PreCinema/ParaCinema

Special Topics in Film: PreCinema/ParaCinema Instructor: Mark Sandberg Interest in the contextual study of early cinema’s emergence has increasingly put pressure on developmental temporal models that lead directly from “precinema” to cinema “proper.” Other lines of research have made clear that spatial models emphasizing adjacency (“paracinema”) not only reveal relationships hidden by more teleological accounts, but also help emphasize cinema’s ongoing intermedial relationships up to the present day. This seminar organizes the subject matter of paracinematic cultural history in terms of place and juxtaposition; it examines the cinema “beside” the theater, the museum, the panorama, the laboratory, the shopping arcade, the fairground, the zoo, and the train station. The spatial emphasis will assist us in thinking through both image production and spectatorship in new ways, but also embraces the possibility that this kind of “cinematic” research might lose its cinematic center altogether. Readings emphasize both cultural-historical content and theoretical approaches to developments from the mid-nineteenth century through the early twentieth. This is a research seminar, so students are expected to engage with an original topic requiring work with primary historical materials. One seminar paper and oral presentations required. Required Texts: Ames, Eric. Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-0295988337 Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. ISBN-13: 978-0262531078 Ligensa, Annemone and Klaus Kreimeier, eds. Film 1900: Technology, Perception, Culture. John Libby Publishing, 2009. ISBN-13: 978-0861966967 Rabinowitz, Lauren. Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2012. ISBN-13: 978-0231156615 Sandberg, Mark B. Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums and Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. ISBN-13: 978-0691050744 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century. Berkeley: UC Press, 1986. ISBN-13: 978-0520059290