Anne Friedberg 
Window Shopping 
Cinema and the Postmodern

Departing from those who define postmodernism in film merely as a visual style or set of narrative conventions, Anne Friedberg develops the first sustained account of the cinema’s role in postmodern culture. She explores the ways in which nineteenth-century visual experiences—photography, urban strolling, panorama and diorama entertainments—anticipate contemporary pleasures provided by cinema, video, shopping malls, and emerging ‘virtual reality’ technologies.


Comparing the visual practices of shopping, tourism, and film-viewing, Friedberg identifies the experience of ‘virtual’ mobility through time and space as a key determinant of postmodern cultural identity. Evaluating the theories of Jameson, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and others, she adds critical insights about the role of gender and gender mobility in the configurations of consumer culture.


A strikingly original work,
Window Shopping challenges many of the existing assumptions about what exactly
postmodern is. This book marks the emergence of a compelling new voice in the study of contemporary culture.


This title is part of UC Press’s Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Departing from those who define postmodernism in film merely as a visual style or set of narrative conventions, Anne Friedberg develops the first sustained account of the cinema’s role in postmodern culture. She explores the ways in which nineteenth-centu

สารบัญ

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


INTRODUCTION LOOKING BACKWARD-AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE CONCEPT OF ‘POST’

The Past, the Present, the Virtual

Method

The ‘P’ Word

A Road Map


1 THE MOBILIZED AND VIRTUAL GAZE IN MODERNITY:

FLANEURIFLANEUSE

Modernity and the ‘Panoptic’ Gaze

Modernity and the ‘Virtual’ Gaze

The Baudelairean Observer:

The ‘Mobilized’ Gaze of the Flaneur

The Gender of the Observer: The Flaneuse

The ‘Mobilized’ and ‘Virtual’ Gaze

PASSAGE I The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola


2 THE PASSAGE FROM ARCADE TO CINEMA

The Commodity-Experience

RE: Construction-The Public Interior/The Private Exterior

The Mobilized Gaze: T award the Virtual

From the Arcade to the Cinema

PASSAGE II A Short Film Is More of a ”Rest Cure”

The Cinema as Time Machine

Window-Shopping Through Time


3 LES Fi.ANEURS/FLANEUSE DU MALL

The Mall

Temporality and Cinema Spectatorship

Spectatorial Flanerie

Cybertechnology: From Observer to Participant

Postmodern Flanerie: To Spatialize Temporality

PASSAGE Ill Architecture: Looking Foward, Looking Backward


4 THE END OF MODERNITY: WHERE IS YOUR RUPTURE?

The Architectural Model

The Cinema and Modernity/Modernism:

The ‘Avant-Garde’ as a Troubling Third Term

Jameson and the Cinematic ‘Postmodern’

Cinema and Postmodernity

Postmodernity Without the Word


CONCLUSION: SPENDING TIME


POST-SCRIPT: THE FATE OF FEMINISM IN POSTMODERNITY

Warnings at the Post

Postfeminism?

Beyond Indifference

Neither or Both: An Epilogue to the Period of the Plural


NOTES

INDEX

เกี่ยวกับผู้แต่ง

Anne Friedberg i is the Professor and Chair of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts.