The future of cinema studies in the age of global media' : aesthetics, spectatorship and public spheres

Miriam Hansen, one of the foremost scholars of Critical Theory in the US, has written extensively on the work of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor Adorno, and the potential they offer to reframe the central questions of Cinema Studies. Her work has played a major role in shifting the terrain of cinema studies from the apparatus-based and psychoanalytical film theory of the 1970s and eighties, and has contributed to a revitalisation of the study of cinema within broader parameters. Together with other scholars of cinema history, Hansen has redrawn debates around early cinema and its relation to modernity and modernism. In her recent work, Hansen focuses increasingly on the transformations in contemporary cinematic contexts to challenge hegemonic models of cinema spectatorship derived from the so-called classical Hollywood period. Anne Rutherford and Laleen Jayamanne talked to Hansen about how she sees the key questions facing Cinema Studies as a discipline, and issues arising from these two symposia.