Jeffrey Ruoff
Jeffrey Ruoff
Jeffrey Ruoff (born 1962, Champaign-Urbana, IL, United States) is a nonfiction film historian and documentary filmmaker, author of books and films.
Biography
Ruoff was born in Ithaca, NY where he attended Ithaca High School (Ithaca, New York) and later Cornell. Upon graduating high school, Ruoff traveled, worked, and lived in France for a year. Ruoff’s curiosity in film began when he encountered a movie theatre in Paris that was hosting a Kurosawa retrospective, where he saw for the first time multiple films a day. However, Ruoff truly became interested in film in college, inspired by Cornell Cinema, the university’s film series program. Nightly screenings introduced Ruoff and friends to genres that would later become topics of his scholarship and teaching, such as documentary and the French New Wave. As a college senior in 1984-1985, Ruoff studied abroad in Paris, France, at the American Center for Cinema and Critical Studies. While in Paris, he also took three courses with ethnographic and French new wave filmmaker Jean Rouch, who introduced him to anthropology.
After graduating Cornell University (1985) with a B.A. in Romance Languages, Ruoff received his M.F.A in Radio-Television-Film from Temple University (1989), where he studied with visual anthropologist Jay Ruby, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa (1995), where he studied with anthropologist Rich Horwitz and film scholars Lauren Rabinovitz, Rick Altman, and Dudley Andrew.
As a Ph.D. candidate, Ruoff won First Prize in the Society for Cinema Studies Student Writing Competition in 1990 and Third Prize in 1991. In 1994-95, he received a Fulbright Research Grant to return to Paris, France, and, in 1997-1998, a National Endowment for the Humanities Research Grant.
After receiving his Ph.D., Ruoff taught at Vassar College, on a Luce Teaching Fellowship (1995-1996), the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands (1996-1997), and Middlebury College (1999-2001), before beginning his current position at Dartmouth College (2001-present).
At Dartmouth, he is a full-time tenured faculty member in Film and Media Studies. His scholarship and creative work includes books on film history and documentary film. His written work focuses principally on nonfiction and independent cinema: the role of the travelogue in film history, historical memories of the Pacific War in Japanese documentary, home movies, and the roots of American nonfiction film and television. Since 2012, his writing has centered on film festivals as spaces for alternative media exhibition and debate that boost the public sphere, including a 2016 book about the Telluride Film Festival.
Ruoff teaches production courses in documentary and experimental video making, as well as history classes in ethnographic film, the French New Wave, and North African cinema. In 2012, he created Dartmouth’s first foreign study Film program, in Edinburgh, Scotland, centered around the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Ruoff speaks French and Italian, and has lived and worked in the U.S., France, the Netherlands, Tunisia, and Scotland.
Selected Publications
In 1998, Jeffrey Ruoff co-authored (with his brother, Kenneth Ruoff), ‘’The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On’’, about historical memories of the Pacific War in Japanese cinema. His next book, ‘’An American Family: A Televised Life’’ (published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2002) tells the story behind the 1973 documentary TV series, ‘’An American Family’’, from conception to long term impact. In 2005, the book was optioned by a Hollywood screenwriter for a feature film about the series. Ruoff explores the documentary’s immediate impact on both producers and viewers and its influence on new nonfiction forms of media.
He has edited two anthologies: ‘’Coming Soon to a Festival Near You; Programming Film Festivals’’ with St. Andrews Film Studies in 2012 with contributions from - among others - New York Film Festival director Richard Peña, producer and screenwriter James Schamus, and Hiroshima International Animation Festival founder/director Sayoko Kinoshita, and ’Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel’’ with Duke University Press in 2006, with chapters by film scholars such as Tom Gunning, Hamid Naficy, Paula Amad, and Allison Griffiths.
In 2016, his monograph ‘’Telluride in the Film Festival Galaxy’’ was published by St. Andrews. Through archival research, interviews, and attendance, this book analyses Telluride’s origins and historical development as a multi-layered institution. Ruoff reveals how Telluride’s practices have defined film as an art form, the importance of business factors and sponsorship, the heightened nature of its exhibition practices, and changing features of the global festival landscape.Cite error: Invalid parameter in <ref> tag
Ruoff’s current manuscript-in-progress, ‘’Out of the Shadow of Cannes: Film Festivals in France’’, explores the rich diversity of festivals in France, obscured by an over-emphasis on the Cannes Film Festival.
A list of Ruoff’s additional academic book chapters, articles, and essays appears here.
Documentaries
Beginning in 2009, Ruoff was inspired to make a documentary on the ethos and history of the Pilobolus dance troupe. Still Moving: Pilobolus at Forty (38 minutes, 2012) follows the story of four male athletes at Dartmouth who join a dance class and eventually develop their own art form. Their collaborative work in the 1970s led to the creation of Pilobolus, a group that “broke the rules of dance to make something new.” Ruoff captures the dance troupe’s philosophy, but also the company’s lifestyle- its evolution, transformation, and regeneration. Ruoff spent three and a half years producing and directing [1], which had its avant-premiere at Lincoln Center in New York and its premiere at the Mill Valley Film Festival in California. “Still Moving” received the Jury Award for Best Short Documentary at the 2013 Sebastopol Documentary Film Festival in Sebastopol, CA, and an Award for Best Cinematography at the 2014 Vermont International Film Festival in Burlington, VT.
Ruoff’s other films include “Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown” (60 minutes, co-directed with Andrew Truppin, 1993) about the celebrated folksinger from Iowa, and “The Last Vaudevillain: On the Road with Travelogue Filmmaker John Holod (30 minutes, 1998), an exploration of 16mm film lecturers (cf., Ruoff’s companion essay “Around the World in Eighty Minutes: The Travel Lecture Film”).
Public Voice
In addition to publishing scholarly articles and books, Ruoff also has a public voice in mainstream newspapers and magazinesCite error: Invalid parameter in <ref> tag. Most notably, his Op-Ed “An American Citizen Apologizes to the Iraqi People” was published in the U.S. by the “Huffington Post”Cite error: Invalid parameter in <ref> tag, in Iraq by “Sotal Iraq” as“مواطن أمريكي يقدم اعتذاره للشعب العراقي عن الغزو الأمريكي للعراق,” and in France by Mediapart. Cite error: Invalid parameter in <ref> tag
References
- ↑ Dartmouth Professor Brings Pilobolus to DVD. "Valley News."
External Links
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