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This volume brings together nine essays that address a constellation of issues regarding histories of film theory and theories of film history. It focuses throughout on feminist film theories and histories, viewed through the lens of German cinema, critical theory, and visual culture. Some of the chapters are published here for the first time. Others have appeared in journals or books or small circulation periodicals. Still others have been republished in various venues (in translation in international journals or as part of larger collections on feminism, film history, or German theory). The obvious and immediate questions for this introduction are, Why bring these essays together here, in this book, and why now?
The beginning of the new century has brought with it a host of assumptions about the newness of our technologies, globalized economies, and transnational media practices. As a consequence, there has been a great deal of interest in exploring the prehistory of our own modernity, in an effort to understand where we are now, and how we got to where we are today. Of course, our own time, both pre- and postmillennial, is typically described as a time marked by refined mechanisms of power, accelerated growth and accelerated obsolescence, and experiences of fragmentation, dispersal, sensation, and shock. In this volume, I concur with this general view, arguing that fragmentation, dispersal, speed, and shock are indeed hallmarks of our contemporary age. But I also contend that these mechanisms and experiences must be understood historically, through reciprocal relation to a host of other, simultaneous developments, such as boredom and waiting, not to mention slowness, banality, and repetition-and this as much in our culture as in our intellectual lives.
The essays collected here, although written at different times, under different circumstances, and for distinct audiences, are joined by their common concern to explore the pre- and post-history of our own modernity, specifically in the field of film studies. They are linked by their focus on modernism, German cinema, and feminist film theory, and by their effort to show, not how feminism or film or modernism itself ushered in the ''shocks of the new'' but, rather, how they continue to shape and define the aftershocks of our own modernity. I will have more to say in this introduction about feminism and film studies, after the shock of their newness and novelty, and in the context of an emergence of new constellations of institutional forces, activities, and arrangements. I would like to begin, however, by saying more about the impulse for this collection, which appears at a moment when we are witnessing a proliferation of books and monographs and collections about feminism, recent film theory, and the institutional status of film studies more generally.
It seems fair to say that there is currently a widespread interest among film scholars in taking stock of and making interventions into our current understanding of the history of film theory, particularly since the 1970s, when film studies was first institutionalized as a specific discipline or field. My own efforts here are obviously part of this trend, although they are also intended as a considered response to it. Indeed, although the essays gathered here were written over a period of more than a decade, they come together in a volume at a time when cinema itself has been subsumed within new configurations (in the process of globalization and media convergence, for instance) and when film studies itself is being dispersed (into newly formed departments of ''media studies'' or ''cultural studies'' or ''visual studies'').
Rather than lament such developments, I attempt in this collection to ask what new possibilities might be imagined-for film studies, feminist women, and cross-disciplinary scholarship-in the wake of the aftershocks of the new: the aftershocks of feminism, most centrally, but the aftershocks of cinema as well. It is of course ironic that film studies emerged as a discipline at the very moment that the cinema itself had ceased to be the major cultural force in the realm of media. But, then, the cinema has been challenged and transformed by new technologies throughout the twentieth century (by photography, gramophone, radio, television, and computer) and has been, at least since the time of Lumiere, considered ''an invention without a future.'' In this regard, and in thinking about the introduction to this volume, I was drawn to Siegfried Kracauer's introduction to his last, posthumously published book History: The Last Things before the Last (1969). There, Kracauer remarks on the connection between his interest in transient phenomenon and historical contingency and his commitment to the study of photographic media, particularly photography and film.' 'At long last,'' he writes, ''all my main efforts, so incoherent on the surface, fall into line-they all have served, and continue to serve-a single purpose: the rehabilitation of objectives and modes of being which still lack a name and hence are overlooked and misjudged.''
Along with Walter Benjamin, whose historical analysis of modern subjectivity continues to inspire spirited commentary and debate, Kracauer was drawn to the transient and fleeting qualities of modern life, offering a phenomenological interpretation of the everyday world of modernity. He adopted an attitude of extreme commitment that was matched by an unwillingness to surrender to any critical or theoretical absolutes. As Gertrud Koch explains in a recent monograph, Kracauer always raised doubts, always retained a critical attitude toward systematic historical or philosophical constructions. He was always ''of the opinion that the overall outline of the course things take over time remains hidden from our view-all we see are the traces it has left'' -hence, his commitment to photography and cinema as distinct modes of knowledge in the modern age. Like Benjamin, Kracauer was guided not by an interest in history in the service of the present, but rather by a passion for lost causes, for failed opportunities and unrealized promises in the past that might be revealed and redeemed in the future.
This critical, indeed utopian, attitude, especially in its commitment to locate the newness of the new within its reciprocal banality and repetition, remains, for me, both inspirational and timely. As I argue throughout this collection, the newness and familiarity of film theory must be understood in relation to the practices and theories of cinema that emerged in the teens and twenties, the proverbial site of the ''shock of the new'' in popular culture, the arts, and social practices. In drawing on German film theory, and especially on Kracauer's theories of history, I aim not simply to make connections between twenties and seventies film theory or to repeat the ideas or attitudes or approaches of another time. Instead, I am motivated to redeem multiple approaches to film studies, and to feminism and film theory especially, against the relentless pursuit of novelty-a novelty that fails to remember its past and hence fails to bring about anything new in history.
The essays collected here are organized in the order in which they were written, but there is another logic to their organization that became clear to me only retrospectively. The first three chapters-''The 'Place' of Television in Film Studies,'' ''Feminism and Film History,'' and ''German Film Theory and Anglo-American Film Studies''-were all written in the late eighties and early nineties, largely in response to a variety of issues circulating around French poststructuralism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, or what is now simply called ''seventies film theory.'' At stake in each chapter is the status of film studies as an emerging academic discipline in the United States. As their titles suggest, the questions they raise remain at once familiar and topical. What is the place of television and other media in the field of film studies? What is the place of feminist film theory in our conceptions of film history, and how does this theory function, more fundamentally, in defining periods, genres, historical evidence, and objects of study? Finally, what is the place of German film theory in film studies, given the inaccurate translations and the more general inability of German film theory to circulate in or seriously influence a discipline built on French and British intellectual foundations?
In one sense, perhaps, it would seem that these questions have already been adequately and properly answered. Television studies now have a firm place in film studies, or at least an established identity in the U.S. academy and in its national organization, the Society for Cinema Studies (SCS). Feminist theory likewise has established its academic credentials in monographs and essays and book-length studies of directors, historical periods, national cinemas, and stars. Finally, German film theory has an incontestable place in the history of film, with new translations of central texts by German theorists being published almost every year, and new assessments of this work informing contemporary debates about the nature and history of perception, representation, and modern subjectivity.
But to leave it at this would be to miss the ongoing importance of debating, expanding, defending, and redefining the place of German film theory, the status of feminism, and the relevance of technologies of representation in film studies. If television studies, for instance, no longer seems an issue for some in film studies, certainly the prospect of internet studies raises issues-and problems and misunderstandings- similar to those raised in early debates about the place of television in the field. The status of German film theory likewise remains of pressing concern, because it is largely German studies scholars who have extended the insights of early German film theory texts, outside of the purview of film studies, which has remained relatively unaffected by much new work.