagination (ed), Univ. Of California Press, 2022.
• André Bazin’s New Media (ed and tr.) University of California Press, 2014.
• Opening Bazin (edited with introduction), Oxford Univ Press (Winner SCMS best Anthology Award for 2011)
• A Companion to François Truffaut, ed with Anne Gillain. Wiley Blackwell 2013
• What  Cinema Is! Bazin’s Quest and its Charge.  Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. (French. ed. (SIC), 2014; Arabic 2014; Chinese, 2015)
• Popular Front Paris and the Poetics of Culture (with Steven Ungar). Harvard UP, 2005
• Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classical French Film. Princeton, 1995
• Film in the Aura of Art.  Princeton UP, 1984

Work in Progress

• French Cinema, a very short Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press, 2022
• Encountering World Cinema