The past decade has seen a massive interest in the history of film theory. Starting with major reassessments of classical film theory, more recent work has turned to the 1970s and 1980s to seek a more general account of the notions of media, spectatorship, and ideology. This talk explores the overlooked period between them. Drawing on Annette Michelson’s writings of the 1960s and early 1970s, I argue that her work—along with other contemporaries—evinces the contours of an alternate model of film theory, one that is centrally preoccupied with the status of modernism in and for film. Based on a dense and complex account of time and temporal organization in cinema, she turns to a tradition of developmental psychology to think through the relation of film and mind. The result is the model of a cognitively mature spectator, and the modes of thought that come with that maturity, which allows her to bridge the competing modernist projects of Soviet Cinema, art films, and the American avant-garde into a utopian vision of what cinema can be.

Daniel Morgan is Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago. He is author of Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (2013) and The Lure of the Image: Epistemic Fantasies of the Moving Camera (2021).

This event is sponsored by the Center for Documentary Research and Practice, the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the Cultural Studies Program.