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Abstract: While Raymond Williams's television study is foundational for the field, less known is that Williams wrote extensively-and intelligently-on cinema. Based in large part on research in the Raymond Williams Papers at Swansea University, Wales, this essay offers a genealogy of Williams's continued engagement with film as cultural form.
Had Raymond Williams written nary a word concerning the modern culture of the moving image, his vast body of work would still be of compelling interest to scholars in the areas of film, television, and media study. Williams ( 1921-1988) is arguably the most important cultural theorist and critic of twentieth-century Britain. His early, groundbreaking intellectual history of English thought on the idea of culture. Culture and Society (1958), is readily considered (along with Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy and ?. ? Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class) one of the triumvirate of works that fundamentally estab- lished the field of Cultural Studies, and his follow-up volume. The Long Revolution (1961), was key to the founding of the British New Left (along with a later text cowritten by Williams and Thompson with others. The May Day Manifesto). Elis first major work in Media Studies, Communications (1962),, was a best seller and made an essential contribution to the discipline in the LTnited Kingdom, and to the in- spired idea of teaching Media Studies through extension programs such as Open LTniversity. Elis works of literary and dramatic criticism, such as The Country and the City (1973) and Modern Tragedy (1966), are models in the unification of techniques of close reading with broader reflection on literary texts' place in society. Elis ef- forts at social theorizing in books such as Problems in Materialism and Culture (1981) and Marxism and Literature (1977) established the value of "cultural materialism" as a mode of analysis.
A veritable interdiscipliiiarian, Williams drew on diverse fields of thought in the ;;; humanities (and social sciences) to conduct his cultural investigation-from literary £ criticism to drama. Media and Communication Studies, social thought and politi- ^ cal theory, linguistics and anthropology, and cultural study more broadly. Concepts 0 and phrases from across the range of his work have become key to the ongoing 1 work of Cultural Studies and, in many cases, have...