George Stephen Semsel papers

George Stephen Semsel (GSS) was a professor in the School of Film at Ohio University for approximately forty years. GSS earned his interdisciplinary doctorate at the Ohio State University, combining studies in photography and film with studies in curriculum development in higher education. H e has a B.A. in literature from Wagner College and holds an M.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and a second, in film studies, from New York University, where he managed The Drama Review. GSS began filmmaking in 1953. During the Underground Film Movement of the 1960s, he was associated with Marie Menken and Willard Maas in the Gryphon Film Group. In 1984, GSS spent a year working in the Chinese film industry, then under the Ministry of Culture. His first Fulbright sent him to Thailand, and his second had him teaching modern American literature and film at Shandong University in the People's Republic of China. A pioneer of Chinese film studies, GSS published the first book on the subject following the cultural revolution and in two other introduced Chinese film theory to the U.S.