Artists and Models (1955): Modernism, Medium-Specificity, and Mayhem

Introduction by Tom Gunning, Professor, Dept of Cinema and Media Studies.

Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis meet with Clement Greenberg to discuss in which sense a Hollywood film can be said to reflect on the problems and procedures of its own medium. Against Greenberg (and Arnheim but with Bazin), Artists and Models celebrates the impure and mixed nature of cinema as a modern art form and demolishes classical concepts of the cinematic body.

Miriam Hansen is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she teaches in the Departments of English and Cinema & Media Studies. Her publications include a book on Ezra Pound’s early poetics (1979) and Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (1991, 1994), as well as numerous articles in film history and film theory, focusing on questions of film aesthetics, cinema experience and the public sphere, and on the notion of cinema as vernacular modernism. She is completing a study on "The Other Frankfurt School: Kracauer, Benjamin, and Adorno on Cinema, Mass Culture, and Modernity."