Annette Michelson, Influential Film Writer, Is Dead at 95

Her family eventually moved to Brooklyn, where Annette, a voracious reader, spent many hours in the public library. She commuted to Hunter College High School in Manhattan, then attended Brooklyn College, graduating in 1945. She pursued graduate studies in art history and philosophy at Columbia University. She left New York for Paris in 1950, continuing her studies at the University of Paris and immersing herself in the city’s artistic life.

Ms. Michelson initially hoped to become an actress. Professor Liebman said she fell in with a circle of theater people around the director Roger Blin and had the opportunity to observe his rehearsals of the world premiere of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” first staged in early 1953.

At the Sorbonne, she heard lectures by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings about perception and aesthetics influenced her, and by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose ideas on Structuralism — a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity — she would later help bring to the United States.

While in France she wrote and edited for several publications and translated the essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and others. She returned to New York in 1966 and, the next year, helped start a program in cinema history and criticism at New York University’s Graduate School of the Arts and Science.

Ms. Michelson taught at N.Y.U. for decades, leading courses, seminars and conferences on a wide range of topics. She was named a professor emerita in 2004.

“She was for 50 years — in her writing and teaching — in the forefront of repositioning the study of film from being a subset of literature to being a discipline in its own right, in dialogue with the visual arts,” Ms. Taubin said.

Ms. Michelson became an associate editor of Artforum in 1966, and she wrote for and helped plan numerous issues over the next decade. She was not given to write about popular movies of the day, but an exception was her 1969 Artforum essay on Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which had been released the year before.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/18/obituaries/annette-michelson-dead.html?partner=rss&emc=rss