William Rothman

William Rothman (born June 25, 1944) is an American film theorist and critic.

After submitting his dissertation in 1973, he accepted a position as assistant professor in Cinema Studies at New York University.

Since receiving his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in 1974, he has authored numerous books, including Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History and Aesthetic (1988), and Tuitions and Intuitions: Essays at the Intersection of Film Criticism and Philosophy (2019). He was "part of a modern wave of thinkers to apply questions of philosophy to the medium of movies" during the 1980s, and his work contributed to the emergence of the sub-discipline that has come to be known as “film-philosophy.” Rothman has also written on aspects of film theory and on the writings of Stanley Cavell, an American philosopher who made film a major focus of his work.

He is currently Professor of Cinematic Arts in the School of Communication at the University of Miami.

William Rothman received his Ph.D. from Harvard's Philosophy Department, where Stanley Cavell was his dissertation advisor.

In 1976, a National Endowment for the Humanities grant brought him back to Harvard, "to develop a set of eight courses to the present curriculum in film and to develop new teaching and research tools...to help secure the humanistic incorporation of film into universities."

In Rothman's first book, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982), his stated goals were to achieve a philosophical perspective on Hitchcock's authorship and to investigate, philosophically, the conditions of authorship in film.

In pursuit of these goals, he performed extended readings, incorporating over 600 frame enlargements of five Hitchcock films.

In 1986, Rothman became Director of the International Honors Program on Film, Television and Social Change in Europe and Asia.

In 1989, he and his wife, filmmaker Kitty Morgan, wrote and co-produced (with the National Film Development Corporation of India) Unni, a 35mm feature film shot in South India and directed by the Indian filmmaker G. Aravindan.

In 1990, Rothman relocated to Florida to be a professor in the Motion Picture Program (now the Department of Cinematic Arts) at the University of Miami, where he served as Director of the Graduate Program in Film Studies for several years.

He was the founding editor of the "Harvard Film Studies" series at Harvard University Press, and also served as series editor for the "Cambridge Studies in Film" series at Cambridge University Press.

Rothman has published critical essays on films ranging from the works of Alfred Hitchcock and other “classical” directors (e.g., George Cukor, John Ford, Howard Hawks, Yasujiro Ozu, Jean Renoir, Billy Wilder) to more contemporary filmmakers (e.g., Chantal Akerman, the Dardenne brothers, Abbas Kiarostami, Terrence Malick).

His 1997 book Documentary Film Classics was part of a revival of scholarly interest in the subject, focusing on historically significant documentaries (from Nanook of the North and Land without Bread to Night and Fog, “direct cinema” films of Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, ethnographic films of Jean Rouch and Robert Gardner, and personal documentaries by Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee and Edward Pincus).

Rothman has also written on and edited collections of the writings of Cavell, which, according to scholar David LaRocca, have "helped the inheritance of Cavell’s relationship to film and thinking about film."

Rothman's later work focused on the implications of the affinities between Cavell's way of thinking and that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a moral and philosophical outlook Cavell named “Emersonian perfectionism.”