The Shape of Spectatorship

Focusing on the nontheatrical use of motion picture technology in Germany between the 1890s and World War I, Scott Curtis follows researchers, teachers, and intellectuals as they negotiated the fraught relationship between technology, discipline, and expert vision. As these specialists struggled to come to terms with motion pictures, they advanced new ideas of mass spectatorship that continue to affect the way we make and experience film.

Draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern conceptions of spectatorship

Scott Curtis is associate professor in the Department of Radio/Television/Film at Northwestern University, director of the Communication Program at Northwestern University in Qatar, and president of Domitor, the international society for the study of early cinema.

Jan Philip Müller:
The central connection, developed by film scholar Scott Curtis in his study The Shape of Spectatorship, runs between the formal aspects of film and the specificity of particular disciplines. Curtis examines how moving images in these fields are related to practices and theories of observation and spectatorship, and are accordingly adapted, assessed, and negotiated, especially with regard to the temporal aspects of cinematography (such as pace or duration). . . . The expert/lay dichotomy developed by Curtis, focusing on the relationship between discourse and discipline, illuminates in interesting ways recurring questions about the connection between film, science, and the media. . . . This difference between experts and laypeople acts as a kind of counter-image to the usual histories that emphasize senses such as vision as “dependent variables” of purely technical or technological decisions. Indeed, insofar as these two types of histories have in common an interest in connections between power and media, they could very possibly be read as complementary—and this makes The Shape of Spectatorship a very rewarding book.

Alison Griffiths, author of Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View:
Scott Curtis has produced a fascinating study of the uses of cinema within medicine, science, and education in Germany in the early twentieth century. An exhaustive archival dig into cinema's uses by experts, The Shape of Spectatorship will itself shape conversations about cinema's usefulness as a way of observing and changing the world.

Tony Kaes, University of California, Berkeley and author of Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War :
This important, historiographically innovative book examines a wide range of materials from the fields of aesthetics, education, medicine, and science—and Curtis knows how to read early film—theoretical texts like poetry. An original contribution to media archaeology, Curtis's research illuminates new sources in the debates about the promise and possible uses of cinema in Germany and beyond.

Eric Rentschler, Harvard University, author of The Use and Abuse of Cinema:
I was invigorated and intrigued by the scholarly rigor, historical acumen, and interdisciplinary incentive of Scott Curtis's book. It brings significant inflections to our understanding of the multiple determinations of early German cinema as well as more generally to the complex relations between film and science.