Description: Draws our eye to the role of scientific, medical, educational, and aesthetic observation in shaping modern conceptions of spectatorship
Brief description: Scott Curtis is a professor of film history at Northwestern University. He has written The Shape of Spectatorship: Art, Science, and Early Cinema in Germany (Columbia University Press, 2015), and Performing New Media: 1890-1915 (co-editor, Indiana University Press, 2014).
Review Quotes: 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.--Eric Rentschler, Harvard University, author of The Use and Abuse of Cinema