In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

History Workshop Journal 58 (2004) 355-358



[Access article in PDF]

Vernacular Modernism

'Film: The First Global Vernacular?' University of London

The Fourth Symposium of the Screen Studies Group was in honour of the work of Miriam Hansen, Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. It provided a welcome space to discuss here in Britain her developing concept of vernacular modernism. In her introduction to the day and to Hansen's keynote talk Laura Mulvey stated that the subject of the symposium marked a return to modernity but one that was critical and not nostalgic. She felt her generation had been losing touch with the utopian language and thought of modernity and that to return would be to reflect on the history and 'failed promises' of the twentieth century. In this she implied a distinction between modernity and modernism that is illuminating. Her reference to the term modernity seemed to encompass the functional impact and the affect of an everyday aesthetic produced by modernization and its products: design, consumer culture generally, and mass entertainment, on the material experience and texture of living. Her hope was that the symposium would look critically at the possibility that this everyday aesthetic produced 'a language to dream the dream of a better life'. This was not then the critical perspectives and prescriptions of high modernism, but instead was a means of exploring the 'vernaculars' emerging from the production of and engagement with globalizing mass communication and aesthetic practices. [End Page 355] It was these vernaculars that constituted the focus of the symposium.

Hansen's talk helpfully raised questions about her theory of vernacular modernism which were designed to consider its viability as a critical concept. The talk was structured in three parts: a series of questions about the theory of vernacular modernism, a list of possible approaches, and a comparative analysis of two US films from the late twenties, The Crowd (King Vidor, 1928) and Lonesome (Paul Fajos, 1928). She addressed at the outset American movies of the classical period as a 'global vernacular' which, she argues, '. . . had a translatable and transnational resonance . . . not just because of its optimal mobilization of biologically hardwired structures and universal narrative templates but . . . because it played a key role in mediating competing cultural discourses on modernity and modernization, because it articulated, multiplied, and globalised a particular historical experience'.1 She asked whether the concept of the global vernacular can account for a reflection or negotiation of the pathological aspects of modernity, and in doing so framed a set of questions designed to interrogate the concept's usefulness in writing an aesthetic, international history of film. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, she discussed the value of his switch in perspective—from using high modernism as a benchmark in the consideration of film aesthetics, to one which considers cinema as a 'paramodernist or vulgar' form which incorporates the aesthetics of high modernism and traces the stylistic, generic repertoire of film itself.2 This might make it possible to enrich an account of modernism through the history of film and of other technological media. She went on to suggest that vernacular modernism in film could be seen as a new regime of sensory experience, a reflective performativity in its reception. Here was a call for the kind of work (although perhaps differently inflected) that those studying the reception of movies, and particularly of Hollywood movies outside the borders of the U.S., have been engaged in for some time. The value here is that it may offer a theoretical framework which reconnects aesthetic interpretation of the text with discourse analysis and ethnographic study.

Ian Christie's talk on the 'competing modernisms' in Soviet cinema sought to incorporate this approach in order to draw attention to the political dimension of modernism. He noted the two dominant histories of Soviet cinema: the first positing a backward Russia transformed by radical montage aesthetic in film, with its emphasis falling on Soviet cinema as both modern art and as a vital political force; the second emphasizing a vibrant pre-Revolutionary Russian...

pdf

Share