Homo cinematicus : science, motion pictures, and the making of modern Germany /
In the early decades of the twentieth century, two intertwined changes began to shape the direction of German society. The baptism of the German film industry took place amid post-World War I conditions of political and social breakdown, and the cultural vacuum left by collapsing institutions was pa...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Philadelphia :
University of Pennsylvania Press,
[2017]
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| Series: | Intellectual history of the modern age.
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| Subjects: |
| Summary: | In the early decades of the twentieth century, two intertwined changes began to shape the direction of German society. The baptism of the German film industry took place amid post-World War I conditions of political and social breakdown, and the cultural vacuum left by collapsing institutions was partially filled by moving images. At the same time, the emerging human sciences, including psychiatry, neurology, sexology, eugenics, industrial psychology and psychoanalysis, began to play an increasingly significant role in setting the terms for the way Germany analyzed itself and the problems it had inherited from its authoritarian past, the modernizing process and war. Moreover, in advancing their professional and social goals, these sciences became heavily reliant on motion pictures. Situated at the intersection of film studies, the history of science and medicine and the history of modern Germany, Killen connects the rise of cinema as a social institution to an inquiry into the history of knowledge production in the human sciences. Taking its title from a term coined in 1919 by commentator Wilhelm Stapel to identify a new social type that had been created by the emergence of cinema, Killen explores how a new class of experts in these new disciplines converged on the figure of the "homo cinematicus" and made him central to many of that era's major narratives and social policy initiatives. |
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| Physical Description: | 268 pages ; 25 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780812249279 0812249275 |