Colin MacCabe

Career

MacCabe was educated at St Benedict's School, Ealing, and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his first degree and doctorate entitled James Joyce and the Revolution of the Word (which was subsequently revised and published in 1978). While a graduate student he attended the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris (1972–73), following courses by Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. In 1974 he was elected a research fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he remained from 1976 until 1981 as a university assistant lecturer in the history of Modern and Early Modern English in relation to literature, and also became a teaching fellow of King's College, Cambridge.

MacCabe became involved in Screen, a journal of film theory published by SEFT (Society for Education in Film and Television) https://academic.oup.com/screen, becoming a member of its board in 1973–78 and contributing essays such as "Realism and Cinema: Notes on Some Brechtian Theses" (1974). This was a period that critic Robin Wood described as the "felt moment of Screen" – the time when critical theories emanating from Paris in the late 1960s began to intervene in Anglophone film culture. By releasing the energy and intellectual debate associated with a major paradigm shift, Screen posed a "formidable and sustained challenge to traditional aesthetics" and academia. Screen attempted the ambitious project of linking cinema to other cultural and social frameworks, as part of an investigation of signification and the constitution of human subjectivity in history.

MacCabe came to public prominence in 1981 when he was denied tenure as a consequence of his position at the centre of a much publicised dispute within the faculty of English concerning the teaching of structuralism. His account of events was published three decades later in "A Tale of Two Theories".

After leaving Cambridge he took up a professorship of English at the University of Strathclyde (1981–85) where he was Head of Department and introduced graduate programmes developing it as a centre for literary linguistics. After over a decade, in which he combined his positions at the British Film Institute with a one-semester appointment at the University of Pittsburgh, he took up a fractional professorship at the University of Exeter (1998–2006), and then at Birkbeck, University of London (1992–2006). He is currently visiting Professor of English at University College, London and at the Birkbeck Institute. In 2011 he taught for a semester in the Department of Cultural Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University in Hyderabad. He was a visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in the Michaelmas term of 2014. Since 1986 he has remained a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

On leaving the University of Strathclyde in 1985, MacCabe began working for the British Film Institute, initially as Head of the Production Board and, from 1989, as Head of the Research and Education Department, setting up the London Consortium, relaunching Sight and Sound, initiating the BFI Classics series of short monographs, and producing the international series 100 Years of Cinema (with individual episodes directed by Oshima, Frears, Godard, Scorsese) on the centenary of cinema.

The swift termination of MacCabe’s role at the BFI in 1998 was part of a fundamental restructuring exercise at the Institute as the new chair Alan Parker and chief executive John Woodward abolished the Production Board, BFI TV, and MacCabe’s new MA. Production funding was centralised through the UK Film Council, part of New Labour’s plans for the "creative industries".

Writing and academic interests

After several earlier essays and a short book (Godard: Images,Sounds, Politics) on Jean-Luc Godard, MacCabe wrote a large-scale biography Godard: a Portrait of the Artist at Seventy (2003), gaining insight from collaboration with Godard on several productions and introducing an eight-week season of his late work screened on Channel 4 in 1985 together with a newly made programme, Soft and Hard. Many shorter books offered ideas and insights around specific texts, Nicholas Roeg and Donald Cammell's Performance (1998), T.S. Eliot (2006) and The Butcher Boy (2007) – the 1997 film made by Neil Jordan based on Patrick McCabe’s critically acclaimed 1992 novel. He is the author of Perpetual Carnival: Essays on Film and Literature (2017).

MacCabe has published widely on film and literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Jean-Luc Godard, and topics in the history and theory of language. He has served as chairman of the London Consortium, which he co-founded with Mark Cousins, Paul Hirst, and Richard Humphreys. He has edited Critical Quarterly, a magazine of literary and cultural criticism which is based in the UK at the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge and in the US at the Department of English, University of Pittsburgh since 1987.

He returned to full-time academia in 2001, becoming Executive Director of Pittsburgh’s London Study Abroad program and was made a Distinguished Professor of English and Film in 2002.

Funded by the AHRC, the Colonial Film Project 2007-2010 was co-directed with Lee Grieveson. Following Raymond Williams’s pioneering work in the 1980s on a historically founded etymology – Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, which began in 2005 will be completed in 2017.

Film and television production

MacCabe succeeded Peter Sainsbury as Head of the BFI Production Board, a funding agency that had developed to include the progressive amalgamation of avant garde, oppositional and art cinema; and supported the work of a wide range of filmmakers including Isaac Julien, Derek Jarman, Terence Davies and Gurinder Chada.

Minerva Films was formed with Paula Jalfon in 1998 and produced a series of television histories of cinema funded by the Independent Film Channel The Typewriter, The Rifle and Movie Camera (which won the Ace Cable award for best cultural documentary in 1996) also making The American Nightmare, Badass Cinema and The Spectre of Hope with Sebatiao Salgado. Minerva Pictures' final project was a portrait of Derek Jarman, Derek, directed by Isaac Julien.

When Tilda Swinton proposed a film about John Berger, with whom they had collaborated in Timothy Neat’s Play Me Something (1989), the result was realised with students from the London Consortium The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger and became the basis for establishing the Derek Jarman Lab at Birkbeck with Bartek Dziadosz, Lily Ford and Sarah Joshi.

Involvement in a wide range of filmmaking, developing artistic investigation through filmic means, MacCabe's movement between criticism and production, analysis and creativity has informed a range of diverse and agile intellectual enquiries across disciplinary boundaries in literature, philosophy and film.

Selected writings