John C. Tibbetts

John C. Tibbetts (born Paola, Kansas, October 6, 1946 and grew up in Leavenworth, Kansas) is an American film critic, historian, author, painter, and pianist. He is currently a film professor at The University of Kansas.

Career

Tibbetts received a Ph.D. in 1982 from the University of Kansas in Multi-Disciplinary Studies - Art History, Theater, Photography, and Film. He was the first person to complete what was then regarded as an experimental curriculum in multi-disciplinary studies. He then was tenured as an associate professor. Under the general rubric of “visual literacy,” his coursework included film history, media studies, and theory and aesthetics.

Before entering the academy, John worked from 1980 to 1996 as a full-time broadcaster. He was an Arts and Entertainment Editor and Producer for a variety of radio and television outlets, including KCTV (Kansas City’s CBS affiliate), KMBC Radio, and KXTR-FM radio. During that time he also contributed many broadcast stories about musicians, painters, playwrights, and filmmakers to CBS Television, the Monitor Radio Network, Voice of America, and National Public Radio. More recently, he has produced two radio series about music, including the 15-part The World of Robert Schumann and the 17-part Piano Portraits, that have been broadcast worldwide and are now a part of the permanent collection of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Archives in Lincoln Center, New York. Both derive from his knowledge of music and feature numerous interviews with musicians and scholars in the musical field.

As a writer, he has published short stories, as well as scholarly and popular articles and books about the arts. Among his published short stories, one was featured in Twilight Zone magazine and one was selected by Ballantine Books for inclusion in The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Series Eight.

Music, theater, and film play a substantial part in his twelve books and more than 250 articles. Dvorak in America (Amadeus Press, 1993) was a multicultural study of the famous Czech composer’s sojourn in America from 1892–1895. The eminent cultural historian Robert Winter greeted the book enthusiastically: “Of all the books on American music at the turn of the century, none brings together so many interesting and richly interrelated dimensions as Dvorak in America.” An historical overview of the interactions of theater and film is explored in The American Theatrical Film (Popular Press, 1985), which is currently being used by Professor Charles Musser as a text in his courses at Yale University.

Film adaptations of theater and literature are the subjects of his various edited reference works, including The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film (Facts on File, 1998; rev., 2002), The Cinema of Tony Richardson (SUNY Press, 1999), The Encyclopedia of Stage Plays into Film (2001), and Shakespeare into Film (2002). The dramatization on film of the lives of classical and popular composers, Composers in the Movies: Studies in Musical Biography (Yale University Press, 2005), is the first scholarly study of the subject. It was praised by the dean of cultural studies, Professor Jacques Barzun, as “a welcome and worthwhile endeavor.” It received second prize from the prestigious International Association of Media Historians for “Best Book on Media Studies” in 2007.

Tibbetts continues to pursue his work as a painter and illustrator. He has executed many covers and interior illustrations for his articles and books. His work has been featured in gallery exhibitions in Kansas City and at the University of Kansas, where the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has reserved a wall for his paintings. He has had a lifelong passion for portraits, and claims to have painted thousands of them, on commission and on his own. He has exploited his opportunities as a broadcast interviewer to draw hundreds of images of popular actors, filmmakers, musicians, many personally inscribed and autographed.

His ability as a pianist of twelve years’ training has resulted in a secondary career accompanying silent movies at venues including the American Film Institute Theatre in Washington, D.C., the Silent Film Festival in Topeka, Kansas, and the annual Buster Keaton Celebrations in Iola, Kansas.

In addition to his teaching responsibilities and mentoring activities at the University of Kansas (where he has served as Associate Chair for the Department of Theater and Film), John brings his knowledge and experience in the arts to a wider community service. For the Kansas Humanities Council he has lectured and presented topics on the arts and local history to many communities around the state, such as Garden Grove, Ottawa, and Council Grove. For more than twenty years he has appeared as an arts commentator and critic on the Walt Bodine Show on KCUR-FM radio, Kansas City, and, more recently, as a reporter and film critic on Kansas Public Radio. He organized the “Buster Keaton Celebrations,” held annually in Iola, Kansas since 1992 and sponsored by the Kansas Humanities Council. In the 1980s he provided program notes for the concerts of the Kansas City Camerata Chamber Orchestra.

Broadcast series

Publications

Publications on music

Books and articles on literature and film

Books and articles on film and filmmakers

Awards

References

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