The Shape of Spectatorship, Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany by Scott Curtis (review)

This intriguing book addresses the intersection of science, technology, and discourse about cinema in Germany during the pre–World War One period. The title is somewhat misleading, since the book is not really, in any empirical way, about historical audiences, or spectatorship. Rather, it addresses early German discourse about cinema, particularly among experts in the scientific and technical communities. Its way of approaching the problem of ordinary spectatorship is rather like a negative image. The average spectator is imagined—either explicitly or implicitly—to be everything that the expert viewer is not, and vice versa. If the expert viewer is calm, contemplative, and rational, then the ordinary viewer is imagined to be excitable, unreflective, and irrational. Here Scott Curtis usefully draws on previous research by Anton Kaes, Sabine Hake, and others on the so-called Kino-Debatte(debate about cinema) in the early twentieth century, in which a great many defenders of traditional German cultural values condemned what they saw as cinema's threat to those values.

Although much of this debate is well known by now, Curtis's take on it is new and productive because he relates it to the problem of scientific and technical expertise, and also to broader discussions about aesthetics and spectatorship. In the book's fascinating first chapter, "Science's Cinematic Method," Curtis breaks new ground by analyzing the way that cinema was used in the early twentieth century by particular kinds of scientists—physicists and biologists, for instance—as an innovative observational, experimental, and discursive tool (helping to explain the way nerve fibers function, for instance). Curtis also shows that the chain of influence went in two directions, from the scientific and technological experts to cinema, but also the other way, from cinema to the experts and their discourses about science and technology. As Curtis puts it, "film actually made manifest a mode of understanding" scientific discovery (p. 124).

The book's second chapter addresses medical discourse about the cinema. Here the alarmist critique of film quickly comes to the fore, since, as Curtis explains, "many physicians" viewed cinema "as a hypnotist" that sent "impressionable subjects to the streets with powerful, posthypnotic suggestions to commit crimes of all varieties" (p. 135). This was an anti-film discourse that was to have a powerful impact on elite German views of cinematography for many decades, and that continues to influence approaches to cinema history and new media, as Curtis notes in the book's conclusion, where he acknowledges the structural similarity of early discourse about cinema and current debates about new electronic media. As distant as those early debates may now seem, Curtis observes, in the end, "little has changed" (p. 244). Indeed, he suggests that the alarmism of a century ago has now "doubled or tripled… as the emergence of new media forms seems to underline the lack of control we have over the pace of change and the technologies that come with it" (p. 244).

The final two chapters deal with German educators' efforts to use film technology for their own ends (chapter 3) and film's challenge to traditional German aesthetic discourse, which privileged primarily slow, calm contemplation over distraction, excitement, and speed (chapter 4). Using the familiar ideas of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin, as well as a less widely known 1913 essay on cinema by Georg Lukács, Curtis suggests that the triumph of cinema in the post–World War One period not only coincided with but also helped bring about the privileging of a new approach to aesthetic experience: the aesthetics of distraction. All of this makes for lively and productive reading. There are a few factual or linguistic mistakes, such as when Curtis suggests that the German adjective " naturgetreu" is a noun and therefore even capitalizes it (pp. 179, 181), or when he claims that Immanuel Rath, the male protagonist of Josef von Sternberg's 1930 masterpiece Der blaue Engel, who is actually...