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MEMORIAL RESOLUTION
HARRY MAURICE GEDULD
(March 3, 1931 – January 21, 2016)
Harry Maurice Geduld, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature, West European
Studies, and Film Studies at Indiana University passed away peacefully in his sleep on January
10, 2016 at the Morgantown Health Care Inn after a long battle with dementia.
He was born in London in 1931 to Ann and Sol Geduld and survived the Great Depression
and the London Blitz. Although the Geduld family lost three houses in the war, everyone
survived. Coming from working-class roots, Harry Geduld’s intelligence and drive got him into
the prestigious Latymer Upper School, one of the top “public schools” (what Americans would
actually understand as a private prep school) in the United Kingdom.
After finishing his undergraduate degree and Masters degree at Sheffield University,
Professor Geduld completed his doctorate at the University of London in 1961 with a massive
dissertation on George Bernard Shaw that took up three volumes.
In 1959, he first came to Bloomington as a Fulbright scholar and fell in love with America,
emigrating for good in 1962. He became an American citizen after his first son was born and
was fond of saying he was, “British by birth, American by choice.” In 1962, he joined the
Indiana University faculty, eventually becoming chair of Comparative Literature from 1990 to
1996. He taught a wide range of courses on British, European, and American drama.
The creator, in 1964, of Indiana University’s Film Studies Program and its first Director of
Film Studies, Professor Geduld is also credited with having introduced sixteen undergraduate
and three graduate film courses into the IU curriculum. Among these was the first film course,
based on film adaptations of Shakespeare plays. He taught courses on Silent Cinema,
Screenwriting, Film Genres, and such major figures as Griffith, Eisenstein, and Chaplin. In 1979
he was the recipient of Indiana University’s Distinguished Teaching Award.
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Professor Geduld published more than thirty books and numerous articles and reviews on
literary and film topics, humorous and autobiographical short stories, limericks and essays. His
publications include Chapliniana, Birth of the Talkies, The Girl in the Hairy Paw, Versicles and
Worsicles, The Purim Spiel and The Definitive Time Machine. His vast knowledge of film and
filmmaking allowed him to lecture at the Sorbonne for the Charlie Chaplin Centenary
celebration, have lunch with Fellini, and meet many Hollywood greats including Frank Capra
and Myrna Loy, and become a friend of the director Edward Dmytryk. Many of his students
went on to work in the film industry, most notably the Academy Award-winning screenwriter,
Bruce Joel Rubin. Rubin’s first film, Brainstorm, was originally a screenplay written for a seminar
Professor Geduld taught on screenwriting.
Harry Geduld was also a beloved teacher and mentor of graduate students. Anthony
Guneratne, who today is Professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida
Atlantic University, and director of its Graduate Certificate in Film and Culture, wrote his
dissertation under the guidance of Professor Geduld. He recently wrote the following about his
IU experience with Professor Geduld:
“The decisive influence on my academic career was unquestionably that of
Professor Harry Geduld. He was a walking encyclopedia of film and published at
least one book a year, some of which I read in proofs. An insightful formal critic
of canonical films and directors, he also had an astonishing command of issues in
popular culture and of once scorned topics that have now attained a certain
academic dignity (fandom, memorabilia, the history of printing). He was, for me,
an ideal dissertation director, with a passionate love of music and a surprising
knowledge of the history of science: he invited ideas, was impatient with inferior
ones, never dissembled in disagreement, insisted on the originality of thought,
and showed a marked preference for epic intellectual engagements over
quibbling minutiae (but did quibble over minutiae when necessary). He read
every draft I wrote as if he were offering Shakespeare suggestions about
improvements that might have turned Titus Andronicus into King Lear — the
reference is not casual; one of the books he presented to me and which I have
cited often in my own books and articles pertaining to Shakespeare, happened to
be his monograph on Olivier’s Henry V adaptation. If my mother, a one-time
stage actress, had set me on the course towards Shakespeare, then twinning my
interest in Shakespeare and film must have been left to him.
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He listened with sympathy to tales of my wanderings from country to country in
my younger years. Only later, some time after he had become a close family
friend, did I discover that the travails of my childhood hardly compared with his,
for he had lost relatives to monstrous regimes, heard bombs dropping on his
neighborhood, and suffered an evacuation that separated him from his parents.
His experiences marked him but never diminished his passion for knowledge or
his immense curiosity and interest in every dimension of the world. Through him
I came to know and admire his family (and I still do not quite know whether they
adopted me or I them): I was very close to his parents who predeceased him,
and have remained profoundly attached to his wife and his sons. I have prided
myself on finding the best of teachers, whether microhistorians or film
historians, New Historicists or semioticians. Professor Geduld had little patience
for the rhetoric of theory, even less for the sloppy character of translations of
certain learned works from French and German. But he taught me to respect
strongly-held beliefs, was patient with my own very different interests,
attempted without success to reform the profligacy of my tastes in art and
music, and had me stay with his family in his home as I completed my first
monograph (a decade after I had ceased to be his charge), reading and
commenting on the final chapter as the pages left the printer. In recompense, all
I could do was the occasional favor, such as bundling his sick English Sheepdog
into my car and flying off to the vet with my pizza deliverer’s sense of traffic
regulations: the dog, a gigantic thing who had never resisted the instinct to herd
Prof. Geduld's sons when they were young, unfussily climbed into the back seat
of the car of his own accord, filling its entirety, while Prof. Geduld sat in the
passenger seat and closed his eyes during my more unnerving maneuvers
through a warren of streets.
Over the course of what has turned out to be a longer academic career than I
could have envisaged, it often occurred to me that it is unlikely that I could have
learned as much about film from any other film historian, utterly impossible that
I would have learned as much about life from anyone else at all. Over time, what
will abide will be a sense of gratitude that what he passed on to me is what I
have tried to pass on to many of my own students in an academic sense (one of
his books is on the syllabus for my grad seminar) and in the larger sense of
carding the wool of life and knitting a fabric fitted to the future.”
Harry Geduld was also a devoted father, husband and son and is survived by his wife of 52
years, Carolyn Geduld, his sons Marcus and Daniel and his granddaughter, Violet.
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Submitted by
Daniel J. Geduld
Anthony Guneratne, Professor of Communication and Multimedia Studies, Florida
Atlantic University
Eugene Eoyang, Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature, IUB
David Hertz, Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature, IUB
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