Film and Modernity

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Professor Ben Singer University of Wisconsin-Madison
Event contact
Professor Lucia Nagib University of Leeds

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Film and Modernity or The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema: Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-Modernity Discourse

Abstract

Early discussions of film were animated by a rhetorical current stressing film's relationship to modernity. In many respects, the central precepts of the original discourse have informed recent scholarship similarly interested in relating film to various aspects of modernity. This talk will survey the historical discourse and assess contemporary work on the topic. It argues that recent scholarship has failed to recognize the degree to which a significant discursive counterimpulse - a kind of late Romantic antimodernity - affected both early ideas about film and early forms of film-making.

Biography

Ben Singer is Associate Professor of Film in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is author of 'Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts' (Columbia University Press, 2001). A book in press, entitled 'Modernism and the Space of Spectatorship', focuses on Alexander Bakshy's writings on theater and cinema, 1913-1933.