Synopses & Reviews
Casting aside the traditional conception of film as an outgrowth of photography, theater, and the novel, the essays in this volume reassess the relationship between the emergence of film and the broader culture of modernity. Contributors, leading scholars in film and cultural studies, link the popularity of cinema in the late nineteenth century to emerging cultural phenomena such as window shopping, mail-order catalogs, and wax museums.
Synopsis
"This is one of the finest, freshest, and most suggestive anthologies I've come across in recent years."Stuart Liebman, City University of New York Graduate Center
About the Author
Leo Charney is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Iowa and Vanessa R. Schwartz is Assistant Professor of History at The American University in Washington, D.C.
Table of Contents
Tracing the individual body : photography, detectives, and early cinema / Tom Gunning -- Unbinding vision : Manet and the attentive observer in the late nineteenth century / Jonathan Crary -- Modernity, hyperstimulus, and the rise of popular sensationalism / Ben Singer -- The poster in fin-de-siáecle Paris : "that mobile and degenerate art" / Marcus Verhagen -- "A new era of shopping" : the promotion of women's pleasure in London's West End, 1909-1914 / Erika D. Rappaport -- Disseminations of modernity : representation and consumer desire in early mail-order catalogs / Alexandra Keller -- The perils of Pathâe, or the Americanization of the American cinema / Richard Abel -- Panoramic literature and the invention of everyday genres / Margaret Cohen -- Moving pictures : photography, narrative, and the Paris Commune of 1871 / Jeannene M. Przyblyski -- In a moment : film and the philosophy of modernity / Leo Charney -- Cinematic spectatorship before the apparatus : the public taste for reality in fin-de-siáecle Paris / Vanessa R. Schwartz -- Effigy and narrative : looking into the nineteenth-century folk museum / Mark B. Sandberg -- America, Paris, the Alps : Kracauer (and Benjamin) on cinema and modernity / Miriam Bratu Hansen.