Customer Reviews

Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film

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While some of the academic language may not be familiar to all readers, this is a superb account of early cinema that bridges the divide between film history and film theory. Hansen's argument that early cinema possessed a fundamentally different model of spectatorship--an interactive and collective one--is lucidly articulated, in addition to being wholly provocative for understanding what it means to go to the movies now. This book altered my sense of my own viewing and moviegoing practices today. An excellent book that discusses film in new ways, Babel and Babylon is both an absorbing and a fascinating reading experience.

As other reviewers have noted, this study is a terrific analysis of how early film could be an open, more interactive medium. But it is valuable for more than its contribution to the history of film. Hansen combines her study of the history of film with two other areas--1) empirical study of the reception of early film (the opportunities for collective sense-making by populations such as women and new immigrant groups), and 2) theoretical study of the way film changes our ideas about the public sphere.

It is the methodological richness of this book that makes it such a powerful work. Readers are offered astute, inventive close readings of films, informed discussions about historical reception, and cutting-edge ideas about what a mass-culture medium like film might mean for our ideas of public reason.

This is one of the best books on early cinema written by one of the best film theorists/historians on spectatorship.

This book is a tough read. Ms. Hanson has certainly done her research, but her prose is barely understandable because she uses many words that are unfamiliar to the common reader and her sentences are a mile long. This book is only for hard-core fans of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance and Rudolph Valentino. Be warned, you will need help staying awake while you read it...