Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in Humanities
Professor, Department of English
Committee on Cinema & Media Studies

Office: Wieboldt 403
Phone: (773) 702-8028
mhansen@uchicago.edu

My research and teaching interests focus on the history of American cinema, theories of mass culture and modernity (including debates on "Americanism"), film and media aesthetics, and the interrelations between cinematic modernism and modernist and avant-garde practices in the traditional arts. In addition to a book based on my dissertation on Ezra Pound, I have published Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991), which examines the historical dynamics between the invention of a textually and institutionally constructed spectator and the cinema as a new type of public sphere. I have written articles on a wide range of topics, including German, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese cinemas, and issues in film and media theory. A related focus of my work is on debates on film in the (wider) context of the Frankfurt School, in particular writers such as Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and filmmaker/writer Alexander Kluge (cf. Eng. 687 / CMS 675).

Siegfried Kracauer

More recently, I have been teaching and writing about the notion of classical Hollywood cinema from the perspective of "vernacular modernism," exploring that concept in both its historical and transnational dimensions (Eng. 587 / CMS 673). This project evolved in part from my earlier work on literary and artistic modernism, in part from a course (team-taught with Bill Brown) on "Modernity and the Sense of Things" (see Eng. 292/692 / CMS 274). A related project focuses on the work of exile directors in Hollywood (e.g., Wilder, Ophuls, Fejos, Polanski) and their aesthetic/ethnographic critique of American society and the culture industry. In a recent course on the cinema of Max Ophuls (Eng. 281/381 / CMS 265/365), we explored questions of film aesthetics, such as how particular stylistic devices generate both affective involvement and analytic detachment; worked on revising prevailing concepts of cinematic subjectivity; and discussed issues of genre - melodrama, the woman's film - in terms of cultural translatability and creative/critical miscognition.

Graduate: Cinema as Vernacular Modernism; The Films of Max Ophuls; Frankfurt School on Cinema, Modernity, and Mass Culture; Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies.

Undergraduate: Film Aesthetics; Spectatorship and Cinema Experience; The Frankfurt School, Cinema, Modernity; Cinema as Vernacular Modernism; Women Directors.

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Selected Publications:

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• Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Harvard UP, 1991; 1994).
• “Vernacular Modernism: Tracking Cinema on a Global Scale.” In: N. Durovicova, K. Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Forthcoming, New York, London: Routledge, 2007.
• “Benjamin’s Aura: The Resuscitation of a Concept.” Forthcoming, Critical Inquiry 2008.
• “‘A Self-Representation of the Masses’: Siegfried Kracauer’s Curious Americanism.” Forthcoming in: Kerstin Barndt, Kathleen Canning, and Kristin McGuire, eds., Weimar Publics/Weimar Subjects: Rethinking the Political Culture of Germany in the 1920s. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Publishers, 2007.
• “Of Lightning Rods, Prisms, and Forgotten Scissors: Potemkin and German Film Theory.” New German Critique 96 (Spring 2006): 101-118.
• “Room-for-Play: Benjamin’s Gamble with Cinema” (long version), October 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45.
• “Why Media Aesthetics?” Critical Inquiry Symposium 2003. Critical Inquiry 30 (Spring 2004): 391-95.
• "Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism." Film Quarterly 54.1 (Fall 2000): 10-22.
• "The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism." Modernism / Modernity 6.2 (April 1999): 59-77; also in: Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, eds., Reinventing Film Studies (London: Edward Arnold, 2000).
• "Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street." Critical Inquiry 25.2 (Winter 1998).
• "Introduction." Siegfried Kracauer. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. vii-xlv.
• "Schindler's List is not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism and Public Memory." Critical Inquiry 22.2 (Winter 1996): 292-312.
• "America, Paris, The Alps: Kracauer (and Benjamin) on Cinema and Modernity." In: Leo Charney, Vanessa Schwartz, eds. Cinema and the Invention of Modern Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995. 362-402.
• "Foreword." Oskar Negt & Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience. Tr. Peter Labanyi & Jamie Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ix-xli.
• "Early Cinema, Late Cinema: Permutations of the Public Sphere." Screen 34.3 (Autumn 1993): 197-210; rpt. in Linda Williams, ed. Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995. 134-152.
• "Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer." New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 43-73; most recently rpt. in: Nigel Gibson & Andrew Rubin, eds. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Malden, Mass. & Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2002.
"Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship." Cinema Journal 25.4 (Summer 1986): 6-32 [expanded in chs. 11 & 12 of Babel and Babylon].

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