Miriam Hansen
Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Transformations of the Public Sphere (1997)
discourse acquires historicity: film theory from 70s and 80s - esp. notion of spectator (Marxist and feminist, Baudry, Metz, Mulvey, etc.)
- shift from textual structures to processes of reception and spectatorship
- how cinema constructs the subject (reproduces the viewer as subject) and how viewers identify with these positions
- hypothetical ideal spectator - locus of impossibility (self denial and masochism)
- psychoanalytic and semiotic constructions fo the spectator (obsolete)
- cinema as site fo film consumption
- glance and the gaze
- private viewing vs. classical mode of spectatorship
- nostalgia
- specific forms of reception
- alternative practices and new forms of distribution/reception
- diff conception of relationship b/w film and viewer
Tom Gunning's Cinema of Attractions describes how early films functioned to generate excitement in spectators. The two filmmakers most cited for their work in this period are Melies, who produced trick films, and the Lumiere brothers, who produced documentary "actualities." While the Melies films were essentially "filmed theater," the Lumiere brothers filmed scenes from reality and presented them in a larger-than-life setting. It is said that when they exhibited their film of a train entering a station, people in the crowd actually ducked for cover, so great was the realism of the image.
- the presentational over the representational
- the real potential of cinema lays in its power of making images seen (rather than representing the real)
- these preserved the perceptual continuum b/w space/time (you are in the movie)
- address the viewer directly
2 principles of the early cinema experience
1. disjunctive style of programming (talent show like)
2. mediation of the individual film by personnel present at the theatre
Other articles by/about Hansen:
http://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/issues/v30/30n2.Hansen.html
http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:ggmBjEUdUP0J:www.yorku.ca/hayashi/f...
- compares sites of exhibition from earlier to now - challenges the historography
- she is making a claim about blockbusters (BB) - they need to be ideologically incoherent (not her phrase) - targets everyone
BB: genre - confounds all genres? polysemic readings? loss of genre to BB genre - aesthetic loss - appeal to lowest common denominator - relates to thrill and sensation rather than intellectual/social change; BB broken off form "the community"?
- purity of art forms -
- kitch - popular culture that borrows from (or steals) from culture and diminishes its value; elevating the phantom of the opera to opera
- Hansen emphasizes the heterogeneity
- public sphere - early or late cinema - collective (collectivities) s to individual (or solitary); anonymity, responsibility, accountability, skepticism, people who would not participate normally, might through online forums, fan culture (liberating - other sorts of cultural production beyond the film itself)
- working for free - affective labour - affective economies - forms of connection based on sensibility or sentiment (however temporary) which may be different from fan cultures
- poses a methodological challenge about how to define the popular in relation to cinema - poses itself as a political question about the public sphere, a factor that contributes to the expansion of the horizon of social experience
- textual analysis or a study of social formations
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[Zoe's notes]
Miriam Hansen. “Early Cinema, Late Cinema”
Thesis: 1) A parallel is observable between the modes of exhibition and reception in early (pre-classical) cinema and those of late (post-classical) cinema.
2) This parallel is not only formal, but more importantly, the parallel is in the capacity of both periods of cinema to enable the existence of an oppositional public sphere.
Part 1
“…Contemporary forms of media culture evoke the parallel of early cinema.” – p. 137
How?
- a paradigmatic shift takes place at the end of the classical cinema era in the 1970’s
- shift in film scholarship, the corresponding modes of textual representation and address, and exhibition practices
- this shift is 3-fold:
1. film scholarship
- 1970’s shift away from textual and ontological approaches to film towards psychoanalytical-semiotic film theory which privileged the spectator – the focus was on how subjectivity and identification took place in the spectator
- this kind of work, however, assumed a homogenous ideal spectatorship – a spectator position which was in effect, impossible for some if not most viewers because of diversity of gender, ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
- recent film theory has continued to focus on the spectator and, furthermore, the exhibition context, while trying to take into consideration the diversity of the audience
2. textual modes of address
- on this level, film texts have increasingly attempted to address themselves to a heterogenous audience
- Hansen gives the example of blockbusters:
- “the blockbuster gamble consists of offering something to everyone, of appealing to diverse interests with a diversity of attractions and multiple levels of textuality” – p. 136
- She also discusses a general diversification of film content as a result of the globalization of cultural transmission, creating a reception environment in which “imported products are transformed and appropriated through highly specific forms of reception” – p. 136
- A major element here is intertextuality, which was also forefronted in early cinema
- The degree to which this is true is debatable, but the point for Hansen is that this shift corresponds with the shift in film scholarship that I outlined, and furthermore, with a shift in exhibition practices
3. exhibition and distribution
- shift away from the classical mode of exhibition, which privileged the authority of the film text and constructed an attentive, absorbed viewer; towards the globalised, postmodernized practices of late cinema
- this took place in two ways::
o a) the diversification of products by transnational corporate networks (e.g. music, fashion, etc.)
o b) the advent of new technology which has liberated the spectator from the restrictions of the time-specific nature of public projection, and has moved the cinema into the domestic space, creating a more distracted, autonomous spectator – Hansen says that this shift has in turn informed traditional exhibition contexts and she cites a significant increase in the amount of talking during screenings at public movie theatres
- Hansen draws a comparison between these manifestations of late cinema and early, pre-classical cinema, as described and conceptualized by Tom Gunning in “The Cinema of Attractions”
- She bookends the classical cinema era with early cinema and late cinema, positioning the homogeneity of the classical cinema as a sort of cultural and chronological anomaly when it comes to exhibition and spectator reception
- She even suggests that the apparent stability of classical cinema is simply a historiographic construct
- She notes that the modes of exhibition and reception of early cinema have resurfaced throughout history from time to time, with examples such as Cinerama and 3D
- despite this intermittent resurgence of the cinema of attractions in the classical cinema era, Hansen maintains that there is indeed a significant break between classical cinema and late cinema:
“contemporary film and media culture seems to be reverting to a state in which transitory, ephemeral practices are mushrooming, the institution of cinema is increasingly fragmented and dispersed, and long-standing hierarchies of production, distribution and exhibition have lost their force”
- p. 139
- here, late cinema is contrasted sharply with classical cinema
- In this paper, Hansen questions the hegemonic power of classical cinema, but does not fully investigate the issue and stops short of declaring with conviction that classical cinema may not actually mark a radical break from early and late cinema
- I would like to examine this question further, with help from Hansen’s other writings and an essay by our very own Catherine Russell, called “Parallax Historiography: The Flaneuse as Cyberfeminist”
- We probably sensed, when reading Hansen, that it is unwise to attribute classical cinema with the monolithic uniformity that it is traditionally granted
- Hansen herself alludes to the periodic resurfacing of a cinema of attractions – she also mentions the discontinuities in spectatorship caused by the diversity between genres
- In a chapter from her 1991 book, Babel and Babylon, Hansen approaches classical Hollywood cinema differently
- The chapter is called “Male Star, Female Fans”, and it addresses the star system of classical Hollywood cinema
- Hansen suggests that because of his/her locus outside of the systems of production and outside of the film texts themselves, the star opened up the possibility of alternative spectatorial relationships with the film text
- She focuses on the figure of Rudolph Valentino, whose fame revolved not only around his status as an object of female desire, but also around his highly contested image of sexual and ethnic ambiguity
- Ultimately, Valentino’s persona could not be stabilized by the classical system and for Hansen,
“Valentino seemed to live out the vicissitudes of social change as they affected people’s lives” – p. 267
- the star system then, is one example of how alternative spectatorial relationships could and did exist within classical cinema
(Another possible example of how CHC possibly opened up alternative public spheres: alternative exhibition practices (e.g. drive-ins))
- Katie Russell’s article “Parallax Historiography” is concerned with the woman of modernity as subject and her relationship to film spectatorship
- she uses a method she calls “parallax historiography” – which is a way of envisioning two parallel moments of history, from a distinct perspective that is informed by the preoccupations of the present
- Russell draws from the works of Anne Friedberg, Guliana Bruno and Miriam Hansen – the article was very helpful in opening up some of the concepts in Hansen’s “Early Cinema, Late Cinema” article
- You can find Katie’s article online on her website
- Russell notes that Friedberg, Bruno and Hansen all, apparently independently, posit a parallel between early cinema and late cinema
- Russell goes on to suggest that the radical breaks between the 3 film periods posited by the 3 scholars is itself problematic
- It seems evident that alternative modes of film spectatorship were likely during what we refer to as classical cinema
- Regardless, the sites of exhibition and reception seem to have been subject to a greater degree of institutionalized standardization during classical cinema than with early and late cinema
- It is probable that as more scholarship is focused on reception in the classical era, more gaps will be uncovered, each one further undermining the assumption of stability of classical modes of exhibition and spectatorship
Part 2
This brings us to the second part of Hansen’s thesis: the relationship between the public sphere and modes of distribution, exhibition, and spectatorship.
