Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture [Paperback]

The current digital revolution has sparked a renewed interest in the origins and trajectory of modern media, particularly in the years around 1900 when the technology was rapidly developing. This collection aims to broaden our understanding of early cinema as a significant innovation in media history. Joining traditional scholarship with fresh insights from a variety of disciplines, this book explains the aesthetic and institutional characteristics in early cinema within the context of the contemporary media landscape. It also addresses transcultural developments such as scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, as well as differing attitudes toward modernization.Film 1900is an important reassessment of early cinema's position in cultural history.

The capable Ligensa and Kreimeier invited a coterie of renowned Continental scholars and thinkers to reflect on issues of modernity and cinema by harking back to the fin de si?cle. Such archeological excavations into the cinema of attractions enable one to critique the specific predicament in the 21st century. Using a concept of 'triangulation,' the contributors look at the interrelationships between film, culture, and spectators (i.e., how they construed the emerging film apparatus of early silent film as it both shaped and was itself transformed by culture): for example, the eminent Thomas Elsaesser plays with the trope of the na?ve rube spectator who pops up throughout the history of media. Though technical and complex, the essays are not too abstruse for those fascinated with the moments of modernity (e.g., industrialization, urbanization, synchronicity, medical psychology, and so on) and the dynamics of perceptions (even, curiously enough, hypnosis). Particularly noteworthy for its richness is Kreimeier and Tom Gunning's foray into the energetic, thrilling spectacle of truly sensational motion (as in the phantom rides), where heightened consciousness of spatial landsl“„