Modernity

Modernity

Is there a difference between the terms modernism and modernity? The small yet important difference may lie in the fact that “modernity,” as theorists use the term, tends to refer more to something experiential. The experience of modernism, lived on a social and/or individual level.

Soja quotes from two theorists who have tried to define modernity: Marshall Berman and Stephen Kern. Soja offers the following about Berman’s All That is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982):
Berman broadly defines modernity as ‘a mode of vital experience’, a collective sharing of a particularized sense of ‘the self and others’, of ‘life’s possibilities and perils.’ In this definition, there is a special place given to ways we think about the experience of time and space, history and geography, sequence and simultaneity, event and locality, the immediate period and region in which we live. Modernity is thus comprised of both context and conjuncture. It can be understood as the specificity of being alive, in the world, at a particular time and place; a vital individual and collective sense of contemporaneity.” (Soja 24-25)

Soja also offers a lengthy quote about modernity from Stephen Kern. In Kern’s 1983 book The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918, Kern describes the particular changes in modernity that occurred in the late-19th century. Kern writes:
From around 1880 to the outbreak of World War I a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about experiencing time and space. Technological innovations including the telephone, wireless, telegraph, x-ray, cinema, bicycle, automobile and airplane established the material foundation for this reorientation; independent cultural developments such as the stream of consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, and the theory of relativity shaped consciousness directly. The result was a transformation of the dimensions of life and thought.” (quoted in Soja 26).

In Kern’s definition, he discusses the period of history we most often associate with the term “modernity”—the late-19th to early-20th century. Scholars of early cinema, who focus on this historical period, have found conceptions of “modernity” to be a rich theoretical framework, shedding light on connections between the cinema and other cultural changes. Tom Gunning, Miriam Hansen, Guiliana Bruno, Anne Friedberg, Lynne Kirby, and Lauren Rabinovitz are some of the scholars whose work has probed the relationships between cinema, perception, and other forms of modernity.

However, some have criticized the proliferation of scholarship on cinema and modernity. The most vocal critics have been David Bordwell and his former student, Charlie Keil. In Keil’s critique of the “modernity thesis,” he objects to the historiographic methods of Hansen and questions how much modernity can tell us about formal changes in film during the transitional period (roughly 1908-1917).

Both perspectives are worth keeping in mind. The best scholarly works addressing cinema and modernity enrich our understanding of film by placing it in a much larger cultural context. And rather than the closing off new work on modernity, the Bordwell-Keil critique should be seen as a call for methodological rigor as critics and historians continue to grapple with fin de siecle century cinema, technology, and culture.

For an excellent analysis of Griffith’s The Lonedale Operator and modernity’s changes in time and space relations, see Tom Gunning, “Systematizing the Electric Message: Narrative Form, Gender, and Modernity in The Lonedale Operator,” American Cinema’s Transitional Era, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 15-50. Keil’s critique of the “modernity thesis” can be found in the same collection—see Charlie Keil, “To Here From Modernity: Style, Historiography, and Transitional Cinema,” American Cinema’s Transitional Era, ed. Charlie Keil and Shelley Stamp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 51-65.