The Image in Dispute
The Image in Dispute
Art and Cinema in the Age of Photography
Photography, cinema, and video have irrevocably changed the ways in which we view and interpret images. Indeed, the mechanical reproduction of images was a central preoccupation of twentieth-century philosopher Walter Benjamin, who recognized that film would become a vehicle not only for the entertainment of the masses but also for consumerism and even communism and fascism.
In this volume, experts in film studies and art history take up the debate, begun by Benjamin, about the power and scope of the image in a secular age. Part I aims to bring Benjamin's concerns to life in essays that evoke specific aspects and moments of the visual culture he would have known. Part II focuses on precise instances of friction within the traditional arts brought on by this century's changes in the value and mission of images. Part III goes straight to the image technologies themselves—photography, cinema, and video—to isolate distinctive features of the visual cultures they help constitute.
As we advance into the postmodern era, in which images play an ever more central role in conveying perceptions and information, this anthology provides a crucial context for understanding the apparently irreversible shift from words to images that characterized the modernist period. It will be important reading for everyone in cultural studies, film and media studies, and art history.
- A Preface to Disputation (Dudley Andrew)
- I. What Did Walter Benjamin See? Image Cultures, 1890-1933
- Introduction (Dudley Andrew)
- Beauty's Veils: The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Kierkegaard and Benjamin (John Durham Peters)
- Jules, Jim, and Walter Benjamin (Dudley Andrew)
- Women on the Screens and Streets of Modernity: In Search of the Female Flaneur (Anke Gleber)
- The Fair View: Female Spectators and the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition (Lauren Rabinovitz)
- Faces of Weimar Germany (Sabine Hake)
- II. Traditional Arts and the Shock of This Century's Image
- Introduction (Dudley Andrew)
- The Cubist Image and the Image of Cubism (Jennifer Pap)
- Pop Art/Pop Culture: Neo-Dada and the Politics of Plenty (Estera Milman)
- (Re)Imaging the Grotesque: Francis Bacon's Crucifixion Triptychs (Robert Newman)
- III. Vision and Interpretation after Photography
- Introduction (Dudley Andrew)
- The Variable Eye, or the Mobilization of the Gaze (Jacques Aumont, translated by Charles O'Brien and Sally Shafto)
- The End of Cinema? An Afterword to Jacques Aumont's "The Variable Eye" (Charles O'Brien)
- From the Captured Moment to the Cinematic Image: A Transformation in Pictorial Order (James Lastra)
- Snapshots: The Beginnings of Photography (Robert B. Ray)
- Immediate History: Videotape Interventions and Narrative Film (Timothy Corrigan)
- About the Contributors