- Hansen argues that although early cinema and late cinema have some formal affinities, which I have already outlined, the main point of comparison is the ability or capacity of both periods to create a public sphere
- She bases her conception of the public sphere on the theories of the Frankfurt School, specifically Jurgen Habermas, Oskar Negt, and Alexander Kluge
- the Frankfurt School is concerned with the possibility of the public sphere, a body for the free and open exchange of ideas, which is threatened by the proliferation of so-called democratic modes and technologies of communication, which are necessarily subject to greater institutionalized regulation
- Hansen rejects Habermas’ model of the public sphere because of his claim that the only true public sphere, with full oppositional potential, existed at the end of the 18th century
- he claims that the public sphere “grew out of a specific phase of bourgeois society” – p. 50
- around the 1830’s, with the commercialization of daily political newspapers, the public sphere, in its purest sense began to disappear
- according to Habermas, the dissemination of public bourgeois thought through commercial newspapers expanded the public sphere beyond the realm of the bourgeoisie causing the public sphere to become overly heterogenous
- as a result, the public sphere could no longer regulate itself and outside authority had to be formed
- the public sphere was irreversibly relocated from the bourgeoisie to institutional public authority, robbing it of its oppositional and critical force
- for Habermas, the subsequent state of the public sphere is characterized by the illusion of “openness” because of the accessibility of information through technology – and this accessibility effaces the sparsity of critical strategies necessary for resistance
- Hansen rejects this model because it relies too heavily on the prerequisite of face-to-face communication between individuals
- also, Habermas’ model is exclusionary – he feels that the unity of the public sphere was dissolved by diversification, presumably the inclusion of workers and women
- finally, Habermas’ model is overly deterministic – he invokes the public sphere only to close it off with the advent of communication technologies
- Hansen turns instead to the more optimistic and activist thought of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge
- here she finds a solution to:
“the problem of how to conceptualize the dimension of the public in a technologically and industrially mediated public sphere that has eroded the very conditions of discursive interaction, participation, and self-representation” – p. 141
- instead of focusing on the formal conditions of communication, Negt and Kluge propose a “general horizon of experience”
- for them, the public sphere is constituted by the shared experiences of day-to-day life, based in the conditions of material, psychic and social production and reproduction
- in this inclusionary model, the potential for an oppositional public sphere exists in the fragmentation of modern life and the possibility of realigning these fragments in resistant ways
- by shifting focus to the social horizon of experience, the industrialization and commercialization of communication actually becomes a boon to the public sphere – it enables the diversification and fragmentation necessary for the construction of new paradigms
- the hunger of industrial modes to appropriate and exhaust every aspect of social experience makes them abundantly inclusionary – Hansen says
“It is in their potentially indiscriminating, inclusive grasp…that the public spheres of production make visible, at certain junctures, a different function of the public, namely that of a social horizon of experience.” – p. 143
- In “On Film and the Public Sphere”, Kluge uses a slightly different metaphor for the oppositional potential of the public sphere:
“the fence erected by corporations, by censorship, by authority does not reach all the way to the base but stops short – because the base is so complex – so that one can crawl under the fence at any time.” – p. 214
- here again, the power of the public sphere lies in its diversity, its multiplicity and the sheer vastness of social experience
- for Hansen, the similarity between early cinema and late cinema is inextricably linked to the public sphere
- it is the diversity of experiences enabled by the unstable and fragmented modes of exhibition and reception in these periods that align them with a public sphere
- during the classical cinema era, on the other hand, focus was placed on unifying and standardizing these modes