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The "public sphere" is a key concept in political discourse,
designating a space for political action. But is this a single
authoritative and universal space in which various positions
compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local
spaces spread over diverse collectivities? In Kluge and Negt's
groundbreaking book they examine the material conditions of
experience in an arena that had previously figured only as an
abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture. With new,
up-to-date introduction from Alexander Kluge.
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno -
affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument -
developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which
technological media played a key role. This book explores in depth
their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period
up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive
archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials
and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including
Benjamin's artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from
these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience
that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture
evolves in response to digital technology.
Although cinema was invented in the mid-1890s, it was a decade more
before the concept of a "film spectator" emerged. As the cinema
began to separate itself from the commercial entertainments in
whose context films initially had been shown-vaudeville, dime
museums, fairgrounds-a particular concept of its spectator was
developed on the level of film style, as a means of predicting the
reception of films on a mass scale. In Babel and Babylon, Miriam
Hansen offers an original perspective on American film by tying the
emergence of spectatorship to the historical transformation of the
public sphere. Hansen builds a critical framework for understanding
the cultural formation of spectatorship, drawing on the Frankfurt
School's debates on mass culture and the public sphere. Focusing on
exemplary moments in the American silent era, she explains how the
concept of the spectator evolved as a crucial part of the classical
Hollywood paradigm-as one of the new industry's strategies to
integrate ethnically, socially, and sexually differentiated
audiences into a modern culture of consumption. In this process,
Hansen argues, the cinema might also have provided the conditions
of an alternative public sphere for particular social groups, such
as recent immigrants and women, by furnishing an intersubjective
context in which they could recognize fragments of their own
experience. After tracing the emergence of spectatorship as an
institution, Hansen pursues the question of reception through
detailed readings of a single film, D. W. Griffith's Intolerance
(1916), and of the cult surrounding a single star, Rudolph
Valentino. In each case the classical construction of spectatorship
is complicated by factors of gender and sexuality, crystallizing
around the fear and desire of the female consumer. Babel and
Babylon recasts the debate on early American cinema-and by
implication on American film as a whole. It is a model study in the
field of cinema studies, mediating the concerns of recent film
theory with those of recent film history.
Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno -
affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument -
developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which
technological media played a key role. This book explores in depth
their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period
up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive
archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials
and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including
Benjamin's artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from
these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience
that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture
evolves in response to digital technology.
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