The current digital revolution has sparked a renewed interest in the origins and trajectory of modern media, particularly in the years around 1900 when the technology was rapidly developing. This collection aims to broaden our understanding of early cinema as a significant innovation in media history. Joining traditional scholarship with fresh insights from a variety of disciplines, this book explains the aesthetic and institutional characteristics in early cinema within the context of the contemporary media landscape. It also addresses transcultural developments such as scientific revolutions, industrialization, urbanization, and globalization, as well as differing attitudes toward modernization. Film 1900 is an important reassessment of early cinema's position in cultural history.
Introduction: Triangulating a Turn: Film 1900 as Technology, Perception and Culture Annemone Ligensa
1. Archaeologies of Interactivity: Early Cinema, Narrative and Spectatorship Thomas Elsaesser
2. Viewing Change, Changing Views: The History of Vision-Debate Frank Kessler
3. The Ambimodernity of Early Cinema Problems and Paradoxes in the Film-and-Modernity Discourse Ben Singer
4. Mind, the Gap: The Discovery of Physiological Time Henning Schmidgen
5. Is Everything Relative?: Cinema and the Revolution of Knowledge Around 1900 Harro Segeberg
6. The Aesthetic Idealist as Efficiency Engineer: Hugo Munsterbergs Theories of Perception, Psychotechnics and Cinema J?rg Schweinitz
7. Between Observation and Spectatorship: Medicine, Movies and Mass Culture in Imperial Germany Scott Curtis
8. The Scene of the Crime: Psychiatric Discourse on the Film Audience in Early Twentieth Century Germany Andreas Killen
9. Seen Through the Eyes of Simmel: The Cinema Programme as a Modern Experience Andrea Haller
10. Under the Sign of the Cinematograph: Urban Mobility and Cinema Location in Wilhelmine Berlin Pelle Snickars
12. Perceptual Environments for Films: TlS>