Directory
|
Ben Singer |
Expertise and Activities
My research has focused on social and historical issues in American silent cinema, the aesthetics of avant-garde film, and the history of film theory, particularly theory in the first third of the 20th century. My first book examined the genre of sensational melodrama in early American cinema, tracing its transposition from popular theater and documenting its social and discursive contexts with respect to experiential and ideological transformations associated with modernity. A second work collects and analyzes the writings of Alexander Bakshy, a pioneering theorist of spectatorship who argued for a modernist conception of overt presentationalism. I am currently doing research on late Romantic currents, both stylistic and thematic, in early film criticism and avant-garde film.
Education
- Ph.D. New York University, 1996
- B.A. Harvard University, 1985
Selected Works
Books
- 2001. Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and its Contexts. Columbia University Press.
Articles
- 1995. "Manhattan Nickelodeons: New Data on Audiences and Exhibitors." Cinema Journal 34:3, 5-35.
- 1990. "Jeanne Dielman...Cinematic Interrogation and 'Amplification'." Millennium Film Journal 22, 56-75.
- 1988. "Film, Photography, and Fetish: The Analyses of Christian Metz." Cinema Journal 27:4, 4-22.
- 1988. "Early Home Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope." Film History 2:1, 37-70.
- 1987. "Connoisseurs of Chaos: Whitman, Vertov and the 'Poetic Survey'." Literature/Film Quarterly 15:4, 247-258.
Chapters
- 2004. "Feature Films, Variety Programs, and the Crisis of the Small Exhibitor." Cinema's Transitional Era: Audiences, Institutions, Practices, Charles Keil and Shelley Stamp, eds. University of California Press.
Courses
- CA 354 - Styles and Genres
- CA 463 - Avant-Garde Film
- CA 664 - Classical Film Theory
