It is with sadness that SCMS notes the death of Professor Paul Willemen, retired Research Professor at the Centre for Media Research at the University of Ulster at Coleraine.

Paul Willemen embraced academic life relatively late, arriving at the University of Ulster at Coleraine in 1999 after a short spell at Napier University in Edinburgh. He had already built a formidable reputation within film studies. While working for the British Film Institute, he played a key role in the 1970s and 1980s, helping define the subject area in the UK and also helping to shape and mould the subject's theoretical terrain and institutional structures. These earlier years were characterized by his dual commitment to promoting a "cinephiliac” understanding of popular cinema – especially mainstream American cinema – and to promoting an understanding of alternative cinema in all its formal and political diversity. He is particularly remembered for proposing the notion of "Third Cinema” as a way of understanding political cinema.

Paul Willemen helped to illuminate a range of other theoretical pathways as well, including the concept of comparative film studies and the pleasures of and political contexts of the action film, especially in its heroic classical mode. He was vexed and intrigued by the concept of national cinema and his dissatisfaction with the "national” was the spur to his interest in comparative film studies. During this time he co-edited the influential collection Theorizing National Cinema, which joined prior seminal interventions including Questions of Third Cinema (1990) and Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory (1994). Paul Willemen's death has deprived us of one of the most accomplished and challenging intellects in our field.