Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film

by Miriam Bratu Hansen

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674058313
• ISBN13: 9780674058316
• Release Date: March 1994
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 1.12 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Not just relevant to film

As other reviewers have noted, this study is a terrific analysis of how early film could be an open, more interactive medium. But it is valuable for more than its contribution to the history of film. Hansen combines her study of the history of film with two other areas--1) empirical study of the reception of early film (the opportunities for collective sense-making by populations such as women and new immigrant groups), and 2) theoretical study of the way film changes our ideas about the public sphere. It is the methodological richness of this book that makes it such a powerful work. Readers are offered astute, inventive close readings of films, informed discussions about historical reception, and cutting-edge ideas about what a mass-culture medium like film might mean for our ideas of public reason.

Invaluable

This is one of the best books on early cinema written by one of the best film theorists/historians on spectatorship.

Superb tour-de-force of early cinema

While some of the academic language may not be familiar to all readers, this is a superb account of early cinema that bridges the divide between film history and film theory. Hansen's argument that early cinema possessed a fundamentally different model of spectatorship--an interactive and collective one--is lucidly articulated, in addition to being wholly provocative for understanding what it means to go to the movies now. This book altered my sense of my own viewing and moviegoing practices today. An excellent book that discusses film in new ways, Babel and Babylon is both an absorbing and a fascinating reading experience.