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The Shape of Spectatorship
Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany
by Scott Curtis
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Book Presentation:
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.
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.
Press 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, Harvard University, author of The Use and Abuse of Cinema
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, University of California, Berkeley and author of Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War
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, author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
The Image in Early Cinema (2018)
Form and Material
by Scott Curtis, Tom Gunning, Philippe Gauthier and Joshua Yumibe
Subject: Silent Cinema
> On a related topic:
The Hygienic Apparatus (2022)
Weimar Cinema and Environmental Disorder
The Uncanny Gaze (2010)
The Drama of Early German Cinema
From Caligari to Hitler (2019)
A Psychological History of the German Film
Screening Nostalgia (2011)
100 Years of German Heimat Film
The Dream That Kicks (2017)
The Prehistory and Early Years of Cinema in Britain
Subject: Countries > Great Britain
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