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  • The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany by Scott Curtis
  • Steve Choe
The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany. By Scott Curtis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. xv + 371. Paper $35.00. ISBN 978-0231134034.

Scott Curtis's The Shape of Spectatorship expands our understanding of the cinema during the Wilhelmine period by elucidating the many roles it played at the time. Attending to the nontheatrical contexts in which the film medium was utilized, such as the laboratory or the classroom, Curtis compellingly describes how its formal features were understood and instrumentalized by expert scientists, medical professionals, film reformers, aesthetes, and educators. The Shape of Spectatorship thus circumvents more conventional approaches that privilege the cinematic "masterpieces" of the period and instead proceeds through historical erudition. Bringing new sources into the scope of early German film studies while also recontextualizing familiar texts, Curtis's readings are guided by the aim of illuminating how appropriations of the film medium not only confirm epistemes of specialized knowledge but also produce the conditions of their possibility. The Shape of Spectatorship "therefore takes up the dual challenge of describing how experts cleared a cultural space for motion picture technology while explaining why that work (rhetorical or practical) took the form it did" (14). Curtis is most successful when he shows how these appropriations put specific features of the film medium into relief as they also coincide with forms of specialized thinking.

Chapter 1 looks at the field of experimental psychology, focusing on the work of key figures such as Wilhelm Braune, Otto Fischer, and Hermann Braus. Curtis forges fundamental connections between science and cinema through Henri Bergson's description of the "cinematographic mechanism of thought." Braune's and Fischer's chronophotographic studies of human motion between 1895 and 1904 find their epistemological corollary in the way cinema constitutes movement through of a series of discrete photographs. Later Curtis argues that Braus's experiments on the growth of nerve fibers utilize film footage of tissue from a frog's heart to underscore his theories on the linearity and incremental development of life, theories that were most effectively expressed through the moving image. These examples culminate in a discursive aporia that is manifest in their experiments, namely that the analytical approach of modern science, whose analog may be found in the film medium, remains inadequate in fully grasping the continuous becoming of their objects of study.

Curtis addresses how dynamic distinctions between lay and expert modes of observation are consolidated in the field of medicine. Speaking to the ramifications of expertise, Curtis writes that "in the medical profession, this dynamic determined the nature of the doctor-patient relationship, or the nature of internal debates about midwives and quacks, for example" (95). Film, because of its documentary capacities [End Page 655] and portability, was particularly effective in training individuals how to become expert observers of the human body, as in Robert Kutner's film illustrating CPR techniques, Ludwig Braun's films of a dog's beating heart, and James Fränkel's demonstration of orthopedic surgery. The debate around film also brought distinctions between "healthy" and "diseased" cultures into relief, evidenced in the writings of Max Nordau, who attributed social degeneracy to the inability of human volition to overcome the challenges of modernity. If, as Curtis demonstrated in the previous chapter, film could be characterized through its vacillation between stillness and movement, in this chapter he shows that medical observation is consolidated through the alternation between analysis and synthesis. "The use of film," Curtis provocatively remarks, "actually made manifest a mode of understanding" (124).

Elucidating the use of film within the field of education, Curtis shows the extent to which the new medium of film was associated with notions of "trash" (Schundfilme), immorality, and mental corruption, notions informed by the cultural anxieties generated by the contrast between Kultur and Zivilisation. He looks at the writings of key thinkers in the film reform movement such as Hermann Lemke and Hermann Häfker. In the pursuit of a cinema that would elevate the taste of a nation, film reformers made great efforts to show that a proper Anschauungsunterricht...

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