Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of "theory" not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity's most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by BEla BalAzs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried...

Rich in implications for our present era of media change, The Promise of Cinema offers a compelling new vision of film theory. The volume conceives of theory not as a fixed body of canonical texts, but as a dynamic set of reflections on the very idea of cinema and the possibilities once associated with it. Unearthing more than 275 early-twentieth-century German texts, this ground-breaking documentation leads readers into a world that was striving to assimilate modernity s most powerful new medium. We encounter lesser-known essays by Bela Balazs, Walter Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer...