Steve Ricci (1952–2020)

Abstract

Steve Ricci (1952–2020) Eric Smoodin (bio) I met Steve Ricci for the first time in September 1977, when I began the master's program, in what was then called critical studies, at UCLA. Steve had begun his MA just one year before, but he already seemed so far advanced, so ahead of most of us. That wasn't because of any intellectual showmanship or posturing. Rather, Steve was just very, very smart, and very committed, even then, to his scholarship. At least to me, he also looked the part; he had that great, thick head of longish hair and the round glasses with dark frames, and he was usually smoking European cigarettes and, at department parties at least, always sipping from a glass of Scotch. He may have been out of central casting as a 1970s-style film studies intellectual, but he was also the real deal. And as so many of us can attest, he was warm and approachable. When I was a teaching assistant for the first time, a year later, and a little panicked about how to grade student papers, I went to Steve for help. I had watched him, in the TA office, make meticulous comments on papers and type long narratives at the end of each one, and he was kind enough to walk me through a few grading lessons, suggesting what I might look for and the things I might ask students to work on. Even then, Steve had significant connections to Europe, especially Italy. He was responsible for one of my first publications, when I was still in grad school, a piece I wrote for a seminar about early television that Steve sent along to an Italian editorial collective, which then translated and included it in a book about Hollywood. I don't mean for these stories to be simply about my relationship with Steve. He and I were friends and grad school colleagues, but there were lots of people at the time, and in the program, to whom he was much closer. Instead, these are stories that are typical of Steve. After we both left grad school, I would see him now and again, occasionally, when I came back to Los Angeles, or at a Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, or someplace else. Those visits became much fewer and [End Page 307] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Steve Ricci. Photograph courtesy of Steve's wife, Mannig Gurekian. further between after Steve experienced significant health problems—every so often, on Facebook, when the Lakers won an important game, or on a birthday, or just through a quick comment on some photo or other. When Steve died, I read some of the online appreciations. They supplied information that I already knew about Steve's terrific scholarship, from The Mexican Cinema Project in 1994 to his groundbreaking study, Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943, from 2008. I had known broadly about his archival work and especially that he had been the founding director of UCLA's moving image archives studies program. But I hadn't known all of the details: his curatorial work in Italy, for instance, or the contributions he made to the American Film Institute, or his extensive service for the International Federation of Film Archives. The clearest image I have of Steve is still from more than forty years ago, talking about semiotics or psychoanalysis or especially Marxism. I know that there are so many friends from grad school, from Steve's long career as an archivist, from his life as a teacher, who think of him, as I do, as a vibrant presence in their lives. For those who knew him, for his family especially and for his many friends and colleagues, may his memory be a blessing. [End Page 308] Eric Smoodin Eric Smoodin is professor of American studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author, most recently, of Paris in the Dark: Going to the Movies in the City of Light (2020). Copyright © 2021 Association of Moving Image Archivists