“What We Are Watching” Does Not Present “Us with a Struggle”

Abstract

From its advent, the film medium has had a complex relationship with its audience. As Miriam Hansen summarizes, “in [the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries], cinema figured as part of the violent restructuration of human perception and interaction effected by industrial-capitalist modes of production and exchange” (362). In this early period, multitudes of people would crowd into neighborhood music halls and storefront nickelodeons to see moving trains, chaotic city streets, and other dynamic images of the newly industrialized world (Belton 350). For the average American, then, the turn-of-the-century film experience was inextricably connected to both “spectacularism” and capitalism; film itself was a reflection and a producer of those particular social features.¹