Peter Harcourt (1931-2014).

Forsyth, Scott

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Peter Harcourt died on July 3, 2014 in Ottawa. He was often called the father of film studies in Canada. After studying with F.R. Leavis at Cambridge and working for the British Film Institute, he came home to Canada to found one of the first film programmes in the country at Queen's University in Kingston in 1969. He went on to help build the film departments at York University in Toronto and Carleton University in Ottawa. He was one of the founders of the Film Studies Association of Canada.

Peter's teaching, and his many books and countless articles, inspired several generations of students of film, especially Canadian film, to become critics, scholars and filmmakers. He was an important programmer for the Toronto International Film Festival, as it grew to be the impressive cultural spectacle that it is now, and inspired its promotion of Canadian filmmakers over the last decades.

Peter was a good friend of all of us at CineActiorv, he contributed regularly over the years, particularly on Canadian films and the films of Godard. In 2008, he built on a life-time of critical contemplation of Godard with an elegant summary, "Analogical Thinking: Organizational Strategies within the work of Jean-Luc Godard," available on our website, issue 75. More recently, he contributed "Remembering Robin" to our memorial issue for his old friend, Robin Wood, in issue 84.

Many moving memorial tributes have been published. See Geoff Pevere, Prof Saw Film as Form of Resistance, July 10, 2014, theglobeandmail.com and Seth Feldman, In Memoriam, filmstudies.ca. I will fondly remember Peter as a teacher and friend. He will be missed by his many friends, former students, filmmakers and film lovers across Canada.