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(More customer reviews)This is a terrific collection of essays that together make a case that cinema is really the formal realization of deep cultural changes in everyday life of 19th century Western modernity. It is especially useful for offering different disciplinary approaches to "modern life"; there are essays on the history visual perception (Crary), modes of philosophic thought (Charney), developments in cultural criticism, and the economics of early film. But these are augmented by many studies of social and cultural history that examine specific features of everyday life, from posters and wax museums to department stores and genres of the mass press.
These essays will enlarge the domain of film scholarship. But they are also valuable for scholars of 19th century culture broadly. Miriam Hansen's essay on Kracauer and Benjamin is especially good, and it offers a careful, thoughtful analysis of theoretical questions about mass culture that resonate with the rich range of materials presented in the volume as a whole.
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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.
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