Description
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.
Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, Scott Curtis follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the 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.
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.
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
Book Information
ISBN 9780231134026
Author Scott Curtis
Format Hardback
Page Count 400
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
Series Film and Culture Series
Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, Scott Curtis follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the 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.
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.
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
Book Information
ISBN 9780231134026
Author Scott Curtis
Format Hardback
Page Count 400
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press
Series Film and Culture Series
