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University of California Press

About the Book

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.


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

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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

Reviews

"Friedberg's idea of the 'mobilized virtual gaze' may become the way we conceive of postmodern subjectivity. This book is in a class by itself."—Linda Hutcheon, author of The Politics of Postmodernism