Kracauer. Film, medium of a disintegrating world. -- Curious Americanism. -- Benjamin. Actuality, antinomies. -- Aura: the appropriation of a concept. -- Mistaking the moon for a ball. -- Micky-maus. -- Room-for-play. -- Adorno. The question of film aesthetics. -- Kracauer in exile. Theory of film.

Although 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.

This study explores the distinctive qualities of the cinematic medium. It includes an introduction which examines "Theory of Film" in the context of Kracauer's extensive film criticism from the 1920s, and provides a framework for appreciating its significance in contemporary film theory.

This issue is dedicated to the thought and writing of Miriam Hansen, whose contributions broke ground in film history, film theory, and the politics of mass culture and the public sphere. The collection focuses on the areas in which she was most influential: early cinema, its reception, and the legacy of vernacular modernism, including essays touching on the concept's impact on contemporary thinking about Russian and Chinese cinemas. The issue also features extensive commentary on Hansen's pioneering book Cinema and Experience, expanding on the book's inquiry into the continuing legacy of the Frankfurt School.

A Poiret dress, a Catholic shrine in France, Thomas Wallis's Hoover Factory building, an Edna Manley sculpture, the poetry of Bei Dao, the internal combustion engine- what makes such artifacts modernist? Disciplining Modernism explores the different ways disciplines conceive modernism and modernity, undisciplining modernist studies in the process.

An overview of film studies

"Lethen brilliantly interprets New Objectivity as a tactical response to the need for a 'code of conduct' in an age of anxiety about values and normative judgments. Moving effortlessly between analysis of philosophical texts and literary works, he charts an increasingly popular field of cultural studies: how cultural discourses shape behavior. One of the most original and daring contributions to Weimar scholarship and to the study of modernity in general in a decade."—Anton Kaes, University of California, Berkeley "Lethen is probably the most original and outstanding scholar writing in German today about Weimar literature and culture. He traces the figure of the 'cold persona' as part of a broader discourse of anthropological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions. The book is written in a personal voice, witty, lucid, and unpretentious."—Miriam Hansen, University of Chicago