Malcolm Turvey

Malcolm Turvey is the Sol Gittleman Professor in the Department of the History of Art & Architecture. He joined Tufts in 2015 to launch its new Film & Media Studies Program, and was the program's founding Director from 2015 until 2021. He is currently serving another term as Director of the program (2025-2028).

Turvey received his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University in 2002. He has been an editor of the journal October since 2001, and serves on the editorial board of Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind. He is also a longtime board member of the Society for the Cognitive Study of the Moving Image.

Turvey works primarily in the areas of film theory, the philosophy and aesthetics of film, avant-garde film, and film and modernism. His work is deeply informed by analytic philosophy, and his first book, Wittgenstein, Theory, and the Arts (Routledge, 2001), co-edited with Richard Allen, explores the implications of Wittgenstein's later philosophy for the study of film and the other arts. His first monograph, Doubting Vision: Film and the Revelationist Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2008), employs the techniques of ordinary language philosophy to elucidate and criticize a strain of classical film theory Turvey refers to as "revelationism." Focusing on the film theories of Jean Epstein, Dziga Vertov, Béla Balázs, and Siegfried Kracauer, the book helped reignite scholarly interest in classical film theory.

Turvey's work is also informed by cognitive psychology, although he believes there are limits to the kinds of questions about film and the other arts that can be answered by psychology and other sciences. He explores these limits in his most recent monograph, Film, Art, and the Limits of Science: In Defence of Humanistic Explanation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), where he mounts a trenchant defence of the purpose and value of humanistic explanation, one that nevertheless acknowledges and welcomes the legitimate contribution of the sciences to the study of the arts.

Turvey is also a scholar of modernism and avant-garde film, about which he as written two monographs. The Filming of Modern Life: European Avant-Garde Film of the 1920s (MIT Press, 2011), examines five canonical avant-garde films from the 1920s and the complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity they express: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mécanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, 1924), Entr'acte (Francis Picabia and René Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). It also criticizes the "modernity thesis" propounded by Walter Benjamin, Tom Gunning, and others. The book was a highly recommended Kraszna-Krausz Moving Image Book in 2012.

Meanwhile, Play Time: Jacques Tati and Comedic Modernism (Columbia University Press, 2019)--the first English-language book on Tati in several decades--analyzes Tati's unique comedic style and evaluates its significance for the history of film and modernism. Considering films such as Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (1953), Mon Oncle (1958), Play Time (1967), and Trafic (1971), Turvey shows how Tati drew on the rich legacy of comic silent film while modernizing its conventions in order to encourage his viewers to adopt a playful attitude toward the modern world. The book was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2020.

As a longtime editor of October, Turvey has edited numerous special issues and clusters of the journal including, most recently, "Notes for Wavelength" [October 184 (Spring 2023), pp. 27-57] in honor of legendary experimental filmmaker Michael Snow. Other special issues include: Special Issue in Honor of Annette Michelson, co-edited with Rachel Churner, October 169 (Summer 2019), 171pp.; Comedy and the Avant-Garde, October 160 (Spring 2017), pp. 3-126; A Return to Classical Film Theory? October 148 (Spring 2014), pp. 3-132; Experimental Digital Cinema, October 137 (Summer 2011), pp. 51-124; New Ver …