Cinema, Experience, Vernacular Modernism: More on the Work of the late Miriam Bratu Hansen

Viewing (10:33): Miriam Bratu Hansen on her work, "Post-Cinema", and much else

"Miriam Bratu Hansen (1949–2011) was one of the great film scholars of our time.  She was also a friend and colleague to us at Critical Inquiry.  In celebration of the newly-published Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, we are proud to present this short film [above] by Miriam's student Christina Petersen, along with a dossier of five major articles from our archives." [From a note at the Critical Inquiry website to accompany its "Dossier Miriam Hansen"]

"Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno—affiliated through friendship, professional ties, and argument—developed an astute philosophical critique of modernity in which technological media played a key role. [Hansen's last book] explores in depth their reflections on cinema and photography from the Weimar period up to the 1960s. Miriam Bratu Hansen brings to life an impressive archive of known and, in the case of Kracauer, less known materials and reveals surprising perspectives on canonic texts, including Benjamin’s artwork essay. Her lucid analysis extrapolates from these writings the contours of a theory of cinema and experience that speaks to questions being posed anew as moving image culture evolves in response to digital technology." [Publisher's note on Miriam Hansen's Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno, University of California Press, 2011]

On February 5, 2011, the hugely distinguished Film Studies scholar Miriam Bratu Hansen passed away. The next day Film Studies For Free published its appreciation of her career with links to other online tributes to her, and to examples of her work online. It is still this website's single most visited entry, a tiny sign of warm esteem in which she was held in our discipline.

Since the publication of her remarkable, final book Cinema and Experience, last year, three further, openly accessible items of great interest have appeared online.

Two of these are part of a Dossier on Hansen put together at the Critical Inquiry website: the above video about Hansen, and a collection of five major articles that Hansen published in that great journal. All are accessible at this webpage.

And you can also read the wonderful first chapter of Cinema and Experience -- on the work of Siegfried Krakauer --  at the University of California Press webpage. 

To further celebrate the above, FSFF has updated its links to useful online discussions or applications of Hansen's work, including, at the foot of this entry, a very recent video presentation.

• Chris Cagle, 'On Vernacular Modernism', Category D: A Film and Media Studies Blog, July 26, 2006
• Desley Deacon, 'World English? How an Australian Invented "Good American Speech"’, In Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, edited by Damousi, Joy; Deacon, Desley. Canberra: ANU ePress, 2007 
• Desley Deacon, ‘Films as foreign offices’: transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and early thirties', ‘Films as foreign offices: Transnationalism at Paramount in the twenties and earlythirties’. In Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, edited by Curthoys, Ann; Lake, 2005
• Alexander Des Forges, 'Shanghai Alleys, Theatrical Practice, and Cinematic Spectatorship: From Street Angel (1937) to Fifth Generation Film', in: Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 39, 4, 2010: 29-51
• Stephanie Hanson, '“Electrical wonders of the present age”: cinema-going on the Far South Coast of NSW and rural discourses of modernity', Screening the Past, Issue 24, 2009
• Adrian Martin, 'Balance and Linkage : Robert Mulligan's The Man in the Moon', Film Journal, Issue 11
• Allen Meek, 'Benjamin, the televisual and the "fascistic subject", Screening the Past, September 1998
• W.J.T. Mitchell, 'Medium Theory: Preface to the 2003 Critical Inquiry Symposium', Critical Inquiry, Vol. 30, No. 22004-5
• Andrew Nelson, 'Cinema from Attractions: Story and Synergy in Disney’s Theme Park Movies', Cinephile, Vol. 4, Summer 2008
• Justus Nieland, 'Modernism's Laughter', Modernist Cultures, Issue 4, 2009
• Justus Nieland, 'Archives of Modernist Cinephilia', MODERNISM/Modernity, 14(2), 347-355, 2007
• Kyoko Omori, Detecting Japanese Vernacular Modernism: Shinseinen Magazine and the Development of the Tantei Shosetsu Genre, 1920-1931, PhD Thesis, Ohio State University, 2003 
• Pooja Rangan, 'Transitions, Transactions: Bollywood As a Signifying Practice', Sarai Reader 2007: Frontiers 
• Tytti Soila, 'Passion at the threshold: Doctor Glas the flaneur in the films of Rune Carlstén and Mai Zetterling', Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Vol. 1, 2010
• Kirsten Strayer, Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema, PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh 2009 
• Michael Syrimis , 'From Nestoroff To Garbo: Pirandellian Humour in its Cinematic Vernacular', Quaderni d'italianistica : revue officielle de la Société canadienne, Volume XXIX, No. 2, 2008, 29-52
• Mike Walsh, '[Review of] Zhang Zhen, An amorous history of the silver screen: Shanghai cinema, 1896-1937. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005', Screening the Past, 21, 2007
• Mark Wollaeger, 'Where and When is Modernism: Editing on a Global Scale', Kritika Kultura, 16, 2011 
• Chen Xiangyang, 'Technologizing the Vernacular: Cantonese Opera Films through The Legend of Purple Hairpin', David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies (LEWI), Working Paper Series, No. 67, September 2007

'Paranoid Hermeneutics as Queer Cinematic Vernacular' by Catherine Grant.
A film studies presentation prepared for the "Queer Cinema and the Politics of the Global" Workshop held at the University of Sussex, May 12, 2012. The Workshop was part of series of events held by the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research network GLOBAL QUEER CINEMA based at Sussex, led by Rosalind Galt.