On March 28th, during the 2017 annual meeting of The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS), the Katherine Singer Kovács Book Award for outstanding scholarship in cinema and media studies will be presented to prof. Thomas Waugh for his magisterial The Conscience of Cinema. The Works of Joris Ivens, 1912-1989. It is thé ultimate peer review recognition of the intellectual quality and vibrance of this first book about the complete film oeuvre of Joris Ivens.
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) is the leading scholarly organization in the United States (with 3.000 members around the world) dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in the contemporary humanities tradition. The annual meeting and presentation of the award will take place on March 28th.
Needless to say that prof. Waugh is very happy with this prestigious award. The writing of this book of 780 pages was a more or less a life time achievement, because it already started when Waugh studied. His disseration in 1981 analysed already on a remarkable level the filmoeuvre of Joris Ivens between 1926 and 1946. In recent years Waugh expanded his reserach to all films of Ivens between 1912 and 1989. His text and ideas about Ivens are brilliant, evocative and provoking, exploring the complete spectre on all continents and during all periods of his carreer the committed, radical documentary and its context.
The book has been published in the Framing Film book series, dedicated to theoretical and analytical studies in restoration, collection, archival, and exhibition practices in line with the existing archive of EYE Filmmuseum. With this series, Amsterdam University Press and EYE aim to support the academic research community, as well as practitioners in archive and restoration. For the research Waugh did long term research in the Joris Ivens Archives in Nijmegen. André Stufkens from the Ivens Foundation and Bill Nichols wrote the prefaces.