The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany

by Scott Curtis

Overview

Scott Curtis draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern spectatorship. Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, he follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the fascinating, at times fraught relationship between technology, discipline, and expert vision. As these specialists struggled to come to terms with motion pictures, they advanced new ideas of mass spectatorship that continue to affect the way we make and experience film. Staging a brilliant collision between the moving image and scientific or medical observation, visual instruction, and aesthetic contemplation, The Shape of Spectatorship showcases early cinema's revolutionary impact on society and culture and the challenges the new medium placed on ways of seeing and learning.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231508636
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	09/22/2015
Series:	Film and Culture Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	416
File size:	28 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Scott Curtis is associate professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, director of the Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar, and president of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Science's Cinematic Method: Motion Pictures and Scientific Research
2. Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies, and Mass Culture
3. The Taste of a Nation: Educating the Senses and Sensibilities of Film Spectators
4. The Problem with Passivity: Aesthetic Contemplation and Film Spectatorship
Conclusion: Toward a Tactile Historiography
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

I was invigorated and intrigued by the scholarly rigor, historical acumen, and interdisciplinary incentive of Scott Curtis's book. It brings significant inflections to our understanding of the multiple determinations of early German cinema as well as more generally to the complex relations between film and science.

Eric Rentschler

Scott Curtis has produced a fascinating study of the uses of cinema within medicine, science, and education in Germany in the early twentieth century. An exhaustive archival dig into cinema's uses by experts, The Shape of Spectatorship will itself shape conversations about cinema's usefulness as a way of observing and changing the world.

Alison Griffiths

This important, historiographically innovative book examines a wide range of materials from the fields of aesthetics, education, medicine, and science—and Curtis knows how to read early film—theoretical texts like poetry. An original contribution to media archaeology, Curtis's research illuminates new sources in the debates about the promise and possible uses of cinema in Germany and beyond.

Tony Kaes

Curtis's superb book marks a landmark in the emerging literature on the history of the relations between science and film, one that will serve as an important standard for future scholars.

Isis - Andreas Killen