Michael Cowan | University of St Andrews (original) (raw)

Books by Michael Cowan

Papers by Michael Cowan

Most scholars would agree that cinephilia results not simply from a spontaneous love of movies bu... more Most scholars would agree that cinephilia results not simply from a spontaneous love of movies but historically has also been inseparable from processes of legitimization, audience training, and formations of taste. Yet we still know little about the deeper history of cinephilia's emergence: how audiences learned to love the movies and why. This article considers one site for thinking about this question during the "first wave" of cinephilia in the 1920s, namely the puzzle contest as it developed and proliferated in the new landscape of popular magazines in England, France, Germany, and other European countries. Culminating in a discussion of the Viennese magazine Mein Film, this article examines the media-historical and cultural contexts of photographic puzzles to show how they figured in a broader program of participatory and playful pedagogy by which readers could learn to frame film knowledge, film affect, and film experience in the context of an emerging European star system. "It is far more likely that the globe has seen multiple and geographically dispersed cinephilias since the invention of cinema, and what's more, those cinephilias have not stood still for over a hundred years but have been constantly transforming and mutating over time, each in its own distinctive fashion."

With the shift towards intermediality in recent decades, ideas of medium specificity have given w... more With the shift towards intermediality in recent decades, ideas of medium specificity have given way to an understanding of media forms as relational through and through. That is, media are defined less by supposedly intrinsic qualities than by how they position themselves in relation to other media. For film historians, this change of focus entails a rethinking of fundamental questions, asking not what cinema is, but rather how the cinema's changing definitions have become possible in relation both "older" and "newer" media. Thus Tom Gunning famously examined how the motif of the telephone, with its promise of overcoming time and space, helped to catalyze the emergence of narrative (parallel) editing, along with a new mode of spectatorship marked by the promise of mastery and fear of impotence. 1 More recently, Lev Manovich has argued that digital media helped to catalyze the incorporation of "database" narrative structures in the non-linear work of filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway (a logic admittedly prefigured by Dziga Vertov). 2 While such intermedial analyses offer insight into the cinema's elasticity in relation to different media landscapes, however, we should also remember that the various projects attached to the cinema over its history never exist in the absence of broader contextual (cultural, political or discursive) factors. That is, the understandings of a medium, the 1 Tom Gunning, "Heard over the Phone: The Lonely Villa and the De Lorde

Looking over the history of cinema from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, rece... more Looking over the history of cinema from the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, recent research has increasingly highlighted the similarities between the sense of possibility characterizing cinema's early decades and our own digital era, in which the proliferation of interactive media and variable screen formats has loosened the once dominant paradigm of the passive spectator immobilized in the illusory realm of Plato's cave. 1 As Tom Gunning long ago pointed out, however, while the dominance of narrative film and continuity editing might have marginalized other modes of spectatorship after 1910, it did not eliminate them. 2 Much recent work has thus involved an archaeology of those other models for interaction with moving images and the persistence of a more 'mobilized gaze', whether in alternative spaces such as the museum and the planetarium or within the space of the cinema itself. 3 In this essay,

In the wake of recent transformations in moving-image media and screen culture, there is a growin... more In the wake of recent transformations in moving-image media and screen culture, there is a growing sense today that linear narrative may be losing its longheld dominance. From the prevalence of special effects in popular cinema to the practice of found-footage film and museum installations, the digital age is downplaying narrative's developmental logic in favor of attractional, structural, or simply visceral presentational modes. 1 Thus Lev Manovich has famously argued that the "age of the computer" ushered in a paradigm shift from an art of narrative to one of "database." 2 Detectible above all in interactive computer formats but also in film work such as that of Peter Greenaway, database art presents its material not as a syntagmatic chain of events but as a "list of items": a paradigmatic inventory of all the potential choices-or other

Michael Cowan teaches fi lm history and European studies at McGill University. He has published a... more Michael Cowan teaches fi lm history and European studies at McGill University. He has published articles on German and European cinema in journals such as Screen, October, and Modernism/modernity. His most recent book, Technology's Pulse: Essays on Rhythm in German Modernism, appeared in the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies' book series at the University of London in 2012. His current research examines advertising fi lm and visual culture in the early twentieth century, and he is completing a monograph titled Walter Ruttmann and the Multiplied Image.