Toward Interdisciplinary Film Studies

I appreciate being invited to contribute to this feature on books that have made an impact in the field of cinema and media studies. While the mandate was to discuss books that had influenced those of us invited to participate, I decided to do something a bit different. I think everyone in film studies who knows my work also knows the strong influence—in at least the early days—of outstanding scholars like Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, Mary Ann Doane, Teresa de Lauretis, and Patricia White, and more recently, as I turned to work in trauma studies, Kaja Silverman and Janet Walker among others. However, I decided that rather than rehearse what readers can find in my own books, I would discuss two outstanding examples of new research in film studies that I think point the way to a productive strand of work in the field. What characterizes both books—The Virtual Window by Anne Friedberg, a senior scholar, and Translating Time: Cinema, the Fantastic, and Temporal Critique, a new book by Bliss Cua Lim, a young scholar, is that they are interdisciplinary: each combines visual culture and film with philosophy, history, science, sociology (and more) to provide in-depth analyses of cultural phenomena linked to visuality.

Anne Friedberg's The Virtual Window is a tour de force.¹ Her earlier Window Shopping brilliantly brought together (and moved beyond) 1980s scholarship on shopping malls and MTV.² Building on Benjamin's and Baudelaire's concept of the flâneur, Friedberg coined the term the flâneuse, and showed how the newly mobilized gaze of women in the urban space of the innovative nineteenth-century shopping malls offered a new set of behaviors and powers. In addition, the book analyzed how the moving image developed by combining nineteenth-century mobile machines, such as bicycles, steamships, trains, elevators, escalators, and moving walkways. Friedberg usefully distinguished what she calls mobilized visuality from virtual visuality, and argued that the cinema developed through the combination of these two types of visuality.

Her second book, The Virtual Window, as Friedberg herself notes, is both a sequel and a prequel to Window Shopping. Research for the volume was both wide and deep, taking in numerous disciplines. The book first goes back to trace in the mid-nineteenth century historical changes in theories of matter, space, and time, starting with the invention of machines that could finally capture images of the world only dreamed of by scholars, artists, and philosophers before. It then moves forward to new twentieth-century digital machines. As Paul Virilio has noted, the square of the screen replaces the horizon of real space, and Friedberg examines the implications of that change.

Friedberg's focus here, as against that in the earlier volume, is the literal and metaphorical interfaces among ideas of the window, the frame, and the screen. She argues that "how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame."³ The architectural window has been replaced by media screens that rely on virtual images, not a perspective on the natural world. Indeed, Friedberg shows how virtual images have "radically transformed the twentieth-century understanding of reality." ⁴ While I would have liked more on such insights, Friedberg proceeds to examine the differences between screens of cinema, television, and computers, paying close attention to the specificity of the screen or window as a frame, and to what this constant experience of working within a frame does to our sense of space and time. Especially important here is the impact of the new possibilities of multiple perspectives within one frame. Friedberg also discusses implications of the fusing of cinematic, televisual, and computer media, and the apparent "loss" of cinema now that it is embedded in modalities very different from its original nitrate form.

In both books, the focus of Friedberg's research is the subject in its locus as a "gaze" in relation to new technologies of mobility. There is very little, if anything, here about the inner psychic experiences of humans, or about their emotional reactions to their changed visual environments. Friedberg is...