Babel and BabylonAlthough 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. |
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Contents
A Cinema in Search of a Spectator FilmViewer Relations before Hollywood | 23 |
Early Audiences Myths and Models | 60 |
Chameleon and Catalyst The Cinema as an Alternative Public Sphere | 90 |
Babel in Babylon D W Griffiths Intolerance 1916 | 127 |
Reception Textual System and SelfDefinition | 129 |
A Radiant CrazyQuilt Patterns of Narration and Address | 141 |
Genesis Causes Concepts of History | 163 |
Film History Archaeology Universal Language | 173 |
Riddles of Maternity | 199 |
Crisis of Femininity Fantasies of Rescue | 218 |
The Return of Babylon Valentino and Female Spectatorship19211926 | 243 |
Male Star Female Fans | 245 |
Patterns of Vision Scenarios of Identification | 269 |
Notes | 297 |
Illustration Credits | 366 |
367 | |
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Common terms and phrases
Alexander Kluge allegorical American Film audiences Babylon Biograph Biograph films Birth camera character Charles Musser classical cinema Classical Hollywood Cinema close-up concept Cradle shot critical culture D W Griffith David Bordwell diegesis diegetic discourse Doane early cinema early films entertainments erotic essay ethnic exhibition experience fantasy female femininity fictional figure film history film theory film's filmic Freud Friendless function gaze gender genres hieroglyphic identification ideological immigrant institution intertitle Intolerance Kluge Lillian Gish look male Mary Ann Doane masculinity metaphor middle-class mobility mode Modern narrative mother Motion Picture Movies narration nickelodeon parallel particular perverse pleasure popular production prostitute public sphere reception relations representation Rudolph Valentino scopic scopophilia screen sequence sexual social space specific spectator spectator's spectatorship Staiger star story strategies structural style textual theater tion tradition trans universal language University Press Valentino vaudeville viewer vision visual Vitagraph voyeurism Walter Benjamin woman women working-class York
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Page 15 - It cannot be put out of view that the exhibition of moving pictures is a business pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit, like other spectacles, not to be regarded, nor intended to be regarded by the Ohio constitution, we think, as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion.